A Place To Bloom

Heat

It was mofo hot.

The once oppressive humidity that pressed down from all sides had given way to dry, horrid, unrelenting heat. Amid the deafening canopy above where battalions of insects filled the sky with an incessant chord, leaves drooped and wilted everywhere. As though they'd been waiting their turn, fountains of deep-green palm leaves bloomed throughout the jungle floor in every direction—some barely ten feet high, others lifting up from the sticks and vines to claim their rightful place amid the highest canopy.

My team, along with the three women I was lying to, walked carefully through snapping twigs and dried leaves amid the thick smell of dust and... alcohol? Something fruity. Nocked at my bow was an arrow tipped with a red chalk-bag for Ghuni's aunt. Slung over my shoulder were the broadheads.

Just in case.

"Look! Python piss!" Kaye had the same white-yellow eyes as my girlfriend and wore the same bat's-wing tattoo on his shoulder. On the ground beside him was a mass of white, gloopy stuff that gave off a sharp, acidic bouquet.

"How much is there?" Tenae lowered his bow, ignoring the sun-dappled maze of tree branches all around us.

It was a cluster of chalky, glistening pellets, and a sheet of slime hung from a small plant in the middle of it. Gavalya, the young Tobori medic with waves of golden hair down her back, set the final nail in place. "That's got to be at least two-hundred kren."

Everyone turned their eager faces to the cache.

"Can we focus?" I snapped.

Visibility was both better and worse than it had been during rainy season. Instead of dense, green foliage in every direction, shifting shadows blurred a background of dried sticks and vines as far as a hundred yards in some directions.

There was no sign of the snake who'd left us this gift. There should have been some sign of the snake, if only a crushed plant where it had slithered through. There was nothing. In my mind's eye, every fountain of palm leaves hid an enemy soldier waiting in ambush, and we were surrounded.

"Relax, man." Haron slapped my shoulder. The bear-claw scar hid beneath the criss-cross of leather straps over his chest. "We all gettin' paid!"

"Haron, where's the snake?"

He shrugged.

A blur jumped between the trees to my left. In the time it took to raise my bow, Commander Yu'ushi's vita'o ricocheted across the branches above us.

When you grow up shooting a eupin longbow, you spend years honing the skill, training, practicing, shooting elk in the mountains or sniping wild turkeys as they soared between rock ridges, rhythms become automatic. These short bows... for a fraction of a second, my shoulder assumed I had another several inches of draw. The other thing was exit velocity. A bow with a maximum effective range of only sixty yards didn't have the same power, making it far more difficult to gauge a proper lead on the target.

You can just say you missed.

I missed.

And while my arrow struck empty air several feet behind where she flew, hers smacked into my top lip, right beside my nose. The impact sent a shock of pain so intense I forgot about the suffocating heat. "Ahhhh!"

"Shit!" My team sent a flurry of wood through the air after her, and I'm sure it made them feel productive. I, on the other hand, lost a tooth. Maybe. It wasn't supposed to wiggle that much.

God, that hurt.

Would you like some cheese with your whine? A real arrow would have smashed through the bone and shredded the back of your throat on its way down through your chest cavity.