She wakes before sunrise, when the jungle still belongs to the night hunters. The clay walls of her hut still hold the previous day’s heat. She doesn’t light a lamp.

As she moves in the dark of her hut, she recalls her mother’s hands braiding her hair for the first time in the hunter’s style. “Umuburu, thou shalt bring honor upon our family.” A lie, as it turned out.

The ceramic jar sits where she left it, sealed with wax and wrapped in leather. She peels away the protective layers with careful fingers. The honey inside glows a faint amber color even in the darkness. She can smell it before she sees it - a powerfully sweet and yet wrong smell, like flowers growing from a corpse.

She places a spoonful of the precious honey on her tongue.

The first time she tried the honey, she vomited for an hour. Her mentor just laughed, telling her: “The bees are tasting you back.”

The honey dissolves slowly, thick and warm. It tastes like iron and jasmine. She sits cross-legged on her sleeping mat and closes her eyes, waiting for the connection. It starts in her chest; a vibration that no longer gives her vertigo. It turns into a humming in her bones that only gets louder.

The connection forms. The bees are awake: ten miles to the south, in the deep jungle. They know she’s coming to take their dark and powerful honey. They’ll only share willingly if they deem her worthy.

She stands steady despite the honey working through her blood. She takes her harvest bag made of thick leather, reinforced at the seams; her knife, bone-handled and sharp enough to split hair; and finally her trusted rope. Nothing else will be needed to harvest the dark honey. Well, nothing except for her lucky charm hanging from a small hook hidden behind her water gourd: the shrunken head of one of her thieves.

She remembers her old mother’s smile when she brought it. “Thou dost learn with admirable swiftness.” The transformation, however, took time, with the skin having to be carefully peeled off after making a thin cut at the back of the skull. The following ritual was just as careful, with the head slowly simmered in honey before finally being smoked. The shrunken head looked like a fruit left in the sun, eyes still open, mouth twisted in permanent surprise. A lesson for both of them.

She ties it to her belt. The hair is still soft. She’s touched it so many times that the features have worn smooth in places. She talked to it once, after one of the robberies.

She recalled the first time she got ambushed - four Nibenese men with obsidian blades. They beat her until she couldn’t stand. Took everything. The templar, Nekvryt of four necklaces, beat her even more for losing city property when he saw her coming back without any honey. “Shouldst thou lose the honey once more, let death claim thee first.”

Flower petals wait in a bowl of water by the door: midnight blooms, rare and expensive. She paid for them with the little savings she managed to make over several months, the pittance the templars give her doesn’t allow for more. The water has turned pink overnight.

She strips and pours the water over her head. It’s cold. She gasps.

“The bees know everything as their spirits travel freely between this world and the other,” her mentor told her. “The honey tells them of fear, desire, and dishonesty. The flowers confuse them, it doesn’t smell like the corpses they feed on. Makes you smell like something they want to protect instead of kill.”

The honey is working now. Her skin prickles. She can feel the jungle breathing, even from here. Can feel the nest, that dark hollow in the agafari tree, pulsing with life. They’re waiting.

She had become extremely careful after the first robbery. There would be blood, and by the Oba, it would be the thieves’, not hers. That time it was two men, well-armed but overconfident. They came at dawn, when she was tired from the harvest. She killed the first one quickly - knife under the ribs. The second one ran. She found him an hour later, trying to hide the honey in a hollow log. She didn’t make it quick. Instead, she slowly cut his head off and brought it back to the city, still dripping to become her shrunken head. Her lucky charm.

The templar was impressed.

She dresses in her harvesting clothes: thick, fitted, nothing loose for the bees to catch. Leather wraps on her forearms. A cloth tied over her nose and mouth. She looks at herself in the fragment of mirror she traded for last year. Her eyes are already dilated from the honey, black and huge.

She looks like prey.

The dark honey was as valuable to the folks of Nibenay as to Gulg, and they would happily send more expendable men to rob any honey gatherer. The third time, she saw them coming. The men were organized and professional. They knew about the head from the last pair; knew she’d fought back. She left the honey on the ground and climbed a tree for an ambush. Waited like a hunter. When they bent to pick up the jars, she dropped on them with her knife. Got two before they knew what was happening. The others ran.

She takes up her bag, her rope, and her knife. Checks the knots. Checks them again. The honey makes her paranoid, makes her see patterns in the shadows. It’s part of the process. The bees live in paranoia. To commune with them, she must join them there.

The last time she got ambushed by the folk of Nibenay, it had been different: twelve men, waiting at her usual camping spot. Silent, they gave her no chance. They overwhelmed her before she could draw her knife. Took everything. Sat her against a tree and left a guard while the rest left with the honey.

She waited to die. Touched the shrunken head on her belt and whispered a prayer to her ancestors.

An hour later, one man returned. Clean, brightly-colored loose linen shirt and skirt with heavy, expensive-looking boots. His head was wrapped in a long red-and-black scarf marked with ivory-colored dragonflies. His manicured hands were covered with exotic jewellery. An agent of House Shom.

He cut her bonds personally. Smiled like they were old friends. Typical Nibenese.

“A misunderstanding,” he said. “Bandits. Terrible thing.” He pressed four jars back into her hands. Four out of five. Then a purse, heavy with ceramic. More coins than six months of templar wages. More coins than she’d seen in a year.

“Next time,” he said, “perhaps we could arrange things more… civilly.” He pressed something else into her palm. A small whistle, carved from bone, hollow and light. “When you’re ready for the next harvest. Just blow. We’ll find you.”

She touches the whistle now, hanging next to the shrunken head. Both are warm from her body heat. Yet opposite, like two sides of the same coin.

The sun breaks the horizon. Time to go.

The jungle path is familiar in the morning darkness. She doesn’t need light. Her feet know the roots, the stones, the places where the ground suddenly drops. The honey makes everything sharper - colors too bright, sounds too loud. A bird calls and she can taste its fear. Something is hunting it; something is always hunting.

“The bees chose their tree carefully,” her mentor said years ago on their first trip together. “Deep jungle. Away from the roads, away from us. They don’t want to be found. That’s why the honey is so valuable. That’s why we’re so valuable.”

Her mentor lasted three more years before the bees killed her. Bad cut. Wrong angle. They poured out in a black cloud, each the size of a fist; stripped her to bone in minutes.

The templars sent a new girl the next month. Younger, eager, and dead on her first attempt.

They sent four more girls before they came back to her. “Strange grace the bees show thee, when so many worthy souls have been devoured.” an elder templar said, like it was an accusation.

She’s been alone for two years now.

The agafari tree rises from the jungle like a pillar holding up the sky. Massive and ancient. Its bark as thick as fortress walls. She stops at the clearing edge and takes another spoon of honey, smaller this time.

The humming grows. The whole world seems to be vibrating with the invisible buzzing. The hive knows she’s here.

The communion is simple. The communion is impossible. It requires surrender. It requires control. The honey opens the door of her mind. She must walk through it.

She approaches slowly, hands open, palms out. The first bees emerge from the hollow. The scouts - fist-sized bodies striped black and red, wings blurring the air - come to inspect her. Carnivorous bees. They’ve eaten the giant jungle cats. They’ve stripped a full-grown tembo to bone.

They circle her head, land on her shoulders. One crawls across her face, tastes her cheek with its mandibles. Blood drips from her cheeks.

She breathes slowly. In. Out. Smells like flowers. Smells like a friend. Smells like the hive.

Her mentor, the first time: “If you fear them, they’ll know. If you don’t fear them, you’re a fool. You must be both afraid and unafraid. You must hold both truths.”

Like holding loyalty and betrayal. Like wearing both the head and the whistle.

The bee on her face crawls away. The scouts return to the hollow. She’s been accepted.

She begins to climb.

The bark is rough under her hands, with gaps wide enough for her fingers. The tree remembers her. She’s climbed it twenty times, once each month for nearly two years. Her blood and sweat are in its bark. Her tears as well, when she thought the bees would kill her and she couldn’t make herself jump, which probably saved her.

Higher. The hollow gapes above, dark and humming. The vibration travels through the wood into her bones. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. The honey makes her see them through the bark. The living mass - pulsing, organized, and perfect - staring back at her.

The templars only care about control and their tribute. She’s seen what the honey does to psionicists of the Seer’s Dagada: watched a mind master lift a stone block that should have crushed ten men, watched his eyes bleed from the effort while he smiled.

The honey makes them gods. Makes them invaluable. Makes them need more.

She reaches the hollow. The entrance is twice as wide as her shoulders, ringed with old wax and the dried husks of prey. A bird. A jarbo. Something with too many legs to be natural. The bees don’t waste any meat.

She ties off her rope, checks the knot three times. Loops it around her waist. If she falls, if she has to jump, the rope might save her. Might.

The merchant’s smile. “Just blow the whistle.”

The templar’s fist. “Shouldst thou lose the honey once more, let death claim thee first.”

She draws her knife and reaches into the hollow.

The bees erupt around her hand, but they don’t bite or sting. She’s flower-smell. She’s hive-friend. She’s the honey-taker, and today they’ve made their peace with her.

She cuts carefully. The comb is heavy, dripping with amber. The smell is overwhelming: sweet rot, iron blossoms, something that makes her want to weep though she doesn’t know why. She pulls out a section as long as her forearm, thick with honey. She places it carefully in her bag.

She cuts again. The bees swirl around her face, crawl across her hands. She can feel them thinking. Can feel the hive-mind brushing against her own thoughts, curious, alien, and vast.

What does she smell like to them?

She takes what she came for. Five sections. Enough to satisfy the templars. Enough to satisfy the merchants, if she chooses. Enough to buy herself another month of survival.

The bees watch her descend. They don’t follow. They return to their hollow, their endless work, their perfect society. A society with no betrayal, as that requires something alien to the hive: the possibility of choice.

She envies them.

At the base of the tree, she checks her bag. Five sections, intact. She could break one. Could say the bees were aggressive, that she barely escaped. The templars would accept it. They always accept it when there’s less honey, as long as there’s some.

The whistle is cold against her chest.

The shrunken head is warm against her hip.

She closes the bag and starts the long walk back to Gulg.

Next month, she’ll return. The bees will remember her. The jungle will remember her. The templars will expect their tribute. The merchants will wait for their signal.

She carries both the head and the whistle. She serves both loyalty and survival. She holds both truths.

She closes her eyes as she tastes today’s harvest. She lets the honey linger on her tongue. It’s sharper than usual. She swallows it anyway. She lets the dark honey provide an answer, and free her from the freedom of choice.