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were so real. I saw the boy getting beaten once. But not by diggers, it was by human boys who ruled over the diggers.”
    “Elemaki,” murmured Mon. The evil humans who had joined with the diggers and lived in their dank caves and ate the sky people they kidnapped and murdered.
    “The boys were bigger than him. He was hungry and so they tormented him by shoving more food than he could swallow into his mouth until he choked and gagged, and then they rubbed fruit and crumbs all over him and rolled him in the mud and grass so nobody could eat it. It was horrible, and he was so brave and never cried out against them, he just took it with such dignity and I
cried
for him.”
    “In the dream?”
    “No, when I woke up. I wake up crying. I wake up saying, ‘We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to find them and bring them home.’”
    “We?”
    “Father, I suppose. Us. The Nafari. Because I think those people are Nafari.”
    “So why don’t they send sky people to find us andask us for help? That’s what people do, when the Elemaki are attacking them.”
    Edhadeya thought about this. “You know something, Mon? There wasn’t a single angel among them.”
    Mon turned to her then. “No sky people at all?”
    “Maybe the diggers killed them all.”
    “Don’t you remember?” he asked. “The people who left back in the days of Father’s grandfather? The ones who hated Darakemba and wanted to go back and possess the land of Nafai again?”
    “Zef . . . ”
    “Zenif,” said Mon. “They said it was wrong for humans and sky people to live together. They didn’t take a single angel with them. It’s them. They’re the ones you dreamed of.”
    “But they were all killed.”
    “We don’t know that. We just know that we never heard from them again.” Mon nodded. “They must still be alive.”
    “So you think it’s a real dream?” asked Edhadeya. “Like the ones Luet had?”
    Mon shrugged. Something bothered him. “Your dream,” he said. “I don’t think it’s
exactly
about the Zenifi. I mean . . . it just doesn’t feel complete. I think it’s someone else.”
    “Well, how can you know that?” she said. “You’re the one who thought it
was
the Zenifi.”
    “And it felt right when I said it. But now . . . now there’s just something wrong with it. But you’ve got to tell Father.”
    “You tell him,” she said. “You’ll see him at dinner.”
    “And you when he comes to say goodnight.”
    Edhadeya grimaced. “Dudagu Dermo is always there. I never see Father alone.”
    Mon blushed. “That isn’t right of Father.”
    “Yes, well, you’re the one who always knows what’s right.” She punched him in the arm.
    “I’ll tell him your dream at dinner.”
    “Tell him it was
your
dream.”
    Mon shook his head. “I don’t lie.”
    “He won’t listen if he thinks it’s a woman’s dream. All the other men at dinner will laugh.”
    “I won’t tell him whose dream it is until I’m done. How’s that?”
    “Tell him this, too. In the last few dreams, the boy and his sister and his mother and father, they lie there in silence looking at me, saying nothing, just lie there in the darkness and without their saying a word I know they’re pleading with me to come and save them.”
    “
You
?”
    “Well, me in the dream. I don’t think that the
real
people—if there
are
any real people—would be sitting there hoping for a ten-year-old girl to come and deliver them.”
    “I wonder if Father will let Aronha go.”
    “Do you think he’ll really send somebody?”
    Mon shrugged. “It’s dark. It’s time for dinner soon. Listen.”
    From the trees near the river, from the high, narrow houses of the sky people, the evening song arose, a few voices at first, then joined by more and more. Their high, lilting melodies intertwined, played with each other, madly inventing, challenging, resolving dissonance and then subverting expected harmonies, a haunting sound that recalled an earlier time when life