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High in a strangler fig on a hillside in the Solomon Islands, a very new skink lay curled on a branch, waiting for the dark.
She had arrived alone.
Not as one of a clutch, hatching in a row. She had grown inside her mother for about seven months, longer than almost any lizard bothers to wait, and she had come into the world already big, already whole. One baby, instead of many.
So the first strange thing she noticed was this.
She was never actually alone.
Something was curious about that, she decided. Every time she opened her eyes in the blue dark, somebody nearby was already awake.
Some nights it was her mother, tail looped twice around a branch like rope around a post, watching the leaves for movement that did not belong. Other nights it was an old skink she barely knew, thick around the middle, dozing with one eye open near the fruit he liked best.
"Why do you watch me," she asked him once, "when I am not yours?"
"You are ours," he said. "That is different."
She did not understand it yet. She only knew the fig tree at night, and how to move through it.
Her tail did the work her legs could not. It reached ahead of her like a fifth limb, curled once around a branch, held her weight while her feet found the next one. She could hang from it entirely, upside down over a cluster of ripe fruit, and eat without ever letting go. No other skink on Earth could do that, though she did not know it was rare. She only knew it was hers.
The forest gave her leaves when fruit was scarce, and fruit when the fig dropped its small sweet weight into the canopy. She grew slowly. Everyone in the tree grew slowly. There seemed to be no hurry in a life this long.
One night a strange scuffling below sent every adult in the fig tree still at once, and she went still with them, copying without being told. Only when the sound passed did anyone move again.
She understood then. Watching was not for her alone. It had never been. The whole family watched together, turn by turn, the way her tail gripped a branch, without needing to be told twice.
Seasons folded into each other. Her own tail grew long enough to loop the way her mother's did.
Then one night, an even smaller skink arrived in the fig tree, wide-eyed, curled tight on a low branch, alone in the way every monkey-tailed skink is born alone.
She did not sleep that night.
She watched instead, tail hooked loosely around the branch above the newcomer, one eye on the leaves, waiting for whatever might come.
Nobody had asked her to.
Her tail held the branch above the newest one in the tree, the way another tail had once held a branch above her, and somewhere close, in the dark, somebody was always awake.