Questions. Those questions wanted into his brain.

Instead he yelled at the guards. He demanded they return Vathi to him. He even pled.

Nothing happened. They wouldn’t speak to him. Finally, he started to feel foolish. He turned back toward the trees, and continued on his way. His assumptions were probably wrong. After all, the corpses were gone. Everything could go back to normal.

… Normal. Could anything ever be normal with that fortress looming behind him? He shook his head, entering the canopy. The dense humidity of Patji’s jungle should have calmed him.

Instead it annoyed him. As he started the trek toward another of his safecamps, he was so distracted that he could have been a youth, his first time on Sori. He almost stumbled straight onto a gaping deathant den; he didn’t even notice the vision Sak sent. This time, dumb luck saved him as he stubbed his toe on something, looked down, and only then spotted both corpse and crack crawling with motes of yellow.

He growled, then sneered. “Still you try to kill me?” he shouted, looking up at the canopy. “Patji!”

Silence.

“The ones who protect you are the ones you try hardest to kill,” Dusk shouted. “Why!”

The words were lost in the jungle. It consumed them.

“You deserve this, Patji,” he said. “What is coming to you. You deserve to be destroyed!”

He breathed out in gasps, sweating, satisfied at having finally said those things. Perhaps there was a purpose for words. Part of him, as traitorous as Vathi and her company, was glad that Patji would fall to their machines.

Of course, then the company itself would fall. To the Ones Above. His entire people. The world itself.

He bowed his head in the shadows of the canopy, sweat dripping down the sides of his face. Then he fell to his knees, heedless of the nest just three strides away.

Sak nuzzled into his hair. Above, in the branches, Kokerlii chirped uncertainly.

“It’s a trap, you see,” he whispered. “The Ones Above have rules. They can’t trade with us until we’re advanced enough. Just like a man can’t, in good conscience, bargain with a child until they are grown. And so, they have left their machines for us to discover, to prod at and poke. The dead man was a ruse. Vathi was meant to have those machines.

“There will be explanations, left as if carelessly, for us to dig into and learn. And at some point in the near future, we will build something like one of their machines. We will have grown more quickly than we should have. We will be childlike still, ignorant, but the laws from Above will let these visitors trade with us. And then, they will take this land for themselves.”

That was what he should have said. Protecting Patji was impossible. Protecting the Aviar was impossible. Protecting their entire world was impossible. Why hadn’t he explained it?