They found the body at dawn.

But the forest had been rehearsing this discovery for two nights already. Since the men first entered with hurricane lamps and reluctant dogs, calling a name that changed depending on who called it — Talum, said the older voices, out of habit; Yalum, said the ones who had run into her more recently, at the chai stall or the bus stand, and had learned, however grudgingly, to call her by the name she'd chosen. The dogs made no such distinction. At the tree line they simply stopped, forelegs braced, and would not be coaxed further, so that the men had to haul them in by the collar, the animals whining low and constant, as if some grammar of scent told them what the men had not yet let themselves understand.

Among the searchers, one man said almost nothing the whole first night. By the second morning he had stopped coming altogether. No one remarked on it. In a search this reluctant, absence was easier to forgive than presence.

It was hanging — not swinging, not pleading, simply hanging — as though the forest itself had grown weary of keeping her rooted to the earth. The tree was old, its bark thick and split, scarred by lightning and by rituals long abandoned; lichen furred one flank of it in patches the colour of old coins. No one came here unless the mind had slipped its tether, or unless summoned by something older than reason. Yapoms were said to roam this place; take uyis — the wrongrd ones that refuse burial — were believed to linger among its roots, thickening the undergrowth with grievances no one had thought to resolve.

This time, it was neither spirit nor madman. Not in the way the village preferred to believe.

The body had already entered its slow, unhurried dialogue with decay — a dialect the forest spoke fluently and without hurry. Skin had loosened its claim over flesh; flesh had begun to forget bone. Gender, the first lie imposed upon any body, had dissolved into something unnamed, something the forest did not trouble itself to correct. The villagers kept their distance, whispering as if proximity might stain them. The police stepped closer, boots careful in the wet leaf-fall. The forensic team came closest of all, gloved, murmuring the flat vocabulary of their trade.

"Male," the report said. Then it paused, the pen hovering. "Not entirely."

The body had been worked upon. Altered. Rewritten — as though someone, perhaps the body itself, had refused the grammar it was born into and carved a different syntax into skin, patiently, over years, the way a river carves a new bank when the old one no longer holds.

The tree said nothing. It rarely did. It had, after all, kept worse secrets than this one, and would keep this one too, folding it in with the lightning-scars and the abandoned rituals — one more grievance among the roots.