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or even imagined.
    Something
placed
there. Shared with him.
    But by whom?
    The boy was taken apart, overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. Terror, excitement, others he could not name.
    With all his strength, he reached out. Not knowing whether it was to end things or begin them.

EIGHT
    Hell’s Gate, Kenya
    AISHA ROSE LAY at the base of her muhutu tree, dazed, a lump rising painfully on the back of her head, a trickle of blood tracing down her cheek. Above, the sun glinted through the leaves, and a colony of weaverbirds went about its business. Aisha Rose watched a black-and-yellow male using strips of grass to construct its globular nest, which hung like an ornament on the end of a slender branch. A brownish female perched nearby, watching the nest’s progress with bright black eyes.
    â€œWhat I like best about weavers,” Mama had said once, in the clear tone she used to state facts, “is that the males have to do all the work building the nest.”
    Her eyes had gleamed. This was how she smiled, with just the slightest upward curve of the lips, but . . . eyes that shone. “And you know what the female does if none of the nests meet with her approval?”
    Aisha Rose, hearing Mama’s voice loud inside herhead, winced. Her vision blurred, turning the birds above her into dancing patterns of yellow and black.
    â€œWhat, Mama?” she asked.
    â€œThey destroy every nest and make the males start over from scratch.”
    Aisha Rose was thinking about this when she felt something drip onto her bare right leg, just below the knee. Something that started out warm but quickly cooled against her skin.
    That was a new sensation for her, in a world, a life, with few unfamiliar experiences. And that was how, instead of thinking about weaverbirds, she raised her head to see what had caused it, and found herself staring into the pale eyes of the drooling hyena that was considering whether to start feeding on her.
    Its bared teeth revealed long yellowish canines and a thick pink tongue. It breathed out, and she smelled its breath, the reek of rotting meat, as the rank exhalation wafted across her face. The hyena made a moaning sound in its throat, the sound echoed by another, a little farther off, then a third.
    She’d seen hyenas before, of course, out on the grasslands below Mount Longonot and in the zebra-rich plains that fringed Hell’s Gate. But none had ever come here, to the canyons she and Mama called home eight months a year. Aisha Rose had always thought that its narrow, red-rock walls and secret caves made it a protected spot, safe from the biggest predators.
    Or safe enough, at least. That was one of the reasons that she and Mama migrated here every year from their other home in the compound in Naro Moru, whereAisha Rose had been born. Why they followed the game into the Great Rift Valley and sought out the protection of these twisting passages. For safety as well as food.
    Well. So much for that. You were a fool to think you were ever safe on the real earth.
    Shifting her weight just a fraction, Aisha Rose saw the hyena, the alpha, tilt its head. Its gray pupils dilated as it took in the new information: This potential meal wasn’t recently dead, like one of the lion or cheetah kills it frequently commandeered. This piece of meat was still alive.
    Not that that mattered much. Alive, dead, hyenas took their food as they found it. If it needed killing first, they killed it.
    â€œThe locals always knew the truth,” Mama had said, the first time they’d seen a hyena, at a distance, on the shore of Lake Naivasha. “But we Europeans, in our racist way, judged everyone—and everything—by appearances. We saw lions as noble and brave simply because of how they looked, so golden and wreathed in a royal ruff. Hyenas, on the other hand, were sniveling, subservient, untrustworthy.
Native.
”
    Mama had watched the hyena loping along. “Look at how it