Davu the Explorer and
the Druid Tía Yara

by T. K. Rex

Illustrations by Helena Domenic
and Thana Meejinda

“When was the Rewilding?” Davu asked his big brother, Semtset, as they walked the oak and bay lined trail to the ruins of the Berkeley Wall, where they sometimes liked to play.

“Dad said it was seven hundred years ago.”

“Is that a really long time?”

“Yeah, it’s practically forever.”

Semtset climbed onto a concrete boulder, scraping yellow lichen with his shoe, gray felt with brown leather soles. Newer than Davu’s, which were starting to feel a little small, one heel about to get a hole. 

From one boulder they climbed onto another, then another, Semtset offering a hand at every rise, Davu insisting on climbing by himself.

At the height just beyond the last safe height to climb, they sat and looked out at the ruins. It was mostly forest from the crumbled wall out to the bay, but at the water’s edge they could just make out the skeletons of ancient neighborhoods. Out across the silvery water through a growing mist stood the shattered remnants of a dozen skyscrapers, precariously decorating the peninsula.

“I want to go there,” Davu said to his brother, pointing and swinging his feet against the ancient wall’s western face. 

“It’s too dangerous,” Semtset said.

“Everyone always says that but no one ever says why.”

“You can see why from here.” Semtset was impatient. “Those old buildings could fall any time. One more earthquake and they’ll all come down for good.”

Davu had never seen a building fall. In fact, the ragged skyline of the forbidden place across the bay had always looked the same, as long as he could remember.

#

“Here you go, two bags of chia, and one mesquite flour.” The trader with the dromark on her temple handed Brunnel the goods from her small cart, and he hefted the sack of live oak acorns from the prior mast year onto her pile of baskets and bags. Done and done.

“Where’s those boys of yours? They’re usually so curious.”

Brunnel grunted. “Uh, you know, just out being boys.” He took a step back in an attempt to end the interaction, but the trader was unfazed. As she made small talk, all he could think about was her dromark. How had she gotten it? Did it go into her brain? What did she see, or know, that no one else could?

She looked off in the direction of the wall mid-sentence and waved at someone else. Thank—

“Hey there they are! Hi, boys!” 

Oh, no.

Brunnel’s sons, Davu and Semtset, ran up to the cart excitedly. He grabbed them both by their shirt collars before they could get too close.

“Hi, Tía Yara!” little Davu said, squirming under Brunnel’s grip. The trader knelt to the boy’s level and pulled something from one of the many smaller bags she wore.

“Hi there, Davu! I saved something just for you. And one for you too, Semtset.”

“Hey, hold on,” Brunnel said to his boys. “Don’t eat those. You don’t even know what they are.”

The dromarked trader looked up at Brunnel and said, “They’re just carob and candy caps. There’s a nice older couple down in—”

“Mushrooms are easy to mix up.”

She squinted at him, and said flatly, “I don’t mix up mushrooms.” Then she stood, brushed off her brightly colored skirts, and said to the boys, who were already unwrapping the candies, “Anyway, I think you all are my last customers, so I’d better be off before it gets too late.”

“Where do you go?” Davu asked her.

“Wherever I want.” she said. And with a glance at Brunnel, “Some places I stay longer than others.”

“What’s the farthest away place you’ve been?” Davu asked her. “Have you ever flown up into the clouds?”

The trader let out a small laugh and said, “Not exactly.”

Semtset spoke up in an exasperated tone: “Dromarks can’t make you fly, Davu.” He popped the candy in his mouth.

Before Davu could ask the trader anything else, Brunnel gave the boys each a bag of chia seeds to carry and said, “Come on, boys, let’s get dinner started.”

As they walked away, he looked back once. The trader was packing up her cart. She saw him looking, and sighed, and said, with obligatory positivity, “See you next time!” The boys both turned and waved to her. Brunnel did not.

“Dad, how come you don’t like Tía Yara?” Semtset asked.

“She’s not your tía. You don’t even know what tía means.”

“That’s what she said to call her.”

“We don’t know anything about her.”

They walked in subdued silence to the communal kitchen, until the doorway, where Davu stopped, put down his bag, which was almost half his size, and looked up at Brunnel with his big brown eyes full of want. “Dad, when can I go exploring with you?”

“When you’re older.”

“Older than Semtset?”

“You’ll never be older than me, Davu,” Semtset chimed in.

“I meant—”

Brunnel interrupted the boy by picking him up and swinging him onto his shoulders. He was heavier than ever. “I know what you meant. Don’t worry about it, Davu. The years will fly by. Trust me.”

“. . . Years?”

#

That night, after everyone was asleep, Davu packed a small bag of supplies: a slice of acorn bread, a flask of water, his favorite blanket, and a piece of twine he was pretty sure would hold him if he needed to climb down a cliff, like they did sometimes in the adventure sims. He didn’t need to wait years to explore past the wall. He could prove he was ready now.

He tiptoed through the entrance of his family dome, out into the night, and followed the light of the full moon west. He was Davu the Explorer now. He knew the peninsula would be too far, but he could at least see the ruins at the water’s edge on this side of the bay up close, and make discoveries, and be home in time for dinner the next day.

At the wall, Davu looked back once, at the domes of his village, one or two still softly glowing, and then ahead, at the dark, distant skyline, and the bay in moonlight, and the broken, nearer shore. 

Someone rustled in the bushes up ahead. He froze, startled, as a cat emerged—the small kind, like Great-Grandma’s old pet Rascal, but this one had pale fur with a dark star on their head. 

The cat froze, too, then leapt into the rubble of the wall and disappeared.

Davu told himself he’d faced down a mountain lion, and after half an hour, he believed it. After an hour, he was so tired, and had come so far, he decided good adventurers took naps. He pulled his loosely rolled-up blanket from his bag and found an oak tree that reminded him of one his family always gathered acorns under when the air was dry and hot. The ground around the tree was broken concrete, pushed up sharply by its roots, but he found a flat spot just big enough to curl up on, head resting on a root.

#

“I don’t know what all the fuss is about, honestly. So what if she’s dromarked. Plenty of creatures are dromarked. She’s nice, and she always has those yucca flowers from the south that Semtset likes fried.” Brunnel’s partner, Ru, the mother of his two sons and the woman who had welcomed him to this community ten years ago—in a lovely ceremony by the Ashokawna river where both their families spent the salmon run each year—was just not fucking getting it this time. How could she not hear her own words?

“Ru, listen to yourself. ‘Plenty of creatures’?! That’s my whole point. She’s not fully human. It’s unnatural.”

Ru dropped her mending on the blanket over both their laps and looked up at him with that look, the one she always wore when she was one dumb-Brunnel-comment away from walking over to her sister’s dome. He couldn’t back down from this one, though. There was too much at stake. 

“Ru—” 

She cocked her head, eyebrow raised and ready to slap down whatever he said next. He said it anyway. Her people had always been too lax about this stuff. 

“I don’t want her near our boys. What if she—”

“What, infects them? Come on, Brunnel. I thought you were over that backward northern shit. It’s been ten—”

“Mom? Dad?” Semtset. He stood in the arched entrance to their bedroom, arms folded, eyes worried. How much had he heard?

“What is it, kiddo?” Brunnel asked.

“I don’t know where Davu is.”

#

Davu woke in pre-dawn fog to scrub jays in an argument with ravens. “Can’t you just get along?” he said to them as he brushed dried leaves and acorn caps off his blanket and rolled it back up as tightly as he could.

One of the scrub jays cocked their blue head at him, and he noticed a dark star, hard between soft feathers. It reminded him of the cat he’d seen in the bushes, and of the outcast traveler Tía Yara, who traded in the village several times a year. Was that what a dromark was? He’d seen it sometimes on the pronghorn in the valley, too, and once on a doe Dad pointed to, and said, “You see that on her head? It looks like a black brittle star? Someday if you decide to be a hunter, remember this: never hunt the ones with stars.” That was the day he first saw a real brittle star, in an underwater sim when they got home. Its long, thin legs flailed slow and wild over rocks and rippled sand. He wondered if the ones that animals and people sometimes wore could move like that.

The scrub jay squawked and flitted to a higher branch. Davu stuffed his blanket in his bag and continued on his trek downhill.

In the ruins of a building near the water’s edge, Davu stopped to eat his acorn bread, and listened to the waves nip at the seaweed-covered rubble, and the shorebirds flapping from patch of mud to patch of mud between the rust-streaked concrete slabs.

This wasn’t dangerous at all, he thought, chewing the soft, sweet, nutty bread. Or if it was, he must be really brave. 

He kicked his feet in satisfaction, pushing dirt around until his toes began to catch on something. He looked down, and brushed more dirt away with his shoe to see what it was.

It looked a little like a root, a little like a worm, but it was made of hard black stuff like the star the doe and cat and jay and Tía Yara all wore on their heads. He finished off the acorn bread with one last, big bite, and, still chewing, reached down to pull the buried black thing from the dirt.

It wasn’t just a root or worm. It was a whole mess of dead tentacles, light and stiff, like a clump of dried kelp connected by a net-like shell, just bigger than an avocado, but not as big as Davu’s head. The tentacles were stuck together in a tangled, flattened disarray. 

He carried it down to the water’s edge, balancing on chunks of rubble to get close enough to lean in. He knew better than to get his shoes wet if he could help it.

Lying across a barnacle-encrusted slab, he dangled the dark, dirty dead thing by the top of its shell in the waves. The dirt made the water brown, but when he pulled it out, the tentacles had loosened up. They dangled, dripping on the rocks. It almost looked like one of those old drones from the Rewilding sims.

This must be an ancient artifact. That made him a real archaeologist!

He stuffed the artifact into his pack. The tentacles that wouldn’t fit flopped out the top, slapping against the leather of the bag as Davu hopped from rock to rock. 

It was the ninth or tenth rock that finally did his shoe in. The one with the thinning heel finally thinned its last and formed a hole. And as the leather tore, he slipped. 

Thunk. 

Concrete to skull. Dizzy. 

Darkness.

#

Brunnel felt Ru’s mist-cold hand take his and gently tug. “Brunnel. Stop for a second. Let’s think this through.”

Morning light was quickly turning into noon, and no one had slept. Everyone who could walk had been looking for Davu since late last night, first with flashlights in the dark and now with eyes, and a thermal sensor from the tool library. Of course, there was the possibility that a thermal sensor wouldn’t do any good. But he shook that thought back into the scary shadows of his psyche and let Ru pull him to a stop.

The late morning sun hit Ru’s unbrushed brown hair from behind, giving her whole tan face a blazing, tangled auburn aura. Her eyes were still puffy and red from a fit of dawn tears. He pulled her in close and tight and they embraced for a moment, stealing small comfort from each other’s touch until the urgency of finding Davu pulled them back apart. “What’s there to think through?” he asked.

“We’ve looked everywhere,” Ru said.

“Semtset thinks he went past the—”

Ru’s panic made her interrupt him. “What if you were right about that trader, Yara? What if . . .” She choked on the last whispered words, “What if she took him?” 

Brunnel looked off to the distance, in the direction of the crumbling wall. Davu knew better than to go out past it, and the trader had only left yesterday afternoon. He’d assumed she was headed north, but who knew? She could be anywhere. And what if he found her, and confronted her—what powers did the dromark give her? He knew only rumors, stories that his uncles told him third- and fourth-hand about men who denned with mountain lions, women who had condors at their beck and call.

They’d need backup if they had to hunt her down. 

#

Something scratchy tickled Davu’s nose and cheeks. He opened his eyes, and the bright green eyes of a small, pale cat stared back at him. Their mouth was open and their tongue licked his nose again, whiskers tickling with the motion of their head. 

“Please don’t bite me.” He tried his best to sound brave, but he knew he was about to cry.

The cat sat back and blinked at him, and he saw the star across their head. He tried to sit up, but couldn’t. He was trapped beneath a concrete slab, leg pinned between hard edges. It hurt when he tried to pull it out, a sharp pain that finally made him cry. Barnacles scratched his arms, and he could feel crabs crawling through the slimy seaweed underneath his back.

“Can you hear me yet?” the cat said, in a voice a little older than Semtset’s, male and strangely soundless. He’d never heard cats talk before, but he knew the star made this cat special. Davu tried to nod, but it hurt. “Try not to move too much,” the cat said.

“I wanna go home,” Davu cried out loud.

“You will. If we can get you out of here before the tide comes in. But right now just hold still, OK? Help is coming, and I don’t want you hurting yourself any more than you already have.”

Davu sobbed a little more, then wiped his nose across his sleeve. It left a streak of blood.

Now Davu was really scared. “You said there’s someone coming?” he asked the cat, voice wobbling.

“My friends. They’re on their way.”

Disappointment made him want to cry again. He was hoping for Semtset, or Dad, or Mom, or maybe a group of aunties who’d been hunting near the wall or . . . or anyone he knew. How were a tabby cat’s friends supposed to help him?

“Hey, kid,” the cat said. “It’s gonna be OK. Just stay calm. We got this.”

“I shouldn’t have come out here.” Davu sniffled. “My leg hurts a lot.”

“I’m sure it does. Your head probably hurts, too.”

And as he tried to nod again, it did. A lot.

Davu felt his throat clench up again with tears, and sobbed.

“Heeeeey, hey little human, don’t cry.” The cat licked his face again, and climbed up on top of Davu’s chest, and started purring. Soon Davu felt calm again, or calm as he could with all those crabs and seaweed under him, and the sharp shells of barnacles digging into his skin. And his leg and head both throbbing. 

And the tide coming in.

What if the cat’s friends didn’t come in time? 

“Hey, what’s that in your bag?” the cat asked.

Davu couldn’t see the bag from the angle he was stuck at, but he could feel the strap across his chest.

“It’s an ancient artifact I discovered.”

“Well, isn’t that something.” The cat stepped down toward it with his front paws, haunches still on Davu’s chest, and sniffed. “An ancient artifact. Ah. I know what this is.”

“You do?” Davu sniffed.

“It’s a wildcraft drone. Human-companion specialist. Or it was, maybe four hundred years ago? Pretty rare to find them now, most of their bodies got repurposed in the space elevator. This one must’ve gotten trapped in the Big Quake. It was one of the last macros the network made on Earth before they all left.” The cat climbed back up on Davu’s chest and began to purr again.

“What’s the network?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

The waves sounded very close now, and while they were small here in the bay, they could drown a boy all the same. Davu felt afraid. But he wasn’t going to cry again. He wanted the cat to know how brave he was.

“Ah, look at that, you’re healing right up,” the cat said a moment later. He didn’t open his mouth to talk.

Davu thought of the last time he scuffed his knee, and how it took days and days to heal. He reached up to touch his forehead, and it was sticky still with blood. But there was something there, a texture, lines like roots across his skin.

“What is it?” Davu asked.

“Don’t worry, kid, I’ve got it, too. It’s how we’re talking. It’s fixing up your head.”

A cold, wet wave touched the top of his head, and pulled at his blood-soaked hair.

“Will it help me not drown?” Davu asked.

“Don’t worry about that. My friends are close. Just hang tight.” And a moment later, “So, what’s your name anyway?”

“It’s Davu.”

“Davu. I like it. Good name. You can call me Fortunate.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“Yeah, well, most cats don’t have names at all.”

“How did you get one?”

“I gave it to myself. When I joined the network.”

“What’s the—” A wave came up to Davu’s ear and soaked his back. He squirmed. It was so cold. 

Fortunate said, “Don’t worry, Davu. My friends are very close now.” But something in his voice had changed. Like how Mom talked to Great-Grandma sometimes when she found her wandering alone.

Another wave washed up so high he had to lift his head. It soaked all his clothes through and pulled at his bag, tightening the strap around him. Fortunate stood up on his chest to keep from getting wet. His four paws were much heavier this way, and Davu squirmed, then shivered. He could feel the tears well up again.

“Hey, Davu,” Fortunate said in that same tone, “I’ve always wondered. What’s it like being a human?”

“I don’t know.” His voice rattled and his throat grew tight.

“You ever tried walking on four legs?”

“No. Well, babies do. But I don’t remember being a baby.”

“Yeah, I don’t remember anything before my eyes opened. Oh, shit—” Fortunate’s claws dug into Davu’s chest, and water spilled over Davu’s head. His nose and mouth filled up and his eyes stung. The wave receded, pulling at his hair, and his coughing was so bad he had to gasp for air.

“Do you know how to hold your breath, Davu?” Fortunate asked, claws still digging in, pale fur wet against his legs.

All Davu could do was cough before the next wave came, and Fortunate leapt off his chest onto the concrete slab above.

Saltwater touched his leg where it was stuck for the first time, and it stung. For a moment, he was halfway floating, looking up at the surface of the water from the other side. Distorted sunlight, bubbles, the ragged shadows of the concrete—and then another kind of shadow, big and looming, as the wave receded. 

A female voice, without sound, like Fortunate’s, said, “There you are! Oh, hell, did you network him, Fortunate?! The sentient ones are supposed to give consent!”

“Just help him, Tina?” Fortunate said. Davu could only cough. His nose burned all the way up into his throat.

“Yeah, yeah, I got this.” Tina, Davu realized through his uncontrollable coughing, was a bear. She pulled the concrete slab that held his leg up off of him, and he was free.

“Can you get up, kid?” Fortunate asked.

Davu tried to push himself up, but the seaweed was slippery, and he was dizzy and still coughing up seawater. Tina grabbed him by the back of his shirt with her teeth and pulled, and he grabbed the concrete to steady himself. 

Now that he was up, he saw a yellow pronghorn, hooves precariously balanced on the rubble, staring at him skeptically.

A wave washed over his torn shoe and soaked his foot.

“You crazy cat,” the pronghorn said to Fortunate. Her voice was light and feminine and annoyed. “I can’t believe you networked a human.”

“He was gonna die, Horns. And he’s so young he’s basically one of us anyway,” Fortunate said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“His people are gonna be pissed,” Tina said. “But we’d better bring him back to them.” And then to Davu, who stood there soaked and shaking, she said softly, “Can you walk, little one?”

He tried to take a step but his leg hurt so much it made him want to cry again.

“OK, OK,” Tina said. “Hold on.” And she lifted him up with her enormous paws and set him on the pronghorn’s back.

“Hold on to my fur and don’t fall off,” Horns said. And Davu did the best he could. His head was feeling a bit better. Tina took his bag and carried it around her neck, and just as another wave came in, the four of them were off.

#

After finally convincing Semtset not to follow them, Brunnel, Ru, and a well-armed hunting party found the dromarked trader’s cart faster than they’d thought, at a makeshift camp up the trail to the Ohlone village, under an ancient bay tree in full flower. Like hunters stalking prey, they quietly surrounded her small, colorfully patched tent with bows and daggers ready. Ru and her sister approached with blades drawn, and in the manzanita thicket out of sight, Brunnel trained his bow on the triangle entrance.

“Hey! Where’s my son?!” Ru growled.

No answer. She stepped closer and reached for the cloth. Brunnel tensed. In one swift motion Ru sliced at the tent, gutting it like a pronghorn. A pillow and a stack of books fell out, into the dead bay leaves.

No one was inside. Ru cursed. 

Brunnel sighed and lowered his bow, surprisingly relieved. He’d never hurt a human being before, and whatever the dromarked really were, whatever this creature had done to his son . . . he’d not been looking forward to confronting her with violence. And if things went real bad, what did the old custom of not killing dromarked animals mean, when the animal was human?

“What do we do now?” Ru’s sister asked.

“She can’t be far,” Ru said. “We’ll find her.”

“Or she’ll find you,” a voice said from behind Brunnel. He tried to stand and spin at once, caught his sleeve on a manzanita branch, lost his balance, and shot his arrow accidentally in the wrong direction. Ru and her sister were beside him in a heartbeat, and the hunting party quickly surrounded the trader with all their weapons drawn.

She looked just like she had the day before, wild locs tied up with woven reeds, six earrings made of sea lion fangs (he’d heard Ru’s grandma ask about them), skin dark and dusty from long days on southern trails, and layered clothes in garish orange, teal, and red, an array of bags and pouches strapped across her hips and chest. Across her right temple and reaching out above the closest eyebrow were the black arms of the brittle star that marked her. Cyborg, some myths called them. Druid. Bruja. Dromarked, in the regions he and Ru grew up in.

The dromarked trader stood undaunted, arms folded across her chest. “You all gonna kill me, or what?” she asked.

“Where’s my son?” Ru hissed.

The dromarked woman nodded, almost seemed to relax. “Ru. Yeah, I remember your name, we’ve met like eighteen times. Can we chill? I don’t have your kid.”

“Then where is he!” Ru’s sister yelled.

“Look,” the trader said, eyes meeting everyone’s in the group one by one. “I can help, but first you all need to stop giving me these psycho lynch mob vibes. I’m not your enemy.”

Brunnel saw the corner of her mouth twitch. Was she lying?

Or afraid? 

#

“Long ago,” Tina the bear told Davu on the way back up the hill, as they passed the oak tree where he’d slept the night before, “your people, well, a bunch of you got really greedy for a while. Using up everything—forests, mountains, water. Leaving none for anybody else. And then when everything went haywire because of it, your kind made the wildcraft drones to fix it.”

Davu had heard this story before. “That was the Rewilding.”

“So you know about it,” Tina said. Her voice was warm and steady.

“Dad told me. Fortunate said the artifact I discovered is a wildcraft drone.”

“It sure is,” Tina said. “They were everywhere for a long time, and they all talked to each other, like you and I are talking right now.”

“That’s the network I told you about,” Fortunate chimed in.

“Oh.”

“And then when everything was fixed,” Tina continued, “the wildcraft drones handed the work of maintaining it off to folks like us, and left.”

“Where did they go?” Davu asked.

“Other worlds. They were experts at repairing biospheres, you see—”

“He doesn’t know what a biosphere is, Tina,” Horns spoke up. “He’s barely weaned, look at him.” She glanced back at Davu with one dark, sideways eye, as he held onto the short tuft of fur on her neck.

“I know what a biosphere is,” Davu said. “I learned about it in a sim. Our whole planet is one.”

“Oh, if you like sims,” Fortunate said, prancing alongside Horns with his yellow tail high, “you’re gonna love the network. You can explore everything now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see. You’ll be fully integrated in a few hours.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Nah. You’ll like it.”

Even so, Davu felt scared. It sounded like a big change. Like growing out of his favorite pair of shoes, and never being able to wear them again.

#

Brunnel stepped forward and touched Ru’s wrist, a gesture meant to lower her knife. She held it firm and glanced at him without turning her head. “No. She knows where he is. We can’t let her run off.”

“She’s not going to run off.” He looked at the trader when he said it, unable to hide the threat in his voice. The trader sighed, and gave a nod. Part of him was certain she would transform into a condor and fly off at any moment, but Ru lowered her knife, and her sister followed her lead.

“So we’re not fighting?” a younger hunter asked, Ru’s nephew. His voice shook.

“No fighting, kid,” the trader said. “Set that thing down and listen.” Then, to Ru and Brunnel, “I have good news, and news you’re going to have a hard time hearing but really need to understand with at least a tiny bit of nuance.”

All the weapons lowered and Ru’s eyes welled up with tears. “Is he—”

“Your kid’s OK. He went over the wall—”

Dammit. Semtset had tried to tell them, and they’d been headed that way when Ru suggested that the trader took him.

“—and he slipped on some rocks.” Brunnel’s heart pounded. “But he’s OK. Someone found him and helped him.”

“How do you know this? You saw him?” Ru’s sister spoke for all of them.

The trader took a long breath through flared nostrils, uncrossed her arms to gesture, and began her explanation. “Alright, this is gonna take a minute, but you really need to understand, for Davu’s sake. What do you all know about the network?”

#

At their first sight of the village, Davu’s great-grandma spotted them from behind a deer hide she was tanning. “Davu!” She turned around and yelled toward the domes, “Everyone! Davu’s back!” Hardly anyone came out, just the elders and babies. Where were Mom and Dad?

Semtset ran up and helped him climb down off of Horns’s back. “Davu, you’re in so much trouble. Mom and Dad have never been this angry the entire time I’ve known them.” Then he hugged his little brother and said, “I’m really glad you’re OK.” 

No one spoke to his new friends, though a lot of them stared. Everyone asked Davu if he was hurt, and “What happened?” and “Is that a dromark? How’d you get it?” And as he tried to answer, he saw Tina, Fortunate, and Horns turn one by one and walk silently away.

“Bye!” he yelled out after them.

Fortunate turned his pale, starred face once back toward him, and said without words, “Come find us sometime when you’re a little bigger. The network will know where we are.” No one else seemed to hear him.

#

Brunnel and Ru took the rear on the trek back to the village, and spoke quietly about what they had learned.

“I feel like such an ass, getting caught up in your stupid prejudices,” Ru said to him.

“You were the one who thought she’d kidnapped him!”

“OK, fine, maybe I had a few prejudices of my own.”

“You think?”

Ru stopped, and gave him that look again. Her sister glanced back, raised an eyebrow, and wisely kept walking with the rest of the group.

“Sorry, Ru. It’s been a long day. I just—”

She took his hand. The tenseness on her face shifted into something else, a knowing, a pursing of her lips that said she felt it, too. “We both fucked this one up. But I’m glad we found Yara. We know Davu’s OK now, and on his way home.”

But they knew so little, still. “If having a bunch of—what did Yara call them? nanodrones?—swimming around in his head is ‘OK’ . . .”

“He’s alive, Brunnel. That’s all that matters.”

“Is it? What kind of life is he going to have? What do I tell my family when we go visit? What if it changes his whole personality?”

“That was going to happen in a few years anyway, trust me.”

“I don’t mean hormones, Ru. What if he runs off into the wilderness to live with the animals or something? What if he can’t relate to the rest of us anymore? What if—”

“What if: We accept him like Yara said, and help him figure out who he wants to be?”

Brunnel sighed. “We were going to do that anyway.”

“So what’s changed, really?”

It was his turn to give her a look. “Everything’s changed, Ru. Come on.”

She squeezed his hand. “Hey. I’m scared too, Brunnel.”

He saw it on her face, and knew she had to be, no matter how “open-minded” she thought she was about all this.

He knew he didn’t want his son to be an outcast, or to doubt himself, or to feel useless or alone or unwanted. He didn’t want his little Davu treated like . . . well, like he’d treated Yara yesterday.

Yara had said there were communities of dromarked humans he could join, but he was still like any other kid, and the best place for him was with a loving family. Even if they never fully understood, their acceptance would be critical as he grew up. It was exactly what their people always strived for when a kid turned out a little different—like Brunnel’s cousin, who had seizures, or Ru’s sister’s kid who hadn’t started talking yet.

They’d just never thought a difference would be nanodrones.

He pulled Ru’s hand to his cheek and closed his eyes. “Let’s go find out what’s really changed.”

She wrapped her other arm around his waist and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. “Is it OK if we quiz him later? I just want to hug him until he suffocates and then sleep for a week.”

#

That night, after his mom and dad and aunties came back from looking for him, and after being fussed over and washed and scolded and hugged and bandaged and fed more than he had probably ever eaten in a single meal, and after being teased and hugged and questioned about everything by Semtset, Davu sat quietly in his room and pulled the artifact out of his explorer’s bag.

It was still real. The new star on his head felt just like it, hard and black but lightweight, thin and matte.

There were marks on its shell, tiny numbers, and as he read them, suddenly, he knew who the drone had been in life. He saw a gleaming city through its eyes, a red bridge and a bay speckled with the bright white sails of boats that should have been strange but felt familiar. He saw the wall in all its ancient glory, tall and painted with bright murals. And he saw a child, his age, a little girl, and he was helping her with homework in a sunlit room, holding a pencil in one tentacle as he floated by her side.

Dad sat down next to him and the vision dissolved. He set the long-dead drone down on his bag, carefully like fresh-picked greens.

“It’s the network, isn’t it?” Dad said, quietly, almost a whisper. “You’re different now, aren’t you, Davu? You’ve got those . . . things in you.”

“Fortunate said they fixed my head.”

“Fortunate?”

“The cat that found me after I fell.”

Dad tensed up with a quick inhale, then slumped. “I’m glad he found you. It’s just . . .” Dad touched Davu’s face where the black brittle star’s arms stretched over his forehead, and it felt weird, like caked mud that wouldn’t flake off. Dad clenched his jaw, sighed, and dropped his hand to Davu’s shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re OK, son.” And then he hugged Davu, and squeezed him so tight it almost hurt. “And anyone who says otherwise will have to come through me.”

Dad tucked him in, turned off the light, and said from the archway, “If you want to go exploring past the wall, there’s a foraging group planned at the end of flower season. Wait until then, OK? I didn’t think you were old enough, but . . . maybe it’s better you and Semtset learn now.”

Davu sat back up with excitement. “Really? We’ll all be explorers together?” 

“For a few days.” Dad smiled, then his smile fell and his eyes looked sad, or maybe scared. Dad had never looked at him like that before. “Just, never go alone again. Promise me.”

Davu nodded. His head didn’t hurt at all anymore.

He lay awake in bed long after the village had gone quiet, thinking about everything, and Fortunate, and Horns, and Tina. Where were they now? Did they have adventures together? He could almost feel their presence nearby. And he wondered what the other worlds were, the ones with broken biospheres where Fortunate had said the drones went to.

He saw a landscape as he closed his eyes, red dry sandstone cliffs, black lichen, and a pale orange sky. A wildcraft drone flew past, poked at a patch of lichen with one thin, long tentacle, and flew away.

He followed it across the canyon, dim sunlight glinting on his shell, his black tentacles tucked neatly back to glide through the thin, dusty air as fast as he could.

The rocky cliffs ahead looked dangerous, but he was Davu the Explorer, and he had so much to discover.

 

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