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his senses. The all-encompassing security within Oracle scared him every time, as he lost his grip on his body and its pain: a transient fear, before he was submerged.
    He relived their visit to the Leaving Hill, Amber’s questions about the nature of the Lost. What if I were not human? What if you were not human? Do you think that ever happens?
    And then, their encounter with the Tallyman and his assessing gaze; Flint’s trek around Trecosann, asking questions of everyone he met, seeking out all their childhood haunts and hiding places, of which there were many, for they had many reasons to hide. And his fight with Tarn, of course.
    ~
    ...every step hurt, his back sore from a caning, but he kept going, determined not to let it show. This was young Flint’s eleventh dry season and he had long since learnt how to cope with the discomforts of life.
    It was a lesson Amber had still to learn. She had run from the family home this morning. Showing her weakness and fear.
    ...he was lucid-dreaming, a part of his mind told him, still clinging to consciousness, to control. Oracle had cast him back into childhood, tapping buried memories...
    Now he watched himself from a short distance. Thin and tall for a ten-year-old, black hair flopping in the breeze, skin the colour of the finest golden sugar. And such a solemn look in his eyes!
    The boy trod the path from Trecosann to the Leaving Hill. There had been a row, a fight, and Amber had fled.
    He remembered Aunt Clarel, now: once a regular visitor to her brother’s house, but no more. Clarel had been there, that morning, had glimpsed Flint’s pain even if she had not understood its source–had blinded herself to its source.
    And now, the boy emerged from the last fringe of the forest. From this point you could look out across the tops of the trees, down to the cleft that marked the winding route of the river Elver, the waters hidden by vegetation. Monkeys chattered from somewhere nearby, no doubt gathered around an outgrowth of fleshfruit somewhere in the canopy.
    Flint jumped, stretching high, and then jumped again. The second time, he managed to pluck a trumpet flower from the drooping bough of a dawn oak. He sucked the nectar from its meaty pod, then held the purple petals tight across his mouth and blew. The resulting note was pitched high, a nasal buzz, the sound the trees made to lure pollinators.
    He blew again and surveyed the hill for signs of movement, but there were none.
    The boy discarded the broken flower and trudged resolutely up the hill, following a path that wound up the slope across open ground littered with the white fragments of the Lost.
    At one point a black vulture sat watching him, its wings spread defensively over a recent corpse, its bare face slick, reddened. It lifted heavily, struggled for height, soared with its head hung low, watching, waiting.
    At the crest of the hill there was a low wall, carved from the bedrock, forming a rough circle. Flint paused in the narrow entrance, the threshold between Lost mutt pups and Lost human pups.
    Within, the bones were more sparsely distributed, yet still dense enough to impress on the ten-year-old the frequency of change within the womb even amongst the True.
    In the middle of the circle, a naked brown girl lay curled like a pup, knees drawn up. She was crying, he could see that much. She hurt too, in her own way.
    He went to her and she twisted fearfully until she saw that it was Flint.
    “I’ll kill him,” he said softly, a promise he had made on many occasions.
    She dipped her head again, but she had stopped crying.
    He found her clothes nearby and dropped them where she could reach. “You won’t die of exposure like this,” he told her. “You’ll just get stiff and sore.”
    “I belong here,” she said.
    “You hate this place. You told me.”
    “They hate me. Father says I’m worse than a mutt. They’re going to make me sleep in the stock sheds. I belong up here, with the spirits of the Lost.