The village stirs at dawn. The rising sun is hidden behind the eastern mountains and the stars still glitter in the sky. The adobe houses sit in the shadow of the cliff, stacked atop each other, seven stories high.

A young woman stumbles out a doorway, brushing her teeth loudly. In the fading night, she’s just a silhouette, a tall woman in a sleeveless shirt, wearing loose pants tied at the ankles. They swish as she takes light steps to the edge of the roof. Past her toes, on the level below, she sees someone else walk out of their home, stretching and yawning. This child is half her size, small head and thin arms. They reach the ladder to the next level and start to shuffle down.

She spits in a clay cup, drops her brush in it, then sets it on the roof. All round her are layers of adobe, wood poles, metal pipes, bamboo ladders, and dark doorways. Shadows move to the ground, sliding down ladders, breaking away from the houses to join the breakfast line. The rooster doesn’t cry. The dogs don’t bark. For a while, no one says a word.

“Light, Malkia!” Feet land on the roof behind her. Hakim walks to the edge of the roof to stand by her side, hands behind his head. He’s a little shorter than her. His arms are thinner. He wears no shirt in the cool morning air. He gives a loud sigh and looks at the sky.

“Not yet.” Malkia replies. In the east, mount Makali is framed in red light from the sunrise. The dark sands of the Kuachwa haven’t seen a single ray yet.

“Soon ‘nuff…” Another sigh whistles out of him. “Whassa plan for today?

“See how it goes, I guess…” Malkia stares at the stars too, and holds her hands up. By now, she can see the pale of her nails, her palms. “Think I’ll run the grasses. I want to find a tortoise shell.” Hakim cuts off his yawn to laugh.

“Aska’s shield makes you jealous? S’why he made it! Haha!”

“Yat! Shut up. Why don’t you come? Be useful.”

“Got rope to mend.”

“Lazy.” She says. As soon as the word leaves her mouth, his finger pokes her cheek, dimpling it. He pulls his hand back slowly.

“You can fight the giant reptiles. I’ll just rob their nests.” He takes careful steps to the wooden, plank bridge to the next roof over. Just as he starts to cross the gap to the other side, she says:

“Hakim, wait a minute.”

“Oh… no. Sorry.” On the other roof he steps to the edge. “You’re it. Gotta go!”

“Aye!” Malkia races on the roof, and jumps the gap. She lands on the other side with the slap of bare feet. No shadows show where he is. No one is running or jumping their way down. She lost sight of him.

She drops down to the next roof quietly, bending her knees. She squats until her hands are presses against the ground. The houses are quiet. The wooden door behind her is closed. She peeks in the tiny window. Nothing is moving.

“Aaaagh!” Malkia digs fingers into her hair. The day she created this game was the greatest mistake of her life.

“Shhhh!” Someone inside shushes her. And she turns away. The desert stretches in front of her. There’s the first glint of the sun on the peaks to the right, bleeding into the sky. If she lets him get away with this, he’ll be talking at breakfast, with his slow, deep voice:

“Slid right up to Malkia, and got ‘er. Yep. Slipped away before mornin’ bread was baked. She stood and did nothin’. Like a goat.”

“Bastard boy!” She steps to the edge of the roof and looks down over the village. She would know if he ran down. She didn’t see anyone moving quickly, or slipping out of sight. He couldn’t have gotten far.

Malkia looks over her shoulder. On the level above, someone leaves a house, scratching their ass enthusiastically. Someone else sits at the edge of a roof, kicking their legs. And there’s a tiny shift off to the side. She would have missed it. She could be imagining it. But Hakim plays every game the same way. He tries to be clever, tries to do as little as he can. He’s a hide and wait kind of hunter.

The dawn sky spreads with bands of red and orange. The golden glow of sunlight touches the cliff above the village and sweeps down. Malkia crosses three roofs in a few seconds. She’s quiet, but Hakim has great hearing. And good judgement, usually.

She jumps and grabs the edge of the roof, pulling herself up. The sun reaches the roof as she does, revealing pink adobe, a pale, dusty door. She feels its warmth on her skin while she looks for signs of Hakim. A few houses away, on her roof, the clay cup is turned upside down.

“That…” Hakim! Make a fool of me?! Me?! She crosses to her house and slips inside. She finds her straw hat leaned against the wall and pulls it over her messy curls. Outside her house, there’s no one watching or waiting. No one moving yet. The oldest like to sleep in and work late.

She climbs two levels up, to the highest ring of houses. She walks to the only building up there, the only round structure in the entire village, a small adobe dome. She opens the door and slips into the dark. The room has shelves of bamboo and wood hung on pegs in the wall. Scrolls and carvings, pipes and bones line those shelves. She even sees a glass bottle. There are many other knickknacks villagers gathered over the years, symbols from a bigger world. There’s a metal sphere- a holographic projector, interesting but long dead, drained of energy and fried from the heat. A wooden contraption that long lost its strange strings, called a guitar. Malkia was alive when they could still play it, and it was something to behold. A pistol- that’s more familiar- but one that didn’t shoot bullets. They say the hunter who used it burned holes straight through a tyrant lizard’s skull. When the story is told, the lifeless machine is brought off its shell and waved in front of wide-eyed children. So many treasures, retired and waiting for the storytellers to return. We can use some new treasures, Malkia thinks.

The floor below the walls is stacked with rugs. Malkia remembers the first time she saw her father tackle a sheep. He rose out of the sand like a ghost, and the animal fainted halfway through a bleating scream. They shaved it while it slept, and he told her it would wake up cooler than its ever been, and thank them.

Malkia snorts and moves to the hole in the floor. It cuts though the floor and ceiling of all seven stories, caged with bamboo poles to prevent the children from falling in. She glances down in the darkness and doesn’t see anyone at the bottom. The wooden pole in the middle is smooth to the touch. The rope hanging all the way down tied in dense knots, for climbing up. She grabs the pole and wraps her legs around it. Her stomach drops as she slides down, the insides of buildings flying past her, rope knots banging on her knee. She hits the bottom with a soft sound.

The wall behind her is the cliffside. The doors all lead to more houses, all joined without hallways. She walks through door after door, through empty rooms, past sleeping young ones. The door of the farthest house is open to the sands. She steps out under the sun and looks over at Changa. A little taller than her, lighter skinned than most in the village, gap-toothed, and slim for a young hunter, wiry like Hakim.

“Light,” He says, grinning, bumping their shoulders together.

“Light,” She says, then sets her straw hat on his head and leans in to whisper: “Wrestle someone by the totem. Make some noise, but don’t talk. Pretend to be me.”

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“Why?”

“I’m embarrassing Hakim.”

“Haha! Yat! You got it.” He holds the hat to his head with a hand and makes for the totem, swinging his shoulders with exaggerated arrogance. It’s not how Malkia walks, and she frowns at his back.

She steps into the darkness of the doorway and watches her people gather. They drop to the ground. They filter onto the sandy soil and trampled grasses around the Web Weavers’ totem. The line for bread is smaller, most gather around a smokeless fire, where a cauldron is cooking porridge.

It’s bright enough now for her to make out details. Baggy pants tied at the ankles. Tan shirts with wide sleeves, tied at the wrist. Bare feet, wood and leather sandals. Carved bone chokers and bangles and anklets, clacking when they move. Headwraps and turbans. They’re young. A handful are only six or seven years old. More are going through the changes of adolescence. A few hunters right around her age wander around, laughing and talking quietly.

They chew with their mouths open, cradling bread, or bowls of porridge and desert fruit. Some are still half asleep, mumbled words lost to the wind, blinking eyes closing often. Others raise their voices, laughing and shrieking. A trio of young ones chase each other round and round the crowd, jostling their elders and causing trouble. Drifting, in ones and twos, they gather into groups. They surround the totem, standing to the side, squatting in the sand, wandering about. Many hurry off to the compost pits.

For a while, Hakim is nowhere in sight. The sky is turning blue, shadows stretching across sand and rock, when someone drops from a roof nearby. Malkia hears them land, and sees Hakim walking to the crowd of people, his shaved head and bandana, shirtless back and pants pulled above the knee and tied there. He’s looking around quickly, trying to spot her. He stops and turns slowly, so she ducks out of sight. When she glances out again, he’s gone.

Hakim’s the best at hiding out of anyone she knows. He’s patient. He’s calm. But she’s the best hunter, and no one gets away from her. Hakim’s going to get breakfast soon, so she can guess where he’ll go.

Malkia leaves the house and walks left, trailing her hand along the buildings, ducking under the drainage pipes and supports. She reaches the last house and glances around the corner. There’s a little sliver of sandy, weed-choked dirt between the adobe wall and rocky cliff. A few clay pots and urns sit in the shadows. No Hakim.

She slides along the rock wall, eyeing the rest of the village, searching. Careful steps take her around the west side. She avoids broken rocks, but grit and sharp edges still dig into her feet. She slides past patches of thorn-grass, moving closer to the miller’s house.

The light is bright now, the dull colors of the cliff face fading between, brown, yellow, orange and red. The pinkish adobe house seems to light up.  Beyond it, the deep orange sands of the Kuachwa glow, at the crests of its dunes. Shadows gather in its valleys and between its rippling waves. It drifts with the wind, shifting like a see of fire.

Malkia steps over a burnt soldier, the little orange scorpion threatening her from the top of a broken snake skull. She grabs the fence and jumps to the messy yard behind the miller’s house, where the sun doesn’t touch. She eyes the roof as she sneaks through the door.

The millstone takes up the center of the room, wide pole rising through the roof, and another sticking out the side at waist height, still hanging with the ox’s harness. Clay jars and cloth bags are piled to the right, on the ground, on a set of shelves, on an expensive whicker table. The far corner has empty bags hanging from a peg. Other tools hang from the wall: scoops, a leather funnel, a scale, different sifters- mostly wire meshes bound to wooden frames. The rest of the room is mostly empty.

Except for Izi, the cook’s helper. Her big eyes look up slowly, and she licks precious jam off her fingers. The young girl has bits of it sticking to her nose. Malkia shakes her head and raises an eyebrow at the stolen loaf, wrapped in a shirt, sitting on a barrel by the back wall. Malkia pulls at her shirt to fan herself while she walks around the mill. It’s hot, and only gets warmer when she gets through the doorway to the baking room.

“Oi, don’t tell Oka.” She hears behind her. The baking room is almost the same, except with less space and smaller doorways. The clay oven burns embers, radiating heat. Oka is tossing a bucket of sand in it, sweating even with her shirt pulled down and hanging over her skirt. She wears a cloth band over her breasts and a snake’s spine necklace. The heat is hard to bear.

The other helper, Kimbia, sits on a stool, as far as he can get from the oven. A cloth-covered bowl sits in his lap, wider than he is. He licks dough from his fingers.

“Stop that,” Malkia says. Kimbia makes a fart sound and sticks his tongue out at her. He drops the bowl on the stool and darts for the door when she starts walking his way, but she catches him in three steps. Smacks his ass so hard he jumps through the air.

“Eeep!” Kimbia yelps and scrambles into the sunlight, his bowlegs making him look like a sprinting frog.

“Yat! We’re not done yet!” Oka shakes her fist out the doorway, watching her son run away. She’s face to face with Malkia when she turns back around. “Eh?! What are you doing back here, Malkia?”

“Shhh!”

“Shush yourself!”

“Got any loaves left?” Malkia asks.

“Enough for the hunt.” Oka grabs bread off the wooden table and hands it to Malkia with flour dusted hands. “We’ll run out of grain in a few weeks at this rate.”

“’Ay ‘Eavers ‘end us car’an.” Malkia says, chewing a warm mouthful, breathing in the fresh smell.

“Pray they send more than that.” The cook stares at the wall for a moment, a sad look in her eyes. Malkia decides to ignore it- she’s got business.

“Has Hakim come by?”

“Not yet.” The cook glances through the doorway behind her. “You might’ve summoned him though. He’s coming up now.”

“Can I give it to him?” Malkia asks. Oka frowns.

“…Sure?”

“Then come here for a second.” Malkia huddles to the right of the door, back to the wall.

“Light, Oka!” She hears Hakim say. Oka nods and moves to Malkia’s side, handing her a loaf of cooling bread.

“Just get your food and have your fun somewhere else,” She says.

“Mmhmm.” Malkia nods her agreement. She smacks Hakim’s bread against his chest, right as he’s about to step in the house.

“Eh?” Hakim mutters. Malkia sees the tip of his nose past the frame. He looks down at her hand and grabs the bread. “Oka?” And Malkia looks at Oka. With a finger to her lips, she nods to the doorway. Oka just stares at her with lips pursed, then she walks over and stands across from Hakim, arms crossed.

“You got your food, now go!”

“…Okay? Thank-” Oka closes the wooden door in his face.

“Happy?” She asks Malkia. But Malkia’s already gone. She slipped back through the miller’s room, to the yard behind and up to the roof. She lays flat at the edge, watching the crowd around the totem, people still joining the rowdy breakfast. Many are sitting down now, yelling conversations at each other. Hakim walks that way, scratching his head. She pulls back and holds her breath when she sees him turn. After fifteen counts, she glances again. He’s moving around the north side of the village, probably thinking to keep his back to the dunes to see her coming.

Malkia jumps off the edge of the roof, startling the ox. It snorts and starts to stand, but she slowly pats its butt and gives a good scratch.

“Shhh…” She makes soothing noises. Though it keeps its head turned, suspicious eye on her, it lays back down. She moves on, and sees Hakim scanning the village. He freezes when he spots a straw hat laying by a wrestling pile. Changa has a young one in a screeching headlock, while someone older beats on his back. His taunts and laughter are half the noise from the field.

Malkia takes the moment and sprints away from the village. She runs until she crests a dune, then follows it to where she believes Hakim is standing. Crouched over and running as quiet as she can, she slides on the orange slope, sand crunching and scraping, tumbling over itself in small avalanches. She peeks over the dune. Hakim is standing with his back to her, chewing his bread. She frowns and looks at the loaf gripped in her own fist, half buried in the sand.

“Ugh…” She wipes it on her shirt and takes a gritty bite, making a face. She fights not to spit it out. Then, she crawls over the dune, looking around Hakim. He’s got good senses, and can feel eyes on his back. So she looks past him, to the crowd. Someone’s standing at the base of the totem, waving their hands around and shouting. They’ve got a good amount of attention. Even Hakim is watching, though his head swivels from time to time.

Malkia places slow steps, shifting her balance carefully. Closer. Closer. In five minutes, she’s a dozen steps away. In another five, close enough to jump and tackle him to the ground. She waits, watching as he finally sits down. She eases behind him, crosses her legs and sits close enough to lean forward and kiss his head. She does lean forward, forcing herself to breath low and slow, away from the back of his neck. She strains her face to keep from smiling. She’s so close, she imagines he’ll hear her mouth move if she does.

She sits the bread in the sand behind her, then holds her arms out a little from her sides. She doesn’t want him to hear cloth sliding or skin moving. When he glances around again, she twists her spine to stay out of sight. She leans right when he looks left, shading his eyes from the sun with a handful of bread. She leans left when he looks right, across the sand where her shadow should be stretched out next to his. It isn’t. She fights another smile.

For minutes, she stares past his ears, to the spectacle and drama around the Web Weavers’ totem. Some people do glance their way, but most say nothing. A few point and wave. Hakim nods at them. He relaxes, getting comfortable, finishing his bread.

“Malkia! What are you guys doing over there?!” Uvumi shouts through her hand, pointing their way. Hakim stops what he’s doing. Slowly, he turns, staring straight at her.

Malkia meets his blank expression with a smile. A raised hand.

Tsh!

And a smack.