“Hi!” she said. “Happy birthday, Tau, I thought you’d come.” She wore her hair shaved almost to the scalp, since it otherwise became unmanageable in the heat.

Abdumasi stared at her and made big rude crunching sounds with a mouthful of honeycomb. Kindalana rolled her eyes enormously, not at his stare (she was from Segu, where the men were very modest), but because she clearly wanted him to stop eating her honey.

For no reason they could understand, Tau-indi felt suddenly, strangely young.

“Welb?” Abdumasi said between bites. “Where are yourb manners?”

Kindalana crossed her arms. “You are endlessly welcome to the honey of my house.”

“Thamf yooh,” Abdumasi said. “Yor hibeness.”

“It must,” Kindalana said performing the polite self-deprecation required by etiquette, sickly sweet with sarcasm, “be too tangy, this early in the summer.”

“You’re right,” Abdumasi said, refusing the politely trimmed reply that the honey was in fact the greatest honey ever to drip from the finest bees on this good earth, “it is, it tastes like shit!”

And he took another huge bite, smiling insufferably.

Tau-indi stepped on his foot and Kindalana (grinning at Tau-indi) leapt at him so that he flinched away and tripped on his pinned foot and fell off the boardwalk into the soft cypress shrubs.

They ran down the hillside, skirmishing amongst each other, toward the lake and the cranes who staggered around drunkenly eating cranebliss and the crocodile fences that kept them safe, away from the houses where their parents failed to have affairs, away from the past, into the sun-dappled wavetips of the future, on this the last summer of the last year before the Armada War.

*   *   *

DOWN in Lake Jaro, where the water tasted like sweet silt, Tau-indi came up from a dive in the kelp to find Kindalana treading water.

She looked like a head bobbing on the waves, her small ears folded back, her wide far-set eyes canted a little to meet a broad flat nose. Tau-indi imagined her head as beautiful bait floated up by some submerged fish. They laughed, and then their guts vibrated with nerves: oh, what was this, when had this happened, when had the word beautiful gotten onto Kindalana? They didn’t want their friendships to be complicated. Especially they didn’t want the complication to be Kindalana, who had no patience at all.

“You’ve got ash on your brow.” Kindalana frowned in concern. “Are you grieving?”

“Oh no,” Tau gasped, pawing at their head. Why hadn’t the ash washed away?

“And now it’s mud.” Kindalana sighed. “You can’t let mourning ash go to mud, Tau-indi, or the principles of the lake will think you’re a liar.”