She’d been put down as close to her destination as the ship had dared, but it had still meant a hike through thick fields of chin-tall bronze-coloured grass to a dusty dirt road and then a longer tramp to a deserted tram stop in the middle of the plain.

From the platform, while she waited, she looked in the direction of the mountains, but they were too far away. A smudge of orange-white, high in the sky to the east, might have been clouds above the mountains, but the range itself was submerged in the atmospheric haze.

She was on her way to Ahen’tayawa, a hearkenry on the slopes of Mount Jamanathrus in the Querechui range, Cethyd.

Another traveller came along the road from the opposite direction in a ramshackle three-wheeled vehicle that bounced over the tracks in a cloud of dust. The single passenger got out, lifted a bag, then the contraption drove itself away again, heading back the way it had come. The traveller stopped suddenly on seeing Tefwe, then bow-nodded, chose a sitting area of the platform at the other end from where Tefwe stood, and folded itself compactly into a resting configuration, the rhombus of its patterned head-part lowered over the complex of creased planes it used as upper limbs.

The Uwanui were mattiform. Most people, most of the time, would have called them folds, though this term could be insulting, depending on the language the term was expressed in and the species it was being used to describe; they looked like tall, dark, angular, multiply poled tents, complexly folded. Their rhomboid head-parts, patterned with eye bands and ear spots, cut by a slit that was their mouth, looked like oddly tilted flags above the tents of their bodies. Origami creatures; beings of the crease.

The tram arrived, rattling. It was three carriages long with an open upper deck perched above the middle carriage. She and the dark fold got on.

The tram was mostly empty. It climbed steadily up a slope of tilted plain, stopping to pick up or drop off a few travellers. Those that saw Tefwe all stopped and stared at her for a few moments, then ignored her. Nobody chose to sit close to her.

The sound built very slowly; it would have been hard to know when it first started to become distinct from the noises of the rattling, swaying tram and the wind moving over the surrounding fields of tall, bronze-coloured grasses and occasional thick-trunked coppery trees. She became aware of the sound when she realised that she’d been assuming for a while that somebody was humming monotonously just behind her, only there was nobody there.

“Is that … the sound?” she sub-vocalised to the suit.

“Yes.”