31

It was very dark in the nest, but growing lighter. Through the canopy of vines overhead, Sascha noticed shards of sky. She lay very still, not wanting to attract the attention of Watchful Singer just now.

She had been among the Singers for a day or two, emerging from her stupor only intermittently. At first she thought she was in a huge hollow tree. But now, awake and more clearheaded, Sascha took closer note of her sur-roundings. In the gathering light, she could see that it wasn't a single tree but rather a circular stockade of woody canes, buttressed by several pillars: the reborn sticks of the Gray Spiny Forest. Two gaps in the fortress formed what Sascha thought of as the front and back doors. Over all were twining vines, sprouting many broad leaves and lobes of fruit.

Each adult Singer staked out a circular nest oa the perimeter. The one she called Triplet Singer commanded a position nearest to the nest Sascha shared with Watchful Singer. Triplet Singer had three young ones that ran wild in the nest, chasing one another and screeching. Triplet hummed constantly, louder than any of them. Brat Singer, half the size of Watchful and Triplet, harried the three younger ones, keeping them at bay. In addition to these six, Sascha thought that a very large Singer had been in the center of the nest, but had left at first light.

Watchful Singer could sense Sascha's return to con-sciousness. She—Sascha thought that the milk demon-strated her gender—licked at the wound in Sascha's forehead. Watchful allowed the triplets, but not Brat, to approach Sascha. Her high-pitched hums got Brat's at-tention, freezing the adolescent cub in mid-mischief.

Triplet began to thrash, throwing bits of sticks and leaves around her. Sascha thought the Singer was ailing.

The beasts did not talk. That had been hallucination. But they sang melodies of a sort, humming. The range of their humming sounds scaled from bass rumblings to so-prano warbling. Watchful had a favorite tune, complex but recognizable by now, one that had been threading in and out of Sascha's delirium.

At last Sascha opened her eyes and looked up at Watchful, squinting at the beast, through the slicing pain in her head. Along Watchful's left haunch a mighty scar gouged out a valley all the way to her foot, and left her with a limp. No less impressive for that, Watchful was a terrible beast, capable of killing her with a swipe of her hand. Yet the creature gave her milk and protection, and to Sascha's relief, had not resumed her terrible facial con-tortions.

While Watchful hovered, the triplets climbed over Sascha's legs, tugging at her clothes and wrinkling their high foreheads. The thought occurred that Watchful Singer had taken her to the nest to give the youngsters hunting practice. The babies were the size of small dogs, perhaps a foot high, with teeth and claws that would have put a hyena to shame. One of them nipped at her pants legs. Re-flexively, she jerked away, and the cub pounced on her shin. Crippled or not, Watchful didn't hesitate. With a powerful swing of her arm, Watchful swiped the legs out from under the cub, sending it toppling. The youngster ran back to Triplet, who was still producing a caterwaul-ing that drowned out the noises of the woods.

Sascha saw a huge insect perched on the top of the stockade, amid the green, growing tips of the sticks.

Black with many appendages, it moved with a familiar slow-motion deliberation.

It was the bot. Beneath Triplet's screams, she could hear the bot morphing, pointing a tube at the retreating cub.

"Don't kill the little ones," Sascha told it. "The Singer is protecting me. You'll make things worse." The bot was still taking aim. It wouldn't obey her, she didn't know the command language it responded to. But the bots could learn, were programmed to learn, and since it was directed to protect humans, it might not need a fourteen-year-old's suggestions on how to do it.

Keeping one eye on the metal creature, Watchful of-fered her shoulder to Sascha, where milk trickled amid the grooves of her skin. With a high-pitched whine, the bot pointed its warning finger at Watchful. It hesitated when Sascha lapped at Watchful's milk. It was her only source of nourishment, and she was thirsty. Then, exhausted, she lay back down, resting her hand on her lamp, still strapped to her chest, proof of her previous life.

When Sascha woke again the day was bright, even in the canopied nest.

A shaft of sunshine struck a pile of bones lying near her. Opening her eyes fully, Sascha saw a very small hu-man skull. She stared, trying to process this sight, doubt-ing her senses. Much of the flesh was gone from the small body, but on the back of the skull the remains of a tendril lay withered. Three feet above her, the bot was clinging to the stockade, regarding the body with interest. It slowly climbed down into the nest and approached the bones, ex-amining them with an extruded prod.

Out of nowhere, Watchful erupted. She came charging, sending Sascha into a tight curl of protection.

The Singer's hums soared ever higher, and finally out of hearing range. When the screaming stopped Sascha opened her eyes, see-ing Watchful bending over the bot, and the bot bristling, nozzles pointed at the beast. The soft ridge on Watchful's head fluttered, perhaps trying in vain to smell the bot.

The Singer won the face-off. The bot reversed, sliding away from the bones and back to its perch on the tree wall.

With the crisis passed, Sascha considered what to do with the body. It stank.

She began plucking the large, round leaves from the vines around her. When she had an armful, she carefully laid them out in an overlapping pattern to form a small blanket. Then she lifted the bones and placed them in the center. Watchful hummed her anger.

"I can't sleep next to bones," Sascha told her. Then, thinking better of it, she sang the phrase to Watchful, keep-ing the tones low and soothing. She covered the bones with more leaves, then folded it together, tying it with a fragment of vine. She offered the package to Watchful, who rippled her forehead furiously, but remained immo-bile.

"I'm going to bury this," Sascha sang. As she stood up, dizziness overtook her for a moment, and she leaned on Watchful's thigh. The nest looked skewed and blurry. It had a ragtag population, some large, some small, some mechanical, some flesh. There were humans and ahtra… it was a mix of life, all confused in one place.

When her vision cleared, she made her way along the in-side perimeter of the den, looking for a suitable gap in the braided tree-wall. When she found one, she tucked the pack-age inside. As she crouched there, she could see through the maze of trunks into the surrounding woods. The Gray Spiny Forest had become a vast and shadowy swamp, replete with streams, hanging moss, and giant stands of circular growths, looking like massive stubby trees. Banyans, came to mind. Nazim's Banyans. She peered into the altered world, watch-ing for Nazim, or any human soldier, trying not to conjure up the cruel hope of the sight of her father.

Giant eyes regarded her from the other side.

In her surprise, she fell backward, landing on her rump, and jarring her head with horrible effect.

It was a Singer. Bigger than Watchful. It had pressed its face close to the tree mass, rumbling deep in its throat, mak-ing an ugly sound, unlike any sound Watchful had made so far. Sascha stepped away from the hole, but when she passed another gap in the wall, the great eyes were there, waiting for her. The big Singer's forehead ridge curled dra-matically. Its eyes watched her with a decided unfriendli-ness. She plucked a leaf from the vines and stuffed it into the keyhole, as she thought of it. A needle-claw pierced the leaf, and pulled it through the hole to the other side. She had a bad feeling about this Singer, with its unsettling interest in her. She named it Demon Singer.

Sascha's stomach clenched in taut pangs. She had to re-lieve herself, but was not about to put on a show for the spying beast. For privacy she found a thick section of the tree wall, squatting to relieve her bladder, which eased but didn't erase the ache in her belly.

Nearby, the bot had found a gap in the tree, and was intent on looking through it. From the other side, she heard Demon Singer mimicking the bot's tiny screams, un-fazed by the array of weapons pointing at it. Then the lethal extrusions retracted. The bot was uncertain about Demon—about all the Singers. Its confusion prompted mouselike screams.

The nest had grown quiet. She turned. The Singers had all gathered around Triplet. As Sascha crept in among them, she saw Triplet lying on her side, humming sweetly. Between her legs lay a birth mass, which she was licking clean.

One swift lick revealed a disturbing feature of the new cub. If it were not impossible, Sascha would have said that amid the glistening birth sack lay a wriggling infant—with a data tendril.