But I don’t want to be called a heretic. Anyway, this ain’t the place to talk about that.

So there we were, high over Wuphon, all exposed with the bare sun glaring down, and Huck blurts her remark like a sudden burst of hollow hail.

“I know where there’s something to read,” she says.

I put down the lath strips I was carrying, laying them across a clump of black iris vines.-Below, I made out the pharmacist’s house, with its chimney spilling distinct traeki smells. (Do you know that different kinds of plants grow above a traeki’s home? It can be hard working there if the pharmacist happens to be making medicine while you’re overhead!)

“What’re you talking about?” I asked, fighting a wave of wooziness. Huck wheeled over to pick up one of the laths, nimbly bending and slipping it in where the trellis sagged.

“I’m talking about reading something no one on the Slope has ever seen,” she answered in her crooning way, when she thinks an idea’s gloss. Two eyestalks hovered over her busy hands, while a third twisted to watch me with a glint I know too well. “I’m talking about something 50 ancient, it makes the oldest scroll on Jijo look like Joe Dolenz just printed it, with the ink still wet!”

Huck spun along the beams and joists, making me gulp when she popped a wheelie or swerved past a gaping hole, weaving flexible lath canes like reeds in a basket. We tend to see g’Keks as frail beings, because they prefer smooth paths and hate rocky ground. But those axles and rims are nimble, and what a g’Kek calls a road can be narrow as a plank.

“Don’t give me that,” I shot back. “Your folk burned and sank their sneakship, same as every race who skulked down to Jijo. All they had were scrolls — till humans came.”

Huck rocked her torso, imitating a traeki gesture that means, Maybe you’re right, but i/we don’t think so.

“Oh, Alvin, you know even the first exiles found things on Jijo to read.”