Three

Ember got the news from a cricket that chirped it out in code.
"Call ME to order, will you?", she spat. "We'll see who calls who in the end!"
She leaped up from the boulder where she'd been hunched, and grabbed a hold of a branch above her head with both hands, and with a swing worthy of any trapeze artist, flung herself higher and higher, limb after limb, until she had soared to the top of the two hundred foot elm. There she perched, surveying the vast canopy surrounding her. From this vantage point there was no end to the forest in any direction, but she sensed this was somehow an illusion. She still remembered the outer world and knew it was there even now, though she could never see it, no matter where she roamed, and she was sure she had covered every inch of the territory by now.
Ember was an eight year old girl, but not quite your ordinary kind. Barely over four feet tall and weighing less than sixty pounds, she seemed to float however she moved. Her wavy light brown hair flew about her shoulders, and her small pale blue eyes matched the cloudless sky above. She scanned the horizon from the top of the tree like any worthy raptor would. In the back of her mind she held a grid of her captive world and nearly everything in it, alive and breathing in realtime.
Ember was a Savior, and one of the best in the game. It was a Savior's gift to know the terrain, to sense it, to feel it, to see every goal and every ball in play, to spot every player, every Hunter, Gatherer, Smacker or Flower-Bearer. None could move without their intention and direction lighting up on her cranial screen. She would keep in the background, trying to free her mind to focus on the more important details, for the one gap in the Savior's map-ability was their Striker-blindness. They could never know when or where a Striker was or would be, and their entire performance depended on just that. The Savior's job was to stop the Striker from scoring, and to never know where a Striker was at any moment was maddening. It was stressful. It was the key to the entire tournament.
She was an eight year old girl, and had been for more than a century at least. One lost track of human time here in the forest. It didn't help that seasons barely seemed to occur in there. On the more deciduous trees, leaves would turn and drop but new leaves would be budding and forming simultaneously. The temperature fluctuated seemingly at random. The length of the days and the nights never seemed to vary by much. Everything about the place seemed un-genuine somehow. Ember, like the others, could never quite figure it out, given all the time in the world. At least it seemed like all the time in the world. She held her breath and closed her eyes as if that would help her better see if any Striker was on the move. It came to her sometimes. She didn't know how but she trusted her instincts, and more often than not they were right. But this moment it wasn't a Striker that caught her attention, but something new, somebody new had entered their world.
It happened. New blood came seeping in now and then. For years Ember had tried to foretell it somehow. There must be a pattern. From every newcomer's description she knew there was only one road, and only one gate that exiles were brought to, so when they entered the forest you would think they would arrive at the same location every time, but it just didn't work that way. They could appear anywhere and it always seemed they showed up in the middle. There were no visible edges, no boundaries or borders. Ember and the others all wanted to discover a seam, a way in or way out, but it was another maddening fact of life that no one could find such a thing. You could walk in a straight line for days, weeks or years and never come across an edge of the woods. Instead you would always find yourself somewhere familiar. It all seemed familiar. It was circumscribed somehow, infinite and impossible.
She would never resign herself though. Each newcomer might be a key, and at her sensing of this one, Ember scuttled down the tree and ran at top speed to where she knew it would be. Along the way she met no one, heard nothing but songbirds and the buzzing of bees. She dashed through the duff, leapt over trickling streams, an unerringly made her way to the clearing where Eberline sat on a rock, crying and listening to a crow.
"Scat!" Ember called, rushing up to the bird. She picked the thing up by its talons and hurled it into the air. The crow squawked loudly as Ember continued to threaten it with words, and when the bird saw the girl pick up a rock, it climbed higher and flew off. Ember threw the rock at it anyway.
"And never come back, do you hear?" she yelled at the crow.
Edeline stared at the tiny girl, who was wearing a sort of skirt made of thickly wound ivy, and a scant top of the same. Ember was likewise shocked by Edeline's outfit.
"What are you wearing? A napkin? What is that?" she asked, and without any sense of personal boundaries she reached over and started rubbing Ebeline's terricloth top.
"You'll sure get a lot of attention with that," Ember snickered, and then added, "of course you will anyway. New blood, and sexy too. Look at you! Yeah, you'll get a lot of attention in here."
"I'm lost," Edeline tried to shrug the girl's hand off her, but Ember kept touching until she was satisfied. Then she stood back a few paces and with a hand on her hips, delivered her verdict.
"What did you expect? You had to know what was coming."
"It's all a mistake," Edeline pleaded. "I don't belong here. I'm not one of them!"
Ember laughed, and with Ember laughter was usually cruel.
"You mean one of us, and you are. It's obvious."
"I'm not," Edeline insisted. "I'm an ordinary person. I was just getting ready for work. I have meetings. My husband. My life."
"That's all over," Ember declared. "You might as well get used to it."
"That's what he said," Eberline sniffed, recalling her interview with Captain Snig, and she told Ember everything that had happened that day. Ember stood listening impatiently. Sure, it was important to the woman, Ember thought, but she had been hearing such stories forever. The only detail of interest to her was the rapidity with which the woman had been processed. All that in just a few hours, she considered. They're getting more efficient these days. She already knew all about Snig. Eberline wasn't the first he'd dispatched to this place.
"Look on the bright side," Ember snarled when Eberline was finished and had resumed scrolling tears down the side of her face. "That Snig will be dead and long gone in no time, and you'll still be young and yourself and alive. Of course that's also the not-so-bright side," she added. "It'll be true for Snig's great-grandchildren too, and so on."
"And what about you?" Eberline asked.
"Me?" Ember said. "I'm hungry, that's what. I'll be you are too. Come on, it's time to learn a new lesson."
Ember turned and trotted off into the trees, urging Eberline to follow. She did, finding it difficult to keep up. It didn't occur to the girl that the older one might not be as fast or as used to the ground as she was. Despite her vast age, Ember retained the brain structure of a child. She had accumulated much knowledge from all her experience, but certain developments would never occur in her mind, a greater sense of empathy being one of them.
"Over here," she shouted as she jumped straight off the ground and onto a branch ten feet high in the air. Eberline caught up and waited below as she watched Ember scurry aloft.
"Well, come on," Ember urged, but Eberline merely held up her hands.
"What?" she asked. "I can't get up there."
"You have to," Ember scolded. She was already several flights up, but seeing that Eberline remained adamantly earthbound, she relented, and hustled back down. She flew off the last branch, doing a backflip in mid-air, and landed beside the new blood.
"I'll give you a boost," she informed her, and before Eberline knew what was happening, the girl had somehow hoisted her half up the trunk with inconceivable strength in that miniature frame. Eberline grabbed onto the branch and pulled herself up the rest of the way. Getting her bearings, she felt a bit wobbly and decided not to look down. In the meantime, Ember had scurried back up and was quickly above her once more.
"Climb up!" she called back, and Eberline gingerly followed, slowly making her way, one branch at a time up what seemed to be a kind of pine tree. The bark was sticky enough that it helped her grab hold, but also made her hands feel dirty and gross. By the time she reached Ember, she'd managed to get a small tear in the leg of her pants, which were also smeared with splotches of the gooey brown tar.
Ember was holding out a vine which was covered with little black balls of some kind.
"Keriberi," she told Eberline. "It's a fruit."
"Oh," Eberline figured she ought to say something. The keriberis looked like deer droppings to her. She reached out and started to pull one off of the vine, but Ember smacked her hand away.
"Not like that," Ember said. "Do you want us to starve? No, you have to get them off in this particular way. Here, you'll see."
Ember placed her thumb and forefinger around one of the berries and began to twist it, slowly to the left.
"One turn," she said, "then another. Lefty loosey, right?"
On the third turn the berry came off.
'Now look," Ember said, pointing to the spot where she'd unfastened the thing. Already a new one was growing in its place.
"You take them off this way," Ember lectured, "and they replenish. Take them off any other way and the spot remains vacant forever. You see? This way we never run out."
"I get it." Eberline said, and when Ember gave her the berry, she popped into in her mouth and was about to crunch her teeth down when Ember gave another cry and shouted,
"No, no, don't bite it. Just let it rest on your tongue. You'll get more nutrition that way. No chewing, remember."
"Okay," Eberline mumbled, and kept her teeth up. She felt a little silly, sitting way up in a tree, sucking on a twist-off wild fruit like hard candy, constantly being scolded by this nasty little child. What a day, she sighed to herself. And that was before it started raining.