I lie in bed in the morning until I know everyone else is already up and about, dreading the day. Despite sleeping heavily, I feel like the emotional roller coaster that was yesterday afternoon into the evening left me with a feelings hangover, and I don’t think I can sit next to Finch and pretend like I was totally unaffected.

  I wonder if I can try out riding inside the wagon. Just to see what it’s like for a day. Probably horrible, but a lot better than sitting next to someone you’ve just noticed you have a great big unmanageable crush on, right?

  It’s the unmanageable part I’m struggling with. This is exactly why I stopped trying to get into relationships. The moment things start to go wrong, I obsess over what I did to cause it. My whole world becomes the other person and their happiness — to the point where I completely abandon my own priorities. I’ve done it enough times to recognize the pattern but I don’t know how to stop, so I stopped putting myself in that situation in the first place. Avoiding it has been pretty easy, too, since work is a terrible place to meet people and the only other place I go is the grocery store.

  Went. I went to the grocery store.

  Are there grocery stores here?

  The point is: I used to live in a city full of people and I avoided all of them because it made living with myself easier. And now I live in a forest with five other people, and one of them in particular has been especially kind and supportive and has listened to all my stupid questions and answered them without an ounce of judgment and he even showed me his favorite stargazing place. I’d caught myself getting territorial about him. I don’t know when I reached the point where I would fall apart if I thought I’d made him mad. It sneaked up on me. That it was a massive misunderstanding doesn’t change what I’ve learned: his reaction to something I say or do could bring out the worst version of me at any moment, and I absolutely cannot become that person. Not again.

  There’s a gentle knock on the wagon door. Puck calls, “Akasha?”

  I try to sound more asleep than I am. “Hmm?”

  “Time to get up, love. May I open the door?”

  “Yes.”

  She opens it wide enough to stick her head inside, smiles, and says, “You’ll be sitting with me, today. Finch mentioned you had been asking about plants a lot, I thought I might be able to help you familiarize with them.”

  I think, I was asking because he seemed stuck in his head, but then reflect that perhaps he was just content to think his own thoughts and I was interrupting, after all. This only makes me moodier. “That sounds good.”

  Puck smiles a little more brightly and departs, closing the door. I sigh, and try to pull myself together.

  We are back beneath the denser growth of the western forest, and the rain spits rather than pelts down. The air is still thick with humidity, but it’s less wet. I take the opportunity while Finch is in his wagon washing himself up after breakfast to leave the cloak folded on the platform next to the door — which Thirsan opens just as I am setting it into place. We exchange frozen, startled looks, then he averts his eyes and steps past me, door swinging shut behind him. I walk away without saying anything.

  Ma sits with Finch. I try not to stare at his back too much, observing them all the same as they have a conversation I can’t quite hear.

  “I’m usually not given the reigns,” Puck admits. “I learned, of course, and it’s not so hard when you’re the last wagon; just go until everyone stops. The hibbovins are clever enough, they know to keep a steady pace and don’t come up too close or fall too far behind, but… I do always feel a little afraid of what happens if I accidentally spur them on too quickly. Or lead them astray by mistake. The eight of them are a herd, they know each other and like each other, but I do wonder how well they would wander back together if I somehow got us lost.”

  “I’m still a little frightened of them,” I say. “They’re huge. And those horns!”

  “Oh, psh.” Puck waves a hand dismissively. “They’re more likely to bite you than gore you. I’ve seen the fools rub each other’s faces and get stuck like that; more trouble to each other than to you or me.”

  “…and you call them clever?”

  Puck laughs. “Clever enough, yes. Not bright.”

  She begins pointing out plants as we go along, occasionally interrupting herself to observe something rarer, commenting on uses and ways to identify the difference between one plant and another, similar-looking plant.

  “The silvery stems on Illia’s Earrings make it distinct from salve bush. Silver, jewelry, easy to keep track of that one. Illia’s Earrings will make nice decor, and a lot of things don’t like the scent, but it’s caustic so you don’t want to try making a topical with it unless you really dislike whoever you’re giving it to.”

  I recognize ‘salve bush’ and ‘Illia’s Earrings’ both from Finch pointing them out recently and from Puck mumbling about them during those first weeks. This proof that I’m learning is encouraging.

  “How did you learn all of this?”

  “Went to school for it.”

  “There’s a school for plants?”

  “For becoming an apothecary, yes.”

  Already, I am embellishing the story in my head: Puck studied to be an apothecary and was a mad genius, too experimental for the rest of her cohort, so she retreated to the Sunken Forest to specialize in the strange botany that grew here. Or she was brilliant but unlicensed, and no one in the forest minds the details about her credentials; they’re just happy to have someone who knows what they’re doing.

  I have learned my lesson about making up ostentatious stories for laughs. Lately, they just aren’t landing right.

  “How did you go from Apothecary School to hanging out with thieves in the Sunken Forest?”

  Puck smiles broadly. “That does sound rebellious, doesn’t it? You won’t believe it.”

  “I would. Without judgment.”

  “It’s because I wanted to work.”

  I stare at her. “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

  This makes her laugh so hard I worry she will lose control of the reigns, but I laugh with her and help steady her hands as she recovers herself. Once she can speak again, she continues, “It’s the trouble with studying the medicinal arts. If you’re any good at it, you get hired to be someone’s personal practitioner. It pays well, and they often want you living on their property, always on call for every petty ailment that comes up. There are some people always convinced they’re halfway to dying, and there are some apothecaries who are happy enough to assure them they have the cure. There are entire households run at the apothecary’s commands because the master of the house gives them such importance. Some practitioners attend the school and work hard precisely in hopes of some wealthy household hiring them for the bragging rights of a personal apothecary. And I made the mistake of graduating at the top of my class. Barely even had to try! Should have seen the people next in line, they were hopping mad about it.

  “I thought I was going to be honorable and find work in a community that needed it, up in Holyhill, but all it takes to ruin your plans is for your reputation to precede you. The locals will assume you’ll charge a year’s wages just to assess an infected wound. The wealthy folk — the merchants, the aristocracy, the nobles — they’ll start coming around and insisting you work for them. They’ll find your neighborhood quaint, like you’re their special little secret no one else knows about, and they’ll come by and compliment you on being a gem in a hill of dirt, and then they start investing in the neighborhood so it isn’t quite so distastefully filthy.” Puck sighs. “And at first you’ll think you’re doing something right, until the improvements don’t extend to the wages of the people who live there. And your good work turns into some rich idiot’s pet project.

  “So, when one rich idiot in particular insinuates they’ll have you as their personal employee or no one will, you decide it’s time to skip off with the dashing lady-rogue whose injuries you recently patched up and join her crusade against the same class of fools who treated you like a living bauble for their collection. Fifteen years later, you’re still doing the work you love on behalf of the people who need it.”

  Then she grins and winks at me, and with a flush of embarrassment I realize I was exactly one of those people in need.

  *

  I spend the next few days sitting with Puck as we zig-zag across the forest. Finch and I talk, but it’s stilted and awkward, both of us acting like spooked cats every time we accidentally stand too close or one of us steps around a corner to find the other approaching from the far side. I am almost positive he sits so straight on his wagon roof because he can feel it when I’m staring at him — something I try not to do, but it’s easy to zone out and forget I’m supposed to keep my eyes literally anywhere else. There’s an entire forest all around me, and he’s the only thing I can’t help keep my eyes off.

  Stolen story; please report.

  It’s dumb. It’s so incredibly dumb. I can only guess at what’s going through his head; what’s going through mine is that I am determined to avoid another stupid situation where I’m so caught up in another person that I completely lose my sense of self. Whatever bizarre twist of fate landed me here, I have an unprecedented opportunity to be a new person, the one I’ve always aspired to be, and I refuse to ruin it by doing the exact same shit I’ve always done.

  The outer wall is just barely in sight through the trees when we stop and establish a camp again, wagons circled, fire pit in the center, the hibbovins led off to a meadow in the vicinity which Brand knows about. These meadows, too, are designated safe zones throughout the forest, and the hibbovins can be trusted to stay within them; as herd animals, they stick with each other and to where there is food. Brand only needs to lead one away for the rest to follow sedately after.

  I learn this by following along with him as he demonstrates, barely needing to do more than touch the horn of one he calls Tabitha. I don’t ask how he can tell them apart. After having gotten a look at the hibbovins all together at Star Point, grazing and — in their lumbering way — frolicking in an open field, I still can’t figure out what distinguishes one from another.

  “You doing all right?” Brand asks, removing thick straps from Tabitha even as she lowers her head to begin grazing, already more interested in food than whatever he’s doing.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Fine.”

  He hands me the straps he’s taken from Tabitha and moves on to the next beast. “First time you’ve followed me for hibbovin duty.”

  “I got curious.”

  “Less afraid of ‘em now?”

  “A little.” I do not draw attention to the fact that I am standing with Brand between me and the darling monstrosity he’s liberating from its gear.

  “Nice to have a spare pair of hands, anyway,” he remarks. “Maybe next time we change campsites, you can help me strap ‘em back in.” Then he laughs uproariously at the obvious and immediate panic I am not quick enough to hide. “Really, Akasha, they’re more likely to step on you by accident than hurt you on purpose.”

  “I’d probably lose a foot.”

  “Ah, right… Gotta get you something better than those skins, huh?”

  Remembering he was the one who made them for me, I say, “They’ve been very good. I just don’t think they’re much protection against cloven hooves.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. These?” Brand tilts a booted foot toward me in demonstration. “These’ll guarantee you’ll only maybe lose a toe.” Then he laughs again, this time at my worried expression. “You’re too easy.”

  We move to the next hibbovin. I ask, “Are you sure these are the same ones we arrived at Star Point with? They didn’t get confused and go with the wrong crew?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Brand pauses mid-unbuckling and goes to the creature’s head, pulling back an ear. The hibbovin continues to chew and doesn’t pull away as Brand points out what looks for all the world like an earring post with a metal circle and a bunch of shapes cut into it. “Markers,” he says. “Just in case anyone gets confused.”

  “How do you tell Tabitha from…?”

  “From Julie?” Brand pats the hibbovin’s side as he returns to the buckle he had been working on. “Good old-fashioned experience.”

  I’ve known enough Julies that this hulking mass of megafauna sharing their name is too comical. Not a one is someone I’d compare to a hibbovin.

  “Somethin’ funny?”

  “Just the name. Julie.”

  “It’s a great name for such a sweet girl. Huh, Julie?” He pets her affectionately. Julie lashes her tail, but does not stop mowing the meadow.

  “It’s a good name, it just doesn’t match my idea of a Julie at all.”

  Brand looks at me curiously. “You meet a lot of Julies?”

  Fuck.

  I shrug. “I must have. Enough to think a hibbovin named Julie is funny.”

  “Kind of a rarity in people, these days,” muses Brand.

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. Popular with animals, though. Gotta be six, seven Julies running around down here, all of them hibbovins.”

  “Really?” I look at Julie with new eyes. She’s to hibbovins what ‘Bessie’ is to cows. Or ‘Felix’ to cats. “Huh…”

  I still can’t tell her from Tabitha or any of the others.

  I follow Brand to the fourth and fifth and sixth hibbovins. By the seventh, I’m weighted down with their equipment and my shoulder is burning in protest. I try to shift the weight from one arm to the other without tangling everything together.

  “So how you feeling about our whole mission statement?” asks Brand. He almost starts passing me another strap, sees I’m struggling, and throws it over his own shoulder instead.

  “The whole rebalancing thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine.”

  “‘Fine’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No ethical quandaries? Questions of morality?”

  “Not really. The whole point is to make sure people get what they need, right? Or influence better trading practices?”

  “That’s basically it.”

  “I can’t really find fault in it, then.”

  “Not even if it’s breaking the law?”

  I remember a t-shirt I saw once: If lutefisk is outlawed, only outlaws vill have lutefisk! Silly, but it made a good point. “Laws aren’t always about morals or ethics. Some of them just create criminals. Or protect cruel people from the consequences of hurting others.”

  Brand looks fondly at me. “That’s good. What if it’s a really nice person we’re stealing from? Sweet as cake, pretty as a flower?”

  “How are they making their money?”

  “Good question.”

  “Is there an answer?”

  Brand shrugs.

  “Hm.” I contemplate what I’ve learned so far. “It’s about balance, right? So there’s a code to be followed in who is and who isn’t a potential target.”

  When I look to Brand for confirmation, he nods along as though I’m the one declaring the rules, and he is the one weighing its merit. He says nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter if they’re nice or if they’re good looking,” I continue. “It matters what their values are. If all their good looks and charm are just being used to make themselves richer at the expense of others — of their community — they aren’t actually good people. They just act like they are.”

  “Interesting, interesting… And what if they really earned it?”

  I know this one. I’m from twenty-first century Earth; we have billionaires. “No one gets that rich without exploiting others.”

  Brand grins. “Good answer.”

  I attempt to half-curtsy and almost drop several straps for my troubles. Brand helps me recover my armload and takes a few of them off my hands for good measure. We move on to the last hibbovin.

  “So what’s going on with you and Finch?”

  My grip on the straps I’m still carrying tightens so hard the metal parts clink and grind together. “Um. What?”

  “You ain’t dumb, Akasha, you know what I mean. I know you didn’t get curious about the hibbovins for no reason.”

  He’s called me out and he’s completely right. Following Brand seemed like the easiest way to get some space and still be perceived as helping. “Nothing’s going on,” I mumble, which is technically true.

  Brand sighs. “Such a shame, you know? Two of you being all cute and embarrassing together…”

  “Embarrassing?”

  “Couple of kids making friends, talking all the time…”

  “We’re not kids.”

  “Now you can’t seem to stand each other for the time it takes to say ‘excuse me.’ It’s just sad.”

  “I can stand him — I didn’t stop standing him —”

  From the look on his face, Brand has succeeded in his goal, which is to turn me into a humiliated idiot standing in a field surrounded by the only animals dopier than I am. He’s trying not to grin like an absolute shit-eater, but he’s barely containing it.

  I take a deep, slow breath in, and let a deep, slow breath out.

  “You’ve been watchin’ Ma, huh?” he quips. “I know that breath.”

  “Yeah, well. It works.” I look around for any sign someone else is in hearing range before I continue. “There’s really nothing going on. The other day was just a little… I got kind of upset. And I didn’t like how upset I got, so I’m trying to…” Am I really going to say ‘find my center’? Isn’t this some hippie speak that isn’t going to make any sense here? “I’m trying not to be that kind of person. I don’t want to lose myself.”

  To his credit, Brand listens to this without any teasing or prodding. “Ah. I get it. Not a lot left for you to lose right now, huh?”

  I nod. “I barely know who I am in the first place.”

  Brand finishes removing the last bits of equipment from the last hibbovin. He gestures to me to hand over the stuff I’ve been carrying for him, and he slings it all over a shoulder and supports it there with one arm. “You gotta take care of you,” he says, walking very slowly back toward the wagons. “You’ve got only as much sense of self as whatever’s come up while you’ve been with us, and that’s a pretty small country. Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must’ve been scary for a bit there. Your new friend treating you like a stranger.”

  I think I might cry again. I am sick to death of crying so much, lately. “Yeah.”

  He pats my good shoulder with the same level of affection he showed Julie. “We’re all here to help. We’re not always good at it, but we’re trying.”

  I smile weakly at him, and nod, and swallow back the tears because I swear I will not cry over this, not right now. “Thanks, Brand.”

  “Let’s go see if anyone’s found dinner yet.”