Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

57 – A Straight Demon

“I have been thinking lately about time. How the present moment is a collision between the path stretching behind us and the future racing ahead. A perfect fusion.” Pradeep sits on the edge of the bunk, Maahjabeen at his side. “This is your realm more than mine, Triquet. Although in your case, maybe less about the future. But I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”

“Yeah… It’s weird.” Triquet sits further down the ward room on a bunk with Miriam and Alonso. But now they stand, pacing up and down the narrow aisle, weaving between the outflung arms and legs. Since Maahjabeen and Pradeep returned from the sea cave none of them have moved. They’ve all been in this ward room for hours, processing the events of the past few days. Now, after the most urgent subjects have been properly covered, their thoughts are turning more philosophical. “All these destiny and prophecy themes. Think about how all the Lisicans consider time and chronology. They have a hard date for the beginning of their world and evidently an equally hard date for its end. That’s got to change how you approach each day.”

“And the sky is a ceiling that contains only you and the ocean,” Pradeep adds. “Yes. We are in a place with different geometry. At home we think of the generations growing and developing, often in contrast or rebellion to the generation before. And this is a limitless line of progress stretching to a vanishing point ahead. But here? What would be the point to build or develop anything if your world will end in 72 days with a cataclysmic Jidadaa of doom?”

“Or, in this case,” Katrina chimes in, “72 hours.”

Pradeep nods. “Quite so. Why be curious about the outside world if it is invisible and impossible to reach? The arrival of outsiders must really mess with this cosmology.”

“Except,” Amy says, “that they themselves were once outsiders and I’m not sure there’s been like a real break in immigration since they first arrived. There’s always someone new here. Maybe the Lisicans are just ethnocentric and don’t think the rest of us are worth their time. And why would you, if you lived in paradise?”

“Eh, as far as islands go, I prefer Sardegna.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop.

“Yeah, it’s like…” Jay searches for the words. “I just went up top to get baked and I was thinking about that. Here I am in a bunker built in 1961 smoking a plant that was illegal when the soldiers were here. Imagine how much I could have blown their minds! You said they were all unhappy here, Triquet. Well, here comes Doctor Jay from the future with a jay.”

“Layers of time,” Triquet nods. “We make our own fleeting little depositions here in the sub and then in a few days we’ll pass on just like the sailors did. And someday someone else will sit in this bunk and wonder why it smells faintly of marijuana smoke.” The room fills with laughter. “Oh, I need this. Some unstructured thoughts. How about it? Breakout session, everyone. Let’s hear everyone’s most out-of-the-box ideas about these last few weeks. Nothing’s too wild. Come on. Miriam? How about you? What do you got?”

“Well…” Miriam smiles at Esquibel’s aggrieved glance to Flavia. “Nothing too crazy, ladies, I promise. But yes, I have been waiting to tell my own tale. Just a few things I found up in that canyon with a lake.” She pulls her backpack from its storage beneath the bunk and unzips it. From a hardshell container she removes a handful of white chip fragments and shows them to everyone.

“Fossils,” Triquet says. “Far older than what I usually handle.”

“Oh, far.” Miriam takes out another, a rounded lump with a series of short curved lines along its side. “This is a Trigonia clam. Unmistakable little ridges there, that look like eyelashes, aye?”

“Aye.” Katrina peers at the fossil. “It’s cute. How’s it taste?”

“Nobody knows.” Miriam holds it up. “The entire Trigonia genus has been extinct since the Paleocene, 56 million years ago. This lad solves my chronology riddle. So here’s my Plexity datum, right here, thank you very much. The limestone layers that make up so much of this island’s geology are at least 56 million years old. Certainly older, but that’s the nearest in time it can be. And I was able to get some pretty solid geomagnetic readings out there too. The bedrock below is rare stuff. It shows fragmentary clues of the theorized plate that existed here before the Pacific plate subducted it around 48 million years ago. Which means there was an eight million year window where the ancient plate and the limestone crust atop it still had exposure to the surface. So this is our time range. Now near the end of that window was the transition to a new geological epoch. I imagine the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum must have been a real pivotal time here, when ocean temperatures spiked and there was a mass die-off, leaving all these fossils. But that subducted plate… I’ve never really studied North Pacific plate formations before. You know what it’s name is?”

“Uh… Jerry?” Jay guesses.

“It is the Kula Plate, an ancient remnant that hasn’t been seen on the surface in 48 million years.”

“Kula!” Jay exclaims. “No way. What are the odds? All buried and covered up for sure.”

“And it turns out Kula is a Tlingit word,” Miriam continues, “a word that actually means ‘all gone.’”

“So is that her name or is that just what the villagers decided to call her when she got buried in the tunnels?”

“Subducted.” Katrina says the word with distaste.

“Poor Kula. What a life. Imagine being named ‘all gone.’ Yeah, you’re going to name your daughter ‘doom.’ This shit sounds like a Johnny Cash song.” Jay snorts. “Hey, Miriam, if you’re all finished can I go next?”

Miriam nods. “Aye. I’m done.”

“Right on. Now. Prophecy poems.” Jay nods slowly. “These are wild. So I started like researching them. And I came across the songlines of the Australian aborigines. Anyone heard of these?”

“Oh, yes. I had a seminar on them a few years ago.” Triquet still can’t sit still. They climb onto an empty top bunk and start doing exercises. “Love love love their dreaming tracks. But Lisica hardly compares. This place has only been inhabited for three hundred years. The aboriginal culture stretches back over sixty thousand years in Australia. Their dreamworld is unimaginably deep.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Jay agrees. “But I think it’s got some of the same like features. Rhythm. The aborigines would walk in these long rhythms for days, and the songs are sung in that rhythm. The chants here are something like that. And the Lisicans have woven all their plants and rocks and mountains into their chants, kind of in the same way.”

“I do not know,” Alonso tells them, “about these songlines. What makes them so significant in Australia?”

“Well,” Triquet answers, “say you live in your village in Australia and for various cultural or religious reasons you’ve got to travel like a thousand kilometers on a special journey. Off you go. You don’t ask anyone directions. You already know the way. It’s in the songs you’ve been taught since you were born. And this way-song is like literally a list of directions as well as a kind of literary description of the first ancestors who walked this way and created the land as they walked it. Created all the plants and animals with each step and word. And now you’re just re-tracing their steps while you sing their song. But that’s just the barest description of it. Their whole culture is based around these songs that are like baked in to the actual landscape. A mountain is a story is a dream is a journey.”

“I don’t understand,” Alonso confesses.

Triquet nods in agreement. “Oh, for sure. Nobody who isn’t aboriginal really does. I mean, it’s like the Eyat, where it just forces you to stand on your head and look at the world in a fundamentally different way. Time is different to them. Life and death. Same with the Lisicans, I’m sure. Totally unique beliefs.”

“I would guess,” Flavia contributes, still not looking up from her laptop screen, “that our Tuzhit founding father fellow mustn’t have been a very pious Christian, or we’d have Orthodox iconography all over the place. And these people would be a lot more tortured.”

Maahjabeen waves the insult away. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? Flavia, you think more about religion than I do.”

“So…” Jay interposes, in an attempt to head off the argument, “I decided I’d make my own prophet poem, about this island, and being lidass and all that. I mean, I know plants and animals. I can rap about like cliffs and forests all day. And I can’t just let all these others decide my destiny. I can’t just be a cameo guest appearance on someone else’s track. Time to get my own voice out there.”

“MC Jay on the mic!” Katrina crows.

“So what is the song?” Miriam asks. “Have you finished it?”

“Uh, still a work in progress, but…” Jay shrugs. “Takes a rhyme to beat a rhyme. You said you wanted wacky. Here’s wacky. The wackiest shit on this whole wack island.”

“It certainly is,” Esquibel sourly agrees.

“Well, what about you then?” Jay asks with a frown. “You’re pretty good, Doc, at telling everyone where they’re wrong. But what about you? What’s the craziest most far-out weirdness you’ve seen here? Huh?”

Esquibel has to think about that. It is true that this island is a strange place, but she learned growing up on the outskirts of Nairobi that her future lay with the modern world, not with the ignorance and superstitions of her neighbors messing about in the bush. And she saw how many times their forecasts and warnings were wrong, and how easy it was for them to explain those misses away. But science and medicine do not make those same mistakes. They work or they do not, at least if properly applied. The clear problem here is that science is no longer being properly applied. They are falling into unreason and a kind of new age voodoo that she absolutely despises. “Weirdness… I only have concerns about what this place is doing to our objectivity. I think, if we had just been able to keep a solid internet connection, that most of this madness wouldn’t have affected us so strongly.”

“Oh now you would give my satellite phone back?” Flavia cries. “I cannot believe you.”

“Seriously?” Miriam laughs at Esquibel. “After all that has been done to us here, you’re still saying there’s really nothing out of the ordinary with Lisica? Are you blind?”

“I am saying there is no magic. No prophecy or omen or curse here that has any power in the least.” Mandy lies sleeping behind Esquibel on the bunk. The doctor turns and places a comforting hand over Mandy’s gunshot wound, indicating with her action what is really important here. “There are only imperfect humans with our imperfect senses.”

But Maahjabeen isn’t buying it. “So you have no faith.”

Esquibel sneers. “I never did. If I did I would be married and trapped in some man’s house giving him children and free labor.”

Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “Oh, like me? I understand the challenges you faced and I am not saying it is easy. But you don’t have to run so far in the other direction that you would deny that a world exists outside science—” She speaks louder to override both Esquibel and Flavia’s objections. “And yes I understand that it cannot be properly measured or replicated or characterized by our brains. But you are crazy, willfully blind, if you insist that it doesn’t exist and we only live in your, ehhh, deterministic clockwork.”

“Says the average 16^th century woman,” Flavia retorts, “on the subject of unsolvable mysteries such as gravity and medicine. Just because we don’t understand the phenomena yet, doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, we’ve solved the science of gravity now?” Miriam mock wonders. “That’s grand.”

“And medicine? Ha.” Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm. “When we were poisoned Doctor Daine had no clue what was happening to us. No offense, you did the best you could to the limits of your abilities, but you weren’t the reason we were healed. It was those shamans and their spells. No, medicine is as much an art as a science and you know it.”

“So what you are saying, Flavia,” Alonso rumbles, “is that these things that some of us are interpreting as mystical events are actually real-world phenomena that can be characterized by physics and mathematics. We just don’t know how yet.”

“Exactly. My grandparents didn’t know about chaos theory. And now, without it, the whole modern world could not exist. Quantum mechanics is used in my laser pointer when I lecture. I have a whole bit about it with my phone, how we hold so much exotic computation so easily in our hands. There are even higher-order outputs, as systems get more and more complex and interact at more refined levels. These things might manifest to us as emotions and dreams and ideas like faith and destiny. But it is only because there are an innumerable amount of particles and interactions collapsing onto this moment in spacetime all at once that we have to abstract and simplify them just so we can see them. But our sight is imperfect, eh? And in the end we are all still drooling monkeys with monkey brains. So we hold on tight to these ideas rooted deep in our biological brains. Family. Sex. Fear of death. Belief in higher powers. I mean, until a few centuries ago, Maahjabeen, you would have told me lightning was your god being angry with me.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Then you say things like that and I despair for our future…” Flavia holds up a hand, surrendering after that cheap shot. “No. I am done. The world is full of all kinds of people, that is for sure the truth. Some looking forward and some looking back. And some,” she leans to the side and rests her head on Jay’s broad shoulder, “who are happily here in the present.”

“Facts.” Jay nods judiciously, deciding it’s a compliment.

“Okay. I think what Flavia is describing,” Alonso ventures, “is ultimately a positive vision, an idea of progress where our greater understanding of crazy things like what is happening to us here can eventually fall under the domain of formal things like public policy and therapy, instead of shamans and curses and doom.”

“Yeh, that’s where I am,” Katrina agrees. “Except I like a bit more ghost in my machine. It ain’t mechanistic what Flavia and I do, Maahjabeen. That’s the thing. It’s both science and religion all at once. We’re all saying the same thing here, just with different terms. Remember, there wouldn’t even be any higher maths today without the great Arab thinkers like Al-Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam. And they invented their mathematical concepts as a sacred language in glory to Allah, yeh?”

“Yes, I love maths,” Maahjabeen agrees. “I do. And I appreciate your understanding of the history—”

“All I’m saying is that the sacred language of maths just keeps getting closer and closer to god. We develop it like you develop your own sacred works, with more pronouncements coming out from your faith leaders on a regular basis, yeh? They’re trying to understand the world and the divine that much better. We’re on the same path, everyone. None of us here are trying to hide from the world, like nearly everyone I know back home. We’re the weird ones. That’s what I love about my big Cuban family here. We’re all looking for the truth, with our hearts and minds and everything at our disposal. We’re just hungry, you know?”

The sweetness pouring from Katrina mollifies them all. After a brief silence, Pradeep is the first to continue. “I really appreciate what you said, Katrina. But I want to circle back to something else Flavia mentioned before we change topics. Emergent phenomena. Yes, Amy is nodding her head. She knows what I mean. This is how emergence feels, what we are experiencing here. There is, like I said about time being a collision between the past and future, it’s like all of Plexity’s factors and metrics are colliding upon us all at once, and it is… breathtaking. Too much for my mind to track all at the same time. Never have I felt so…”

“Much like a horse wearing blinders,” Amy finishes for him. “Oh my god that’s exactly how it was in there with the vixen. After the first couple days I felt the rhythm. Remember how we were talking a few weeks ago about plants chirping like reef ecosystems? I could feel it. Not hear it. These old ears can’t hear much. But…”

“Yes,” Pradeep jumps back in, excited. “And that is what I was trying to show you last month, Alonso, with those mycorrhizal networks, the way they were speaking to each other, the grand networks that exist everywhere…”

“Yes…! Yes!” Alonso does remember. Pradeep’s insights had sparked visions that lasted his entire trip. “Networks everywhere! The flow of information! It can be unbearable at times!”

“And then I asked if you could hack the language of the trees so we could change the tune?” Katrina adds with a laugh. “What ever happened to that idea?”

“Yes…” Pradeep frowns, his enthusiastic charge halted by the audacity of the concept. “But I couldn’t imagine it would help then and I still can’t see how it would help now.”

“Oh my god.” The epiphany rises in Amy like a sleeper wave, flooding her with a holistic overview of the entire island. “When they say the foxes rule the island, this is what they mean. Keystone species. Gentle nudges of the ecosystems. Harmonics. Remember, Alonso? Way back at the beginning. We were talking about all the harmonics that Plexity can measure. The microfluidic channels of the Dyson readers being more analog than digital. Remember those arguments, Pradeep? Flavia?”

Alonso laughs, a deep sound filled with pleasure. “Ha ha ha. She has got you there, does she not, Flavia? Your harmonics were too mystical for this old data scientist, remember? We are all at the edge of our respective disciplines, and sometimes we step off. But this is what Katrina was just talking about, isn’t it? We are all striving toward the same goal with different languages?”

“Harmonics is a very well understood mathematical concept.” Flavia shrugs, defensive. “But if you want to make it like a Harry Potter spell or whatever, with like a long string of nonsense rhymes and wiggling fingers, then be my guest.”

“Wait.” Pradeep reaches across the aisle and grabs Katrina’s hand. She inhales sharply at the same instant, her eyes scanning the ceiling.

Then she sees it too. Katrina cries out, “Oh my god.”

Flavia holds up a hand, seeing what they see. “Oh, no no no.”

Pradeep tries to infect her with the beauty of his vision. “No, it’s everything, Flavia. It’s everything that we’ve just talked about. It’s not just… hacking the forest. It’s—”

“Wait.” Alonso scowls. “What is going on here with you three? You can actually do that?”

“Well,” Pradeep stops his runaway train of thought once more to address this. “I mean, it’s just communication. And the most direct means to speak with a forest, for example, would be with fire, yes? Trees react quite dramatically to the presence of—”

“No, you can’t!” Amy protests. “What are you thinking?”

“Or water,” Pradeep allows. “I’m not a monster. I’m just saying these are basic elements we can use. Sunlight. Cold. Parasites. But what I am really saying is that we all need to think much bigger here. Think like Jay.”

“Like Jay?” For Esquibel, this is too much. “You are joking.”

“What I am saying is that he’s writing a prophecy poem and the rest of us are providing him the language. But the audience for his poem isn’t the Lisican villagers. It is the flora and fauna of the island. The winds and the rain and the stars.”

“You are…” Esquibel bites her tongue, trying to find a gentle way to say it. She likes Pradeep and admires his intellect. “A romantic.”

But this is the final piece of the puzzle for Jay. His head rocks back. “Whoa…” He nods, his destiny locking in. “Ohh, this is what they meant by the whole lidass thing. Oh, man. Me myself and I. I’m the man of words and the man of action. Right place at the right time and all that. Dude. Fuck. Got to choose the right words, though. I can really get into some trouble out here, can’t I…?”

“What the hell are you all talking about?” Esquibel demands. “Talking to the trees? What? Singing to them? Changing their song? This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I will begin with an analysis of some of these networks we’ve identified in Plexity,” Flavia tells Pradeep. “And tell you where the most likely entry points into the wider systems might be.”

He nods and points at Amy. “Ring the whole island like a bell. And Amy can help me identify what means we have to introduce permutations to the ecosystems. There are a few pheromones we can isolate and I think we can perhaps also trigger some reactions with compounds we currently have with us.”

“You are going to change the ecosystem of Lisica?” Alonso echoes, his heart dropping. “Isn’t that the one thing we said we would never do?”

“Well.” Pradeep takes a deep breath. It seems like every choice he’s ever had to make in his life is a devil’s bargain. “This is like climate change, Alonso. It is already happening, whether we do anything or not. This island will change in just a couple days, is already changing to hear Jidadaa tell it. The Russians are here, the Chinese are here. Wetchie-ghuy is enslaving people and trying to steal foxes. Everyone is already trying to change it. And this is the means we have to short circuit all their efforts.”

“But to what end?” Esquibel wonders. “Each mission must have a goal. This cannot just be an exercise for its own sake. Just to stop what others are trying to do? Is that why we’re here?”

“Yes, listen to this. Esquibel makes a very good point. What do we say the goal of such a project should be?” Alonso surveys the room. They are for the most part excited by this topic. Good. He loves that they are all once more working together.

“I don’t want to choose sides,” Flavia asserts, “between all the geopolitical monsters. China, America… I don’t care.”

Amy nods. “And I won’t do anything that contributes to the destruction of the habitats here. Not a single thing.”

“Perhaps,” Miriam offers, “our mission goal here is just that old medical guideline: do no harm. Eh, Esquibel?”

“Can’t it be more proactive than that?” Pradeep asks. “More like ‘we are here to de-escalate conflicts,’ or something like that. Like what the blue helmets do for the UN. ‘Send your wounded to us.’ I just want to be a force for actual harm reduction, not just avoidance.”

“I think,” Jay says in the silence, “that if this is like the songlines, what we’re supposed to do is dream up the most beautiful world we can, the world we really want to see, everybody all shiny and healthy and happy, and that’s what we sing into the trees. Show them the best possible world and have them yearn for it. Love not war, yo. It’s not just words or a concept. It’s a… vision. Now it’s up to us to speak it into existence.”

Ξ

Perhaps an hour later, the sub has fallen silent. Some work at their screens, others drowse. Katrina hums as she plays a game on her phone. Then she stops. “Hear that?”

“Hear what…?” Jay lifts his head, blinking away his runaway thoughts. “Oh.” The faintest knock comes from belowdecks. It repeats. “Shit. The spy found us?”

“Doubt he’d knock.” Miriam sits up. “He didn’t seem the polite type. More of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of chap.”

“Then who is it?” Jay rises, frowning at the hatch leading further into the sub. “And what do they want?”

He takes a step but Esquibel grabs his leg. “Wait. He is armed. We can’t take any risks.”

“And what’s he knocking on?” Katrina wonders. “You didn’t barricade the way in down there again, did you, Esquibel?”

“I couldn’t. You people stole all my materials.”

Jay makes a decision. “Well, I’m going to see who it is. We can’t just hide in here for three days.”

“Why not?” Flavia demands. “That is exactly what we should do. We shouldn’t even go back into the island’s interior now that we have an honest-to-god spy after us.”

Jay appeals to authority. “Come on, Esquibel. Let me go check it out. Somebody might need us.”

Esquibel sighs, looking up at Jay with a total lack of confidence. She turns and regards Mandy for a moment. She has her eyes open and she watches Esquibel in turn. “Don’t worry, Mands. I won’t let anyone harm you.”

“See who it is,” Mandy tells her weakly. “We can’t just hide.”

Esquibel frowns, then stands. “Okay. But stay behind me, Jay.” She grabs her black satchel and steps toward the hatch.

She leads him down the narrow hall, past the door leading to the warrant officer’s cabin. Then as they pass the locked door of the radio room the knock is repeated, so close it startles them both and they fall against the far wall.

“It’s from in there.” Esquibel removes her pistol and points it at her feet, the safety still on.

“No way. How did somebody even get in there?” Jay is spooked. “I thought it was coming from below. Had to be. You know…”

“Like someone from the village, yes.” Esquibel’s eyes are wide. She is having trouble controlling her breathing. “But this…”

The knock repeats. It is a tentative sound, with a halting forlorn rhythm. Jay inspects the door. The steel panel is set into the frame with no gaps. He tries the knob. It doesn’t turn.

But his efforts have been noticed on the far side. The knock comes again, more urgent, and Miriam ducks through the hatch behind them. “Who is it?”

“Uh, the radioman, if we’re making guesses…” But Jay doesn’t like his own joke. He steps back. “Somebody trapped in there. We should like get them out.”

The knock sounds again.

The three of them share glances. “You could like shoot the lock off,” Jay suggests.

Esquibel looks at him as if he’s deranged. “Does the word ricochet mean anything to you? Anything at all?”

Jay ducks his head into the Captain’s cabin, looking for tools. “Just like need a crowbar or…” He searches the desk drawers, only finding a paper clip hidden in a corner. “Hold up. This might work. Did some larceny as a kid. Let’s see if I still got it.”

Jay pulls out his phone and kneels before the radio room door. He shines his light into the old-fashioned lock and starts poking at it with the paper clip. “Naah. Shit is frozen. Need some lubricant more than anything. See if Triquet can—”

And then a giant bang shakes the door and the door knob falls off. The seal cracks for the first time in decades, a sharp sound of rust flakes breaking off.

Jay pushes on the door. It swings inward with a billow of dust. Inside the cramped room stands Jidadaa holding a metal strut. She is panting, smeared in mud, eyes wild.

“What?” Jay is disappointed. “Aw, it’s just you. How the fuck did you get stuck in there?”

Jidadaa steps aside to show him the hole in the wall behind her and the tunnel leading down into darkness. “Jay lidass. I have been to Ussiaxan. Let me out.”

Jay turns away from the door in disgust. “Fuck. It’s just Jidadaa. Stirring up shit. I’ll be in my bunk.” He pushes past Esquibel and Miriam to return to the ward room.

Jidadaa hurries after him, smearing her mud on both women. “Wait, Jay. The Chinese man. I can tell.” She ducks through the hatch, Esquibel and Miriam following, to address the entire crew. “I can tell you all. He is in a cage.”

“It’s Jidadaa!” Katrina cries, scrambling to her feet and reaching for her, then pulling her hands back. “Who’s in a cage?”

“The Daadaxáats shaman argue with Chinese man. Ussiaxan decide Chinese man is wrong. They put him in cage. He is stuck in it. You are free to go.”

“Put him in a cage…?” Alonso asks. “They imprisoned him? They put the spy in jail? In Ussiaxan jail?”

“Yes.” Jidadaa is relieved to hear the right words. “Chinese spy in jail. No more sneak at night.”

“Ha! Seriously?” Katrina cackles. “Ha! Tried to get them to come after us and they were like, nah, mate. We’re looking for foxes now. Chill out.”

“Yes!” Jidadaa claps her hands. She steps forward and leans over Mandy. “No more spy. No more blood.” With her thumbtip she points at the gunshot wound, leaning close. Then she pulls back abruptly and addresses the room. “You are safe. Now I must go.”

Ξ

“We are here,” Katrina informs the Mayor, her words slow and deliberate, “to find Jidadaa. We think she stole Mandy’s phone.”

The Mayor’s expression does not change. She stares at Katrina and Jay with a flat expression of disbelief, or perhaps distaste.

“Uhh… Where is everybody?” Katrina peers past the Mayor to the village beyond, at least what she can see from the cave mouth. She can only see Yesiniy and the non-binary youth, who plucks the feathers from a dead bird the size of a partridge. She holds her own phone up. “Looks like this but with a pink case. Chinese model. Has all her stuff on it. Uh…” Katrina edges past the Mayor and slips into the village. “That Jidadaa’s sure got sticky fingers.” She nods at Yesiniy, who gapes irate at her. “Ma’am. Don’t mind us. Just passing through.”

Yesiniy’s response is a hoarse warble that reminds Katrina how close to the end the old woman is. She must be like seventy or more, which has got to be old here, without any modern medicine. Perhaps Katrina can find a time to persuade Yesiniy to record a few long interviews before they go. She can translate them when she gets back home. Her perspective would just be so invaluable to preserve. Then Katrina looks away, guilty at the appraising look she measured the crone with, as if she was already dead. Instead, she should focus on what Yesiniy’s saying. Her condemning tone. Okay. She is obviously telling Katrina that things are going wrong. And that she and her friends won’t win. The fox always wins.

Katrina emphatically nods back and uses all the Lisican, Eyat, and Slavic constructions she knows to signal her agreement. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t win at all. Totally. That’s why we’re leaving in a couple days. Just need that phone first.”

Yesiniy’s response is even more heated and she tries to get to her feet, but that is difficult now without help. The youth hurries over and gives her their hands. But as they pull her up their own voice rises in contrast to whatever point the old woman is making. The two Lisicans argue face to face, in an embrace, shaking each other. Finally Yesiniy falls silent and looks away in surrender. All Katrina can tell the fight was about was some mention of Yesiniy’s sacred tree and, somehow, the allocation of water to each hut. Strange. Must be a list of random grievances getting worked out.

The youth turns their smooth brown face to the two trespassers and looks blandly at them. They have a stronger jaw than most of their kin, and a body trending toward stoutness in a few years. They also have the longest hair in the village, black ringlets intermixed with gold, braided loosely around their face to keep it out of their eyes. Their shift is a style that only the women wear. And their easy manner reminds Katrina of a brash middle-aged Filipina bar owner in Lidcombe she knows and loves. She decides she likes the youth, and nods, giving them her most brilliant smile. “Cheers.” She places a hand against her chest. “Katrina.”

After a long moment of consideration, the youth decides to share their own name. “Xeik’w.”

Xeik’w turns away and deposits Yesiniy back on her mat in front of her hut. Jay notices the streaks of drying bird blood that remain on Yesiniy’s upper arms from where Xeik’w grasped her. Wicked. “Man, now I get why you cats all decided Jidadaa wasn’t welcome in the village. Fucking thief. Mandy needs her phone back pronto. Mui importante.”

“They don’t speak Spanish, Jay. That’s been well-established.”

“They get what I mean.” But the three villagers have all returned to their tasks and are no longer paying attention. “But seriously. Where’d everyone else go? Pine camp?”

Following this assumption, they withdraw from the village and head down the path toward the creek. But as they go, they hear the mewling cry of a child echo around them, urgent and lost…

Katrina and Jay stop at the trailhead and look back up the slope of the hill behind the huts. Is that someone moving in the dense undergrowth? “Xaanach?” Jay calls out. “That you?” He turns toward the sound and moves toward it. “What’s wrong, kid?”

But the Mayor and Xeik’w hurry to intercept Jay. There is real fear in Xeik’w’s face. The Mayor has the blackest gaze Jay’s ever seen. “What is it? Is she okay? I just wanted to check on her.” Then Jay remembers that Xaanach doesn’t belong to the village. She’s an outcast like Jidadaa. Oh, is this like the pariah treatment they gave Amy? Man, these people sure do like kicking folks out.

“Uh… where is she?” Katrina asks, slowly returning to the village square, trying to puzzle out the Mayor’s response.

“I only saw the bushes moving up there.” Jay points at a spot, but as he does so he hears the cry come from a further spot, downslope at a diagonal, at a surprising distance. It is an uncanny sound. Even though it is filled with a child’s heartbreak, something about it makes Jay’s hackles rise. “Nah, dude. Stop. They’re right. Come back to me. Uhh. So creepy. That ain’t a child.”

“What do you mean it isn’t a…?” Katrina tries to reconcile his words with the cry for help that tugs at her heartstrings, and in the pause that it takes her to process, Wetchie-ghuy scuttles onto the trail between her and the village, cutting her off from the others.

“Aw, shit. Hey.” Jay strains in the surprisingly strong grip of both the Mayor and Xeik’w. “Hey, you leave her alone. Katrina. Stay back. Don’t get near him.”

Katrina puts her hands up, her breath suddenly fluttering in her breast like a trapped bird. He has divided her from the others like a sheep dog with his flock. But Wetchie-ghuy isn’t facing her. He confronts the others, hunched over, smelling ripe and evil. She steps further back, nearer the trailhead, to get out of his range.

Wetchie-ghuy mewls like a lost child one last time, then cackles and says something derogatory about Jay and Katrina, with a careless gesture behind him to include her.

“No, fuck you. You can just—” But Jay’s heated words are cut off by the Mayor’s even hotter response. She quivers in fury, spitting her words at the shaman, cursing his filthy bare feet. And Wetchie-ghuy just crouches there and takes it, face split into a malevolent grin. No, there’s no joy in that face. It’s a grimace of pain. He bares his teeth at the Mayor in challenge.

“Isn’t she his sister, yeh?” Katrina calls out.

“Oh, fuck. You’re right. Totally spaced that. Yeah, look at them. That’s how siblings and only siblings can—”

Wetchie-ghuy suddenly storms forward, holding up a talisman of bone and sinew. The Mayor meets his charge and tries to slap it out of his hand but he is too fast. They both are. In an eyeblink they have wrestled themselves into a deadlock, standing hip to hip holding each other by the wrists down by their ankles, trying to pull each other off balance.

Wetchie-ghuy springs free. The talisman has lost one of its sinew straps. He hisses in fury and backs away, chanting.

The Mayor marches after him, in the rhythm of her own chant. These must be their prophet poems, at war. “Oh, hell yeah. Full on rap battle.” Jay cheers. “Get him, sister. Chop him up.”

Xeik’w holds Jay back, calling out a chant in care of the Mayor. Yesiniy lends her own screeching cadence from her door. These rhymers don’t even take turns. It is pure cacophony.

But then Wetchie-ghuy steps past his sister and reaches for Jay, his rhyme ending in an unmistakable—lidass!

“Oh, you coming for me now? My turn?” Jay throws his arms wide, fronting, blood rushing to his brain. This dude wants a battle with him? Jay is up for it like he’s never been up for anything. But the noise is too much, all the fools yelling so nobody can’t hear nothing. Jay bellows, “You coming for me?” and the white-hot fury in his voice finally silences them.

His favorite MF Doom song springs unbidden to his lips. He quotes Megalon at the opening: “Who you think I am?”

The existentialist cry fills the air. Before Wetchie-ghuy or the Mayor or anyone else can respond, Jay drops into the rhymes.

“…Loved not for who you think I am,
but who you want me to be
A true thuggin emcee, true thugs, with no strings attached
I wanna give you my slugs and don’t wanna take em.”

Katrina screams in pleasure. She had no idea Jay could be so hot on the mic. She falls behind his bouncing figure, his hype girl, shouting out echoes and refrains of each line’s end. Opening an app on her phone as she bounces, she makes quick adjustments, and instrumental beats fill the square in time to Jay’s rhymes.

Wetchie-ghuy is dumbfounded. The Mayor falls back, amazed. The look on Xeik’w’s face is a mixture of amazement and horror. MF Doom is obviously unlike anything they have ever heard.

But the heat keeps rising in Jay. This motherfucker has been after them since they got here. No more. Jay drops the memorized lyrics and switches to a snarling freestyle, getting personal with his bars:

“You want Doom? I’m your doomsday killer.
Rap battle? Ain’t no MC sounds iller.
Cold clock? You been sneak up by my bed
Reach for me, homie, gonna wish you was dead.

The birds in the trees and the bees all know
That motherfucking Wetchie-ghuy is the one who’s got to go.
Lee-dass? Lid-ass? You want a piece of this?
When you coming for the chosen one you best not miss.”

The wall of hostility is too much for the shaman. He steps back with a scowl, his words just fragments, trying to find a way to force his way back in but Jay is too much.

“Got fools scared cause you call yourself the shaman,
but you’re the wicked one who should be feeling all the shaming,
so lame how you frame the facts to rig the game
accusing all others when you’re the one to blame.”

A strong hand pulls Jay back. It is the Mayor. She cautions him from following Wetchie-ghuy too deeply in his retreat. Now it finally dawns on him and his flow falters. Oh, shit. Jay isn’t defending the Mayor. Wetchie-ghuy didn’t come here to confront his sister, he came here for the lidass. And if Jay takes another couple steps out of her protection, the bastard might actually get him. Jay’s not anyone’s white knight coming to the rescue here. He’s the precious one they’re trying to keep alive. Crazy.

Now Wetchie-ghuy’s face collapses into an even more black scowl. All his attempts to confront or kidnap the lidass have been confounded. With a last curse and shake of his talisman he vanishes into the underbrush. But they can hear him for a long time as he departs, refusing to give up, shouting his prophecy poem in a shaking voice that sounds of nothing but futility.

With a wild cackle, Katrina opens a keyboard app and plays a final few chords, just to put a fine point of resolution onto the conflict. Then in the ensuing silence her laughter is the only sound. She squeezes Jay tight. “Aw, lad! Where’d you learn to spit like that? You’re a straight demon!”