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temporary solution anyway. This rain will not stop until it drowns everything.
    I put a finger into the thick sap. I can’t stanch the sap flow—I can’t heal this tree’s injury. But I won’t let this sap be lost. I hold my sap-sticky finger to Aban’s mouth. He licks. Now we are both eating the sap. I set Screamer on the sagging, half-broken branch, so the kit can eat the sap too. And he does. Sap is tree blood, after all. It’s bitter and slightly sweet and sticky and earthy. “Thank you,” I breathe onto the branch’s open wound. “Thank you, thank you.”
    “Move away.”
    I understand nothing but the need in Aban’s voice; still, that’s enough. What’s the point of arguing, after all? The branch is already severely damaged. Screamer and I move to a branch on the other side.
    Aban swings the club again; he bashes at the branch until it comes free. He jams the detached branch in among the branches above him and looks around. “The one you’re sitting on,” he announces. “That’s next.”
    Screamer and I move higher and watch Aban bash off that branch too. He’s still strong. I’m so grateful that he’s still strong. Then all three of us lick at the gash.
    “That one,” says Aban. He bashes a third branch off.
    “Now that one.”
    “Stop. Please stop. What will you do with all these broken branches anyway?”
    “Make a boat. Not a sturdy one—just a raft. But it’s better than nothing.”
    A raft on an empty sea.
    Except the sea isn’t empty. Every now and then a bloated carcass floats past our tree. A little white donkey once. A lion once.
    Fish and snakes swim by often. Aban even caught a fish. And he’s the one who said you can’t catch fish with your bare hands. But he did. Or almost with his bare hands. The stupid thing was nibbling at the tree bark, and Aban studied the slow flap, flap, flap of its gills. He quick jabbed a sharp twig between those flaps and we ate the most delicious carp ever. Tiny, but perfect.
    I would be dead if it weren’t for Aban.
    So I can’t tell him that a raft is a pointless idea. I nod. “All right, let’s make a raft. We can use as many branches as you want. But they better be the smaller ones, from the very top of the tree. We need the wider ones to sleep on.”
    Aban looks down at his feet. The water has risen up around his ankles. He puts his hand above his eyebrows to keep out the rain and looks up at the branches above. He’s already bashed off the next three widest ones. After that it isn’t clear that the branches are thick enough to hold both our weights. Please let Aban realize that. I feel the skin along my jaw twitch. I wait forhim to speak. But he’s just standing there. He’s good-looking, in a strange sort of way. Oh, he was better-looking the first time we met; the rain is taking its toll. But he’s still oddly beautiful. Exotic. And I realize for the first time that his name is unique. His hair and eyes are black, like mine, his skin the color of ripe olives, like mine, but he must be of another origin. “What does ‘Aban’ mean?”
    “Waters.” He looks at me, as though astonished. He wipes the rain from his lashes—a futile gesture. “My people lived on a gulf to the south and east. The center of the earth. They followed a river north, the Pishon, and I was born along the way. Washed in the river.” He shakes his head. “Water. It’s my fate.”
    My throat tightens. I, too, was named by my mother for the circumstances of my birth. I was born dead. Or that’s what they thought. But Mamma held me to her breast, naked body to naked body, all night long, and rubbed my back and pulled on my toes. At sunrise, when Papa reached to take me away, he heard a small noise. It was me, crying out. So Mamma named me after the sunrise.
    The contrast between our names seems fateful. Please, please don’t let Aban ask what my name means.
    But, oh, he doesn’t have to. He must know. He’s grown up with my language.
    “You weave,