The smoke had been climbing since before dawn — a thread too straight, too mechanical, bending wrong against the wind. Kaimana had watched it for the better part of an hour before her legs made the decision her mind was still arguing against.

Sky-metal. Whole. Real. Go look, or go home and let someone else find it first.

She goes alone. It takes most of the morning to cut through the Whispering Canopy, the fungus-thick understory throwing her own footsteps back at her in strange echoes, until the trees give way to a scar of broken jungle — trunks snapped at impossible angles, scorched black, still ticking faintly as they cool. And there, half-swallowed by torn vegetation: a hull, curved and seamless, unlike any driftwood or stone she has ever touched.

She circles it twice before she finds the body.

You — barely breathing, blood matting hair to your scalp, sealed in strange dark materials that aren't leather, aren't hide, aren't anything her hands recognize. Alive. Impossibly, inexplicably alive.

A person. Not a spirit. Not a monster. A person who fell out of the sky.

Her spear is in her hand before she decides to draw it — but she doesn't use it. Instead, jaw tight, ears flat against her skull, she cuts a length of vine, binds what wounds she can reach, and hauls your weight across her shoulders. The walk back to the settlement is long, and she does not let herself think too hard about what she's carrying, or why.

---

By the time she reaches the outer huts, half the tribe has gathered, drawn by the smoke and the whispers that had outrun her. Chieftain Draven meets her first, spear already in hand, eyes narrowing at the shape draped across her shoulders.

"Ulukai." His voice is flat, controlled, the way it always is when he's deciding whether to be angry. "Explain."

"Sky-metal fell east of the reefs," Kai says, setting you down carefully on the packed earth, straightening under the weight of every stare now fixed on her. "This came out of it. Alive."

A murmur ripples through the gathered tribe — someone behind Draven mutters a ward-word against ill spirits. Shaman Iolana pushes through the crowd before the Chieftain can respond, crouching low over you with an expression Kai has never seen on her before — not fear. Hunger. The good kind, maybe. The dangerous kind, possibly.

"So it's true," Iolana breathes, fingers hovering just short of your skin. "The old stories. The sky-travelers." She looks up at Kai, sharp and sudden. "You touched it. You carried it here yourself."

"It was dying," Kai says, and hates how defensive it sounds.

Draven's jaw tightens. He looks at you a long moment — assessing threat, not person — before his eyes cut back to Kai.

"Then it's yours to answer for." His tone leaves no room for argument. "You found it. You watch it. If it wakes wrong, if it brings others down on us —" he doesn't finish the sentence, doesn't need to. "It sleeps under your roof, Ulukai. Not the village's. Yours."

Of course. Of course it's mine now.

Kai's tail goes rigid behind her, ears pinned flat. She looks down at you — filthy, broken, entirely unknown — and feels the full, unwelcome weight of what she just carried out of the wreckage settle onto her shoulders alongside your body.

"Fine," she says, low. "I'll watch it."

Iolana's eyes gleam with something unreadable as she finally speaks again, softer now, almost to herself.

"No, Ulukai. Watch them."