The youngest (Pandoid, the deep networks)

The up-people had three lights, and the lights went where the up-people looked, so the youngest could see at once what the up-people looked at, which was their lights.

There were three of them. They were small, and wrapped in something that was not fur, and they were loud. Not loud like the runners, who bellow once and are done. Loud like a stone that never finishes falling. They talked all the time, all three, to each other and to the humming stone they had set at the junction and, as far as the youngest could tell, to nothing at all. They held little things that glowed, and they looked at the little things, and they looked at each other, and they never once looked at the dark, which was where everything else was.

The youngest stood at the edge of their light. Not hidden. There was nothing to hide behind, and the youngest did not try. Just there, on the open floor, in plain sight of anyone who turned.

Nobody turned.

The youngest stood there for as long as it takes to tell the story of the first warm seep, which is a long story, and counted it through twice to be sure. The up-people worked. One of them laughed. One of them knelt by the humming stone and said things to it, and it hummed back, and the up-person seemed pleased. The light that moves moved, and swung, and once came so close across the floor that it touched the youngest's feet and went on past, and the up-person holding it did not follow it with their eyes.

Then the youngest went back the way they had come, before any head could turn, because a telling has to have an end and this was a good one.

The youngest thought about it all the way to the squeeze. The up-people cannot hear the ground. That was the finding. The youngest had moved no stone, had stood in the open at the edge of their light for two whole tellings, and nothing on any of them had turned. Nobody in the deep had ever told that. Nobody had known it to tell.

It was new. It was the youngest's.

And then, at the bottom of the squeeze, with the warm of the people coming up to meet them, the youngest remembered the other half of the rule, the half that comes after the manners: a telling is not yours until somebody has heard it.

The youngest moved a stone, late, and went to find Stone-First.