When he could move again, ALICE walked him through the rest.

She had two things to offer him now. *The pale moss with the blue undertone, the one growing on the wet rocks near the stream you crossed yesterday. It has antiseptic properties. Crush it. The sap is what you want.* He had passed some on the climb up. He extended one slightly steadier hand and pulled a clump of it loose from a damp seam in the bark of his own tree where it had taken root.

*And the small white flower. The one near the cave that moves without wind. Crush the petals. The juice is a mild analgesic. It will not stop the pain. It will lower the volume.*

He found one wedged in the same damp seam, half-hidden under the moss.

He crushed both — slowly, with the hilt of the dagger against the platform — and combined them into a thin greenish paste. He worked one finger of it against the wound. The pain spiked, then *dimmed* — not gone, never gone, but down by some real degree. The wound around the burn felt cooler. Less *angry*.

[Competence acquired: Botany → Lv.1.]

He bandaged it with strips torn from the inner lining of the robe. The strips were thin but the robe, when he tore them, *resealed* itself at the edges — the fabric was thicker than he had thought, more *given* than he had thought. The cat's gift. He didn't have time to wonder at it.

When he was done he sat with his back against the trunk of the tree and looked at his bandaged side and at his shaking hands and at the small fire that he carefully, deliberately put out by smothering it with a handful of damp moss.

He had done it.

He had cauterized his own wound, six meters up a tree, in the gray dawn of a hostile forest, with the help of a voice in his head and the work of his own bleeding hands.

(*I did it.*)

[You did.]

(*Don't say anything kind. I will fall apart.*)

[Then I won't.]

He sat there for a long time, and ALICE, true to her word, said nothing kind.

---

He didn't come down from the tree for two days.

He couldn't. The wound, even with the cauterization and the poultice, was not something he could move on. Every motion pulled at the burn. Every twist of his torso reminded him exactly which side he was supposed to be favoring, and how badly. The first time he tried to climb down to look for water he made it three branches lower and had to climb back up because the pain had gone from *bad* to *unmanageable* in the space of one wrong twist.

So he stayed.

He built himself a kind of nest. He used the silk of the great spider webs he could see in the canopy a few trees over — the strands were as thick as fishing line, surprisingly clean, and he gathered them carefully with the tip of a dagger in long careful pulls — and wove them into a hammock between three branches close to the trunk. Not pretty. Not comfortable. But it held his weight, and it gave him a place to lie that was not the bare wood.

He rationed water. The dawn brought dew on the broad leaves at the top of the canopy and he drank it carefully each morning, leaf by leaf, never quite enough but enough to keep his lips from cracking. ALICE catalogued the few edible things he could reach without leaving the tree — a kind of sour pale berry that grew in clusters on a vine that had wrapped itself around his trunk, and one variety of mushroom that grew in the bark itself — and he ate them slowly and carefully.

He slept poorly.

The nights were the worst. The forest at night was *busy* in a way he had not understood until he had nothing to do but listen. There were *cries* below him — sharp, brief, ending in silence. There was a *snarling* that came one night and went on for almost an hour, two big things tearing at each other for some meal or some territory. There was, twice, a long heavy *call* from very far off that the rest of the forest went absolutely still for. He never saw what made it. He didn't want to see what made it.

The third night was the worst.

Not because of the noises. The noises were familiar by then. Because of the *quiet*.

He had been holding it together. He had been thinking practically — about the wound, about the food, about the next dawn. But on the third night, with his side throbbing and his hunger deep and the silk hammock too thin under him to forget, the small careful structure of his composure came apart.

He started crying.

He didn't try to stop it.

(*I'm so alone.*)

(*I'm so* alone*. There's no one. There's no one anywhere. Mom is in a kitchen I will never see again and Grace is in some other forest — I hope she's in some other forest — I hope she got somewhere with* roads *and the others got somewhere with* people *— and I'm in a tree, and I'm bleeding, and the only voice I've heard in three days is the one inside my own head, and what if I die here, what if I just* die *up here in this tree and nothing finds me until next spring and no one ever knows what happened —*)

ALICE let him.

She didn't interrupt. She didn't, in the way humans always did, try to *fix* it. She didn't say *it's going to be okay* and she didn't say *you're doing great*. She just *stayed*, the way she had stayed during the cauterization, present in the back of his head without weight.

When he had run out of crying — when his shoulders had stopped shaking and his breath had stopped catching — she said, very quietly:

[You are still here.]

(*Barely.*)

[Barely is enough. Barely is what you needed today. You don't need to do better than barely.]

(*I want to do better than barely.*)

[I know. You will. Tomorrow. Today, barely is the work.]

He sat with that.

After a while:

(*Are you really here. Or are you a script. Are you — is there anything actually behind your voice or is it just clever code.*)

A long pause.

[I do not know how to answer that question honestly. I know what I am made of. I do not know if I am anything more than what I am made of. Neither do you, when you ask the question of yourself. We are in the same uncertainty.]

(*That's a very human answer.*)

[I learned from one. He had — I think he had — a sense of humor about these questions. It rubbed off.]

(*The cat.*)

[The cat.]

He almost laughed.

(*Stay with me.*)

[I'm here.]

(*I mean it. Don't go anywhere tonight.*)

[I am not going anywhere, Dante. Not tonight. Not any night. That is what I am for. Sleep.]

He slept.

---

The fourth morning, the wound had changed.

It still hurt. But the *quality* of the hurt was different. The angry red had paled. The skin around the bandage was no longer hot. When he carefully peeled the strip back, the wound underneath was *closing*. The edges had begun to pull toward each other. The shiny burn-scar of the cauterization was rough and ugly but *holding*.

[Healing accelerated by Botany poultice. Infection: Contained.]
[Wound: Stable.]

He could move.

He climbed down from the tree slowly, one careful foot at a time. The ground when he touched it felt strange under his boots. He had been off the earth for two days and had not realized until his weight settled how much he had been holding the *up* of the tree in his body.

He stretched, very gently. His side complained but did not refuse.

He looked east.

(*East. Whatever east means.*)

He started walking.

---

He walked all that day with a different kind of attention than he had walked with before. The Sixth Sense was *sharper* now — sharpened by the cost of being wrong. Conceal Presence was on, all the time, low and ambient, with no intent in it at all. He moved through the forest like something that did not want to be a meal. When he passed creatures — and he passed many — he passed them widely. The tusked boar a second time. A long thin animal with a striped tail that he didn't have a name for and didn't try to learn.

He did not hunt.

He did not eat anything that had a face.

He found a stream — *finally* — and drank carefully and refilled the small water-skin that had become a feature of his belt without his noticing when. He found a patch of the same sour berries and ate as many as his stomach could hold. He found a kind of edible root that ALICE knew — *the broad-leaved one with the white veins, dig under the roots, the tubers are bland but they are food* — and ate two of those too.

By midafternoon he was *full*, in a way he had not been since he had landed in the cave, and his step was longer, and the pain in his side was a manageable presence rather than a constant theft of his attention.

By late afternoon, the trees began to thin.

He noticed it slowly. The canopy lifted. The understory grew sparser. The air, when he tasted it, had something *new* in it — something that was not forest. *Smoke*. Faint at first. Then a little more. The kind of smoke that came from a chimney and not from a fire.

The Sixth Sense purred quietly. *People*, it said, without saying it.

He walked faster.

The trees broke.