Free Monkey Wars by Richard Kurti Page A

won’t harm you! But you have to be quiet!”
    She stopped struggling and looked at him, her eyes searching his face for a clue to his intentions.
    “You used to live here, didn’t you?” Mico asked. “This was your home.”
    “Until you destroyed it!” Papina retorted angrily.
    Mico shook his head. “Not me.”
    Papina looked him up and down. She knew he was too young to have been involved, but in her mind all langurs were guilty.
    Mico pointed to the carving that she clasped in her hand. “What does it mean?”
    The simple directness of the question caught Papina off guard. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a toy.”
    She surrendered it to Mico as if handing over contraband, but he shook his head. “It’s yours. Keep it.”
    Kindness was the last thing Papina was expecting. She scrutinized Mico, noticing his soft eyes, not the eyes of the killers she’d been warned about.
    Too proud to say thank you, Papina went instead for an explanation. “My father gave it to me. He stole it from a market stall. He said it was our family.”
    Suddenly there was a deep sadness in Papina’s eyes.
    “Are they with you?” asked Mico.
    “My mother’s alive. My father…” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. “I came back to see it one last time…where we lived.”
    Mico shook his head. “It’s impossible. Guards patrol all the main runs. If they found a rhesus…” Now it was his turn to leave the words unsaid.
    But Papina had come too far to give up. “I miss him so much. I thought maybe I could find out what happened to him after he came back.”
    A dreadful foreboding stirred in Mico’s guts. “He came back after the battle?”
    “Yes,” Papina said, daring to hope. “To try and set things right. He put the Universal Sign of Peace on his forehead.”
    Mico hesitated as he remembered the male rhesus being butchered by the cemetery wall.
    “Tell me,” Papina urged. “Please.”
    “Your father was killed.” Mico said the words as gently as he could, but he saw Papina’s face tense with pain.
    “How?”
    “Does it matter?”
    She felt sick, but if she didn’t find out the truth, she’d be condemned to spend the rest of her life wondering. “I need to know what happened.”
    —
    They made a strange sight creeping through the cemetery from shadow to shadow. Papina trusted Mico enough to follow his every move, freeze when he did, dart when he darted, yet she maintained a cautious distance between them, as if she suspected he might turn on her at any moment.
    Finally they emerged by the section of the wall where Mico had found the bloody handprint.
    The rain had long since washed the stain from the stones, but it would take more than the weather to erase the disturbing memories.
    “This is where your father died.”
    “How? How did it happen?”
    “They chased him, from down there.” Mico pointed along the path. “They ambushed him.”
    He saw a numbing wave of despair overwhelm Papina, but still she pressed on. “Did it last long?”
    Mico shook his head. “He tried to talk to them; he said he had a family.”
    Papina slumped onto her haunches.
    “I’m sure his last thoughts were of you.”
    In the silence of the night, Papina felt something inside her break, something that would never fully heal. She stared up at Mico; she should hate him, but as she looked into his eyes she realized that he shared her pain, that he felt the horror as keenly as she did.
    Suddenly Mico tensed—he could hear movement down one of the paths. The night patrol.
    “You have to go!”
he whispered urgently, pulling her back into the shadows.
    As they retraced their steps, all Mico’s training kicked in; he circled around the guards, doubling back, darting for the places they’d just checked. It was as if he was still on the night exercise, only this time his hand clasped his enemy’s in a strange bond of trust—two monkeys betraying their own sides for something they didn’t yet