Crumpled up on the ground, Ming Liu shivers, her clothes charred, her skin pink and burned underneath. Littering the ground under the tree are the smoking corpses of mynah birds, motionless. Kadek rushes over, unharmed, and gently turns Ming Liu onto her back. Her breathing is ragged, shallow. Most of her hair is gone.
Kadek’s eyes accusatory, —Must you destroy every living being you meet?
—I ... I didn’t mean ... it was ...
—Help me. We need to bury her.
—But she’s still alive. She’s breathing.
—Do what I say! It is the only thing that can help her.
Scattered on the ground near the trunk of the banyan tree are groundskeeping tools, including a pair of shovels. The two of you dig into the ground, far enough away from the roots that the going is rough but consistent, and after the hole is deep enough, about three feet, you and Kadek lift Ming Liu and place her into it. You are still unsure about this, but the look on Kadek’s face is stern, such a difference from before. You throw the dirt over her, creating a small mound to cover Ming Liu’s still living form. Kadek tamps the dirt tight with his shovel.
He then tends to the dead mynah birds, planting each one in the ground surrounding Ming Liu, digging with his fingers, an oval perimeter of dead guards, dead sentries.
—What are you doing?
—You deserve no explanation, Kadek says. —Sit over there and do not talk to me.
You hobble to the base of the great tree, sit on a massive root. From your position, you hear Kadek sing in a low voice, in the same strange language you heard earlier from Ming Liu. But this song sounds different, not a goodbye, not a release, but more of a plea. The song, soothing, seeps into your brain, and you lean against the tree, the exhaustion of hiking and the most recent events taking over your body, and you are asleep in minutes.
~
The next morning, you awaken to fog, and voices. Kadek and Ming Liu stand just out of earshot, arguing intensely in hushed tones. It crosses your mind that they are discussing what to do with you.
Ming Liu catches your eye and cuts off a sentence mid-word. She gingerly makes her way over, aided by the bamboo walking stick, her steps delicate. Her hair has already started growing back, blue already streaking through the black, as if it is her natural. Her skin is smooth and unburned. To your surprise, her expression is not fury, nor reproach, but concern.
—Are you all right? she says.
—I think so. Are
you
all right?
—It appears I am. The rebirth was successful.
—Are you immortal too?
She laughs, a boisterous sound that doesn’t fit with her small frame.
—No, I’m not immortal. You are, and the Undine is, but not me.
—So how?
—I told you. Rebirth.
And as you look closer, there are subtle differences, the eyes tilted just a bit more, the cheekbones higher, the lips fuller, the face less round. She radiates a glow, possibly the glow of rebirth, but it seems more than that, a happiness that wasn’t there before. A definite improvement.
—But it was so fast, you say.
—I had help.
She pads over to the freshly disturbed grave, and digs with her toes in the surrounding dirt. A miniscule bird skeleton pushes to the surface, its hollow bones stripped completely. Dozens of its brothers and sisters poke out of the ground, the group of annoying Bali mynahs silenced forever. Even the ones in the tree are mute today.
—What is it with you and endangered species? she says with a bit ofa smirk.
—It was an accident, that gun Kadek had ...
—I know, I know. You probably would have gotten a similar response from me. But listen, you’ve got to learn to control your abilities better. I’ve seen you do it, so I know it’s possible.
—You’ve seen me?
—Yes. From before.
—Please, Ming Liu, tell me what’s going on. If you knew me before I lost my memory, you’ve got to help me.
She opens her mouth, her eyes showing an eagerness to reveal the truth. But then she shakes her head. —I’m sorry. It’s not my place.
The fury wells up within you, the helplessness, the frustration. Why won’t anyone just level with you? Why all the secrecy and mystery?
—Why not? Why isn’t it your place?
—It just isn’t. The Undine ...
She closes her mouth again, as if this is a bit of information she wasn’t supposed to reveal. The Undine seems to be pulling all the strings in this place.
—Fine, you say. —I’ll have to find out from her directly. I get it.
Kadek steps into view, a look of shame and embarrassment in his eyes.
—I must apologize for my behavior yesterday, he says to you. —It wasn’t completely your fault, what happened, and I was angry with myself as well.
He gathers all his tools together in a bag, shoulders everything, and shakes your hand.
—Good luck.
—You’re not coming?
—No. I have duties within the Park, but I will see you when you return.
He turns and disappears into the jungle, humming a tune loudly to himself. After several moments, the humming fades away, and Ming Liu turns to you.
—Ready?
She leads you halfway around the base of the giant banyan tree, carefully navigating the network of roots and frequently putting out a hand to balance herself, coming after several minutes to a split in the trunk on the other side, a dark gash. A cold breeze drifts out of the opening, bringing with it dampness, leafmold and decay, the smells of a forest in much cooler climes.
She taps the gash with the head of her walking stick, and it widens, opens, the wind from inside rippling your clothes and chilling your bald head. A motion from Ming Liu, an indication to enter the tree. The thought of so much coldness makes you nervous, but you squeeze through the gash, pushing through into total darkness, instantly chilled to the bone. She follows, and the gash closes again with a wet sucking sound.
—What happens now? you yell to be heard over the gale.
She takes your hand and squeezes tight. The wind changes direction and increases, pulling you upward, and your feet gently leave the ground. You float for a moment, then you are jerked upward, pushed from below and pulled from above, and you’re unable to tell how fast because of the darkness but your stomach lurches, and your internal organs feel as though they want to escape through your feet. You fall upward, twisting now, and turning, and the nausea pushes bile into your throat but you clamp your teeth. Ming Liu’s hand grips yours, so tight that you’ll have bruises later. Falling forever and always, as if this will never stop, as if you will fall upwards into the blackness of space, and beyond, falling past the limits of the solar system, the galaxy, the universe itself, never to return.
But then, your movement slows, and a dim light creeps into your vision, getting brighter, expanding from a point into a fuzzy halo. A hole, a passage to daylight, and you’re through it, once again emerging into daylight, brighter than supernova. You hover above a wooden platform, you’re held up by the wind within the tree, you float there amid the upper branches. Ming Liu performs a series of deft maneuvers, twisting and contorting her body, wriggling out of the column of air and landing easily on the platform. You clumsily follow her example and manage to tumble out, landing on your injured leg, and the pain from your thigh shoots up your spine and into the base of your skull.
—You okay?
—Fine, you grunt.
The sunlight is so bright here, unfiltered by the branches and leaves closer to the ground. It is almost too much, being surrounded, pushed down by the illumination, by the fiery ball close enough for you to reach up a hand and caress it. But gradually, your eyes begin to adjust.
She helps you up and hands you the walking stick.
—Here. You still need this more than me.
A walkway, wooden, cherry or mahogany, stretches out before you from the platform, disappearing into the upper branches, a latticework of struts and trusses. Once again, she takes you by the hand, and over the side of the walkway you see an infinity of branches. You stay to the center of the boards. From far below you can hear the sounds of birdcall, but it is muted. This high up, you expect the air to be cold and thin, a constant assault of wind currents, but it feels almost exactly the same as when you were on the ground, hot and sticky, the barest hint of a breeze.
From nowhere, a giant thing passes overhead, like a pterodactyl with a two-hundred-foot wingspan, a leviathan of the air, and it screeches, filling the sky with its cry, and Ming Liu pushes you to hug the branches, to stay out of sight.
You whisper, —Does it attack?
—Not me. It won’t hurt me. But it’s still angry about what you did to its babies.
—What?
—Quiet.
—What did I do?
—Quiet.
The mammoth bird screeches again, then veers off, away. You press against the branches until she tells you it’s okay. A few moments later, from far away, the bird cries again, a mother raging over her lost children.
—Come on.
Around and over and through, a dizzying number of turns and doubling-backs, and then you are there. A clearing in the branches, a wide circular landing, above which hovers a small zeppelin, no more than thirty feet long, tethered to the landing with steel cables. Hanging from the sides of the balloon is a pair of flesh-colored flaps, lobes, like the ears of an elephant, thin material but sturdy-looking, blending into the fabric of the balloon, seamless. The deck underneath is enclosed, but surrounded by open windscreens. Through the windows at the bow of the airship, a middle-aged thin man is visible, working several controls in a brisk manner. As you and Ming Liu board the airship via the flexible gangplank that stretches from the landing up to the deck, the man looks familiar, and when he turns around, you see why. It is Kadek.
—I thought he wasn’t coming with us, you say, confused at how he could have beaten you two up here.
Ming Liu smiles. Kadek approaches, but ... he appears different, filled out, not so spindly, an easy smile that reaches up into his eyes, and his clothes are different, a sleeveless shirt and cargo pants, and he is clearly not the man you met before.
—I am Wayan, he says slowly, as if talking to an infant, or someone hard of hearing, or a foreigner. —I am the pilot of this ship.
—Amazing, you say. —You and Kadek, you’re twins?
—Septuplets, actually. Seven of us to keep the grounds. You think the Park’s a jungle now, you should see it when we’re not working on it.
Wayan laughs, a joyous boisterous sound that seems to come all the way up from his toes, as if he has just told the funniest joke in the world. It is infectious, and you grin involuntarily. He wipes a tear away.
—My job is reconnaissance, the eyes in the skies. I report anything unusual back to my brothers. And I’ve been known to take passengers where they need to go.
—We’re headed for the Undine’s Waterfall, Ming Liu says.
Wayan nods. —I figured as much. She would definitely want to see him.
It is unnerving, everyone you meet knowing who you are, but unwilling, or unable, to tell you anything, who you are, why you have no memory, what exactly you are doing in Jurong, how you came to be here. You take a deep breath, trying not to burst into an exasperated diatribe, or something worse, go with the flow, breathe, breathe, breathe.
Wayan smacks you on the arm. —Shall we make way?
Ming Liu sinks into a bean bag chair on the deck, made from the same leathery material as the couch in her cave, closes her eyes, and promptly falls asleep. Wayan chuckles.
—It amazes me the way she can do that. But I know how uncomfortable she is traveling by air, being so far up from the ground, from her earth. No worries, we will wake her when we reach the waterfall. Come, stand up at the front with me.
Wayan gives you a leather strap, shows you how to hook it around your waist, hook it to a support loop on the control panel. He dons a similar strap, and does the same. On the panel are dozens of buttons, gauges, levers, a complicated array of controls, illustrated by simple pictograms. One button and the gangplank retracts, another and the cables unmoor themselves from the landing, slither up and disappear underneath the deck. The zeppelin rises slowly, clearing the last of the Mother Tree’s upper branches, your view now unhindered, the vast swath of Jurong extending in all directions, stopped only by the seas on either side.
—Here we go, Wayan says and pulls a lever. The elephant ears on either side of the airship raise, then lower, up down up down up down, faster and faster, building speed, producing an amazing amount of wind, faster, now up to the speed of a hummingbird, or a dragonfly, the sound a roar at tornado-strength, and Wayan grins and pulls another lever and the dirigible launches forward.
Windscreens slide up on all sides of the deck. Your ears pop. You can’t tell how fast you are traveling, but the clouds streak overhead. After a moment, Wayan tells you that it is safe to walk around. You unhook yourself from the control panel and step to a starboard windscreen. Below, far below, the ground passes quickly beneath the ship, out of the Park proper and into miles and miles of city buildings, all overgrown by lichen, ivy, fungi, luminescent violet kudzu. Streets are barely discernible as thoroughfares, so choked they are by hundreds of species of greenery. And above the dimmed roar of the passing wind is the combined sound of thousands upon thousands of cries and squawks and trills, the noise of the bird park writ large.
—Where are all the people? you ask.
—I do not know. In all the time I have been here, I cannot remember encountering anyone other than my brothers, the Undine and Ming Liu. And you.
—Was it always like this?
—It does not appear so, Wayan says. —At one point this whole area must have been a great metropolis, a thriving region of commerce. You see how tall the buildings are. Now, Jurong encompasses everything, all of Singapore, stretching up into Malaysia and Thailand, and down into Indonesia, where I am from.
—So how did you come to work in this place?
—I ... you know, I no longer remember. I have been here a very long time, but I cannot actually recall when or how I first came here. Isn’t that strange?