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The world returned to Arkk in a blur of painful colors. He was sitting upright, bark against his back and a strange pressure around his ribcage. It felt as though all his blood had collected in his head, into a mass that pulsed painfully with each beat of his heart. His muscles and bones throbbed as though—well, as though he’d fallen out of a tree.
Somewhere close, a sibilant voice spoke unintelligible syllables. It took Arkk a moment to realize the voice had been directed at him. His thoughts felt like they were crawling through monsoon mud; they had to float up through the painful colors before he could access them.
The voice spoke a series of liquid fricatives no more comprehensible than the first set of sounds. Then, in a tone of unmistakable exasperation, it said something he understood: “If you can’t understand me, I may have to leave you for the Urd.”
Arkk jerked his neck up. The action sent a bolt of pain through his head, though it was clearing.
The words had been in English, a Terran language, but the speaker was not a Terran. Arkk took in the sleek, four-legged lower body and gracile torso. He realized this must be the same creature whose manipulation of the artificial boulder had caused Arkk to reveal himself and trigger whatever had stunned him. This close, Arkk saw that the black covering he’d taken for a pelt was actually a cloak. Underneath, the alien’s skin was the gray of wet slate, partially hidden on the head by a waterfall of black hair. It had round black eyes bisected by horizontal, slitted pupils that were disconcertingly pale. The eyes were embedded a third of the way down a sleek head not that different in shape from Arkk’s own. But where Arkk’s beak would have been, the alien had a pair of long, expressive lips. They quirked upward in an expression Arkk couldn’t fathom, but which displayed an awful lot of sharp white teeth.
“Understood that, did you?” The words lilted in something like amusement. Perhaps the expression had been a smile, although it didn’t look anything like an Arashal smile. In fact, the alien’s rows of teeth reminded Arkk of an Urd’s. He tensed his legs to spring into the tree behind him.
As Arkk tried to leap, something squeezed his ribcage. He looked down and saw a length of cable wrapped around his chest, tethering him to the tree and pinning his arms to his sides. Arkk twisted and pulled, but the cable didn’t break.
The alien watched him struggle for a few moments, then expelled air through its snout. “Calm down,” it said. “I won’t hurt you.” It crouched on the grass and dirt; it had been at Arkk’s eye level when standing, so now it appeared even smaller. The alien spread its arms so Arkk could see them. There was a peculiar thickening of both forearms—some kind of ridges running along its arms from elbow to wrist—but before Arkk could get a better look at them, the alien’s next words distracted him.
“See? No weapons in my hands.” It straightened slowly, opening its mouth to say more, then hesitated. A flicker of what might have been wariness made the bone-white pupils slide away. Then it continued. “My name is Gau Shesharrim. I’m an Osk. I’m guessing you’ve never seen one of my species before?”
Arkk shook his head, hoping this Gau knew the gesture.
Gau gratified him with a nod. “And who are you?”
Through a sand-dry throat, Arkk managed to croak his name.
“Arkk?” Gau repeated. “That’s your name?”
Arkk nodded.
“What are you doing out here?”
He tried to answer. But this time, the words seemed to shrivel up and fly away on his tongue, as though language was a dry beetle carcass he’d held in his mouth too long. Speaking had always been a struggle for him, as if he was forever pushing some great boulder up a hill in his mind. It wasn’t that Arkk didn’t know the words—rather, it seemed as though some invisible gulf existed in the neural architecture of his brain, between thinking speech and the act of its utterance.
Kral had understood this. On the bad days, when Arkk’s speech might be constrained to a few rough syllables, Kral had always been there to coax his intended meaning from his expressions and body language. It had been Arkk’s idea to start writing this signspeak down; they’d spent long hours developing their sign language and teaching it to the rest of the paddock.
In that moment, Arkk felt lonelier than he ever had in his life. Kral and the rest of the paddock were dead, skinned and butchered for meat. Soon the Urd would catch him too, even in this jungle, and it would all be over.
Unless he could make this alien—this Osk—understand him, help him somehow.
He wriggled in his bonds enough to free his arms from the elbows down. Gau’s eyes went narrow and it stepped back, raising an arm before its body as though to ward Arkk off. Arkk spread his arms as much as the bonds would allow, copying Gau’s earlier gesture to show he had no weapons. The Osk lowered its arm, though it didn’t come any closer.
Stretching his long neck forward, Arkk stuck his tongue as far from his mouth as it would go, until he could grasp it between his fingers. Looking at Gau the whole time, he imitated a sawing motion with the other hand, as though someone were cutting out his tongue.