What the column found first

He ran.

The column had appeared overhead without warning — narrow, exact, moving east — and something in YY broke from the usual calculation and went after it. Not a decision so much as a response. He was moving east at full speed before he'd thought through what he was doing.

He tracked it by sound through the canopy for longer than he'd ever run in one direction. The east boundary passed underneath him without the usual pause he gave it. He kept going. The column didn't slow.

Then the sound changed — a dispersal, a brief scatter — and YY came out into a clearing he had no name for.

It was warm in a way that accumulated, a sun-trap, the kind of place that holds heat past noon. He stood at the edge and let his breathing slow. The column was gone, or had split, or had simply moved past. The clearing was quiet and completely still.

On a low branch near the center: a fragment of honeycomb, wedged between bark and lichen. Pale gold at the break, darker at the edges. Not dropped recently. Cached by something, or left behind when whatever cached it hadn't returned.

YY ate half of it where he stood. The sweetness came in a way food hadn't in several days. He wrapped the rest in a fold of bark and carried it.

On the way back he moved slowly, looking at the ground, looking at the trees. The clearing sat east of everything he'd mapped. Something kept bees out here, and the column had known this place before he did.