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emotion.
    She might not have mourned at all, had it not been for a nightmare in her seventh month of pregnancy, when she dreamed that her baby had been born with blood pouring from its eyes. Waking horrified to the solid heaviness within her, she wept first with relief, realizing that she was still pregnant and a baby’s eyes could not bleed that way. But the dike had crumbled, and she was at long last engulfed by an oceanic sadnesss. Drowning in a sea of loss, she wrapped her arms around her taut, round belly, and wept and wept, with no words, no logic, no intelligence to shield her, and understood that it was this—this terror, this pain—that she had fled from all her life, and with good reason.
    As unfamiliar as she was with tears, it was a terrible thing to cry now, and feel only one side of her face wet—and with that realization, grief became hysteria. Alarmed by her sobbing, Kanchay asked anxiously, "Sipaj, Fia, have you dreamt of the ones who are gone?" But she could not answer or even lift her chin in assent, so Kanchay and his cousin Tinbar swayed and held her, and looked to the sky for the storm that would surely come now that someone had made a fierno. Others came to her as well, asking after her dead and donating ribbons for her arms, as she cried.
    In the end, her own exhaustion saved her when no one else could. Never again, she vowed as she fell asleep, emptied of emotion at last. I will never let this happen to me again. Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
    The baby kicked, as if in protest.
    * * *
    SHE WOKE IN KANCHAY’S EMBRACE WITH TINBAR’S TAIL CURLED OVER her legs. Sweating, her face asymmetrically swollen, she disentangled herself from the others and rose awkwardly, lumbering big-bellied toward the creek with a dark chaninchay, newly made from the broad, shallow shell of a forest pigar. She stood for a few moments, then lowered herself carefully, reaching out into the stream to fill the bowl. Kneeling, she dipped her hands over and over into the cool pure water, sluicing it over her face. Then, filling the bowl once more, she waited for the black water to still before using it as a mirror.
    I am not Runa! she thought, amazed.
    This strange loss of self-image had happened to her before; several months into her first overseas AI contract in Kyoto, she was startled each morning to look into a bathroom mirror and discover that she was not Japanese like everyone around her. Now, here, her own human face seemed naked; her dark, snarled hair bizarre; her ears small and inadequate; her single-irised eye too simple and frighteningly direct. Only after she had come to grips with all this did the rest sink in: the slanting, three-tracked scar that sliced from forehead to jaw. The blind, cratered… place.
    "Someone’s head hurts," she told Kanchay, who had followed her to the creek and sat down beside her.
    "Like Meelo," said Kanchay, who had witnessed Emilio Sandoz’s migraines and considered headache a normal foreign response to grief. He settled back onto a thick-muscled, tapering tail and made a tripod with his upraised legs. "Sipaj, Fia, come and sit," he suggested, and she held out her hand so he could steady her as she moved to him.
    He began to tidy her hair, combing through it section by section with his fingers, untangling knots with a Runao’s sensitive touch. She gave herself up to this, and listened to the forest grow quiet in the midday heat. Occupying her own hands as little Askama always had while sitting in Emilio’s lap, Sofia picked up the ends of three ribbons tied around her arm and began to plait them. Askama had often braided ribbons into Anne Edwards’s hair and Sofia’s, but none of the foreigners had ever been offered body ribbons to wear. "Probably because we wear clothes," Anne had thought, but it was just a guess.
    "Sipaj, Kanchay, someone wonders about the ribbons," Sofia said, looking up at him, turning her head to see from her left side.