The girl couldn't believe how many species there were. Then again, she had only just learned that the whole world wasn't a glass plain like Tsercheg. The earth in most places (at least between there and here) had a malleable, gathering quality to it. It drifted on the wind when dry, and the rains turned it soft and pliant. The rotund, elongated little worms glid effortlessly through it, using their legs, their slimes, their mouths, their throbbing midsections.

Now that she'd had a better look, though, some of the "worms" which had joined the fray were actually caterpillars; slugs; even some kind of baby snake, its vestigial arms jutting amidst translucent skin. Just how many creatures crawled through this soil? What untold life had never even been seen before? She took turns picking up them all, and believed them just as harmless as back home: their spines tickled. Their vivid colors glistened in sunlight. Tame, gentle creatures. But when the girl picked up the one with the pincers in the front, it reared back from where she had gripped it. It bit her, and the pain shot through her finger as cleanly as broken glass through the bottom of a foot. It scissored through her skin; rubies pooled up around its pincers.

Hisses of the throat and clicks of the tongue escaped her as the pain snapped across her hand, shot up her arm. She grasped it firmly by the jaw and tugged, but it held fast, making the pain worse. Rebellious tears evacuated the girl's eyes even though she wasn't sad.

While the pincers were firmly sown into her skin, the insect's body wriggled and writhed. That gave her the idea. The more she thought about it, focusing through the discomfort, this creature had been one of many evacuating what it thought would soon be a rain-soaked burrow, too. The nearby pond was grey with depth, and green with algae.

Toddling over to the bank, the girl straightened her finger, and steeled herself, and dipped it in. It was cool, not scalding like the ponds back home; and though it stung inside the bleeding gapes in her skin, that could only mean the pincers had let go, and the stinging waters had soaked in. Sure enough she watched as the thing thrashed to keep itself afloat, and as thin ribbons of blood diffused into the pond. One could call it sadism, taking glee in punishing that which had harmed her first; particularly as she had been first to trick the insect, and then picked it up when it did not want to be fondled. Did that make her mean like Khurkhee? The girl didn't feel mean. But as she thought about it, and wrestled with herself to decide whether she'd done a bad thing, whether she should fish the thing out of the water and let it crawl away, something else robbed her of the choice. It emerged from the deeps of the pond as a yawning mouth, colored by the pond, but of its own shade of green, too, with a bobbing tongue and cartilaginous lips. The girl leapt back just in time to snatch her finger away from these new jaws, leaping back in alarm—"Eep!"—and not getting a very good look at it as it gulped down the meanie, smacked its tongue to its mouth, and flashed away.

Suddenly she felt a little sorry for her wriggly little playmate.

But the girl wasn't given much time to grieve, because by the time people were climbing the hill, she realized the feast must have been starting.

Some were scarier than others, but adults had a tendency to not understand why she didn't care about dirt under her fingernails, or going out with just a loincloth for modesty, or not preening the knots from her hair. They only seemed to get angry. So it was with a hushed and hissing timbre that the girl said, "Stay here, Khurkhee!" and abandoned him at the pond. She went back for the knife she nearly forgot, but didn't know where Bogavhaana was likeliest to find it, so she stuck it into a tree and trotted on.

At the same time ... in the village one never turned down an offering of food. The girl looked over to where her guardian (somehow) still slept unstirred. She debated whether to go and wake Bogavhaana, or to start without her. It was impatience, ultimately, which won out, a rumbling behind the girl's belly button.

She'd already taken a few slaps to the head for staring too hard at the others of the caravan. "Stop that. It's rude," rumbled Bogavhaana, low enough that most couldn't hear. The girl wanted to stare without being slapped, but with such sparse vegetation up the hill there were few places to hide. In fact, the slope of the hill almost looked sculpted to call attention to whoever was climbing it; to funnel them in. Maybe this village's hunters had had trouble with beasts stealing their livestock in the past. Or it warned them of other, two-legged beasts approaching.

Beginning her shy pit-a-pat up the ruddy slope, the girl began to fried greens, roasted meat, and most importantly, fruits. The rest of the village went wild for meat, but the girl didn't know what was so special about it; she ate it near every day, and frankly could get quite tired of it sometimes. But the fruits—fleshy ones, rind-ish ones, small, stony ones—these she had never seen before until Alu and Starfield went out on a forage and returned with small jewels plucked from the stems of plants. The juices bled into the hands, staining the former's fur and the latter's gills. They had offered her some. The girl had never known such sweetness.

By now she had crested enough of the hill to see just about everyone, or at least the tops of their heads. They weren't paying attention to her yet. Good. She could watch from a distance and pick up some of the manners and customs of this place before she went to the table. That way she wouldn't get in trouble again.