Alight (30 page)

“Godsdamn,” Spingate says, breathless. “Barkah was down there with us. He watched us leave.”

Lahfah thumps the end of his tail on the drawing, making charcoal dust jump. Barkah yells something at him. Lahfah yells back.

Barkah returns to the drawing with what I can only interpret as exasperation. Lines, curves, charcoal dust scattering. He stops, holds the drawing up for all of us to see.

He added Lahfah to the drawing.

“Gromba, gromba, gromba,”
Lahfah says, clearly pleased.

Spingate laughs. “Looks like she was down there, too.”

“
She?
I thought it was a
he
.”

Spingate shrugs.

Lahfah points at her.
“Singat.”
He points at me.
“Hem.”

Barkah pulls out more blank fabric. He draws quickly, efficiently, showing us the life of the Springers. Secret entrances in ruined buildings that lead to tunnels. Springers in those tunnels, families, entire underground villages.

He makes a few drawings of the surface: the jungle, quick sketches of plants, berries and animals that I hope are edible. He finishes every surface drawing with lurking, five-legged figures—spiders. The message is clear: the Springers
have
to live underground. If they stay on the surface too long, the spiders could get them.

“Like the boogeyman,” I say.

Spingate nods. “Except their boogeyman is real.”

Their entire culture, forced to live below the surface. Because our kind chased them there.

Barkah sketches a Springer. He spends a little more time on this drawing. He pulls three little tied-off pouches from his bag. They contain colored powders: red, blue, yellow. These he applies to his sketch with a master’s touch. When he finishes, I am looking at a blue Springer, more wrinkled than any I have yet seen. This one looks very old.

I notice something hanging from the old Springer’s thick neck. It looks like a metal rectangle, very detailed, as if the level of detail is itself important. I tap it, point to Barkah’s necklace.

Barkah taps the necklace. I get the impression he’s saying,
Yes, same as mine
.

I tap the drawing of the old Springer.

“Who is this?” I say to Barkah.

He—or she—can’t understand my words, but I’m betting he can understand my meaning.

He makes a new drawing, a simpler one. A few strokes shows the old blue Springer, then two smaller, purple Springers next to him. He adds necklaces to these as well. He taps the second purple Springer, points to himself.

Then he makes a simple stick figure that clearly represents a Springer. The stick figure is on its knees, head low. Barkah quickly makes many more of these, filling the fabric. In seconds, there are hundreds of them.

“He’s drawing them like they are kneeling,” Spingate says. “Kneeling to the old blue one. That must be their leader.”

More than a leader, I think—
royalty
.

“Maybe their king,” I say. “Or queen.”

Spingate looks at Barkah in a new light. “Then maybe we are very, very lucky—what if our new friend is a prince or a princess?”

A surge of hope courses through me. If Spingate is right, we could be talking to someone who can make decisions, or can at least speak directly to the Springer leader.

We could make peace.

Barkah reaches into his bag, pulls out a small wooden carving: a spider. He uses the toy’s pointy foot to scratch out one of the two purple Springers with necklaces, dragging the tip back and forth until that young Springer is nothing but smears and torn fabric.

He sets the wooden spider right on top of that spot.

“A spider killed the royal child,” Spingate says. “Barkah’s sibling, maybe.”

I’m shocked at how fast a story can be told with nothing but pictures. If spiders killed the king’s child, and if the king thinks we’re connected to the spiders, he would hate us.

Barkah pulls another small toy from his bag. It looks like a flat, wheeled cart with an angled framework on top, almost like thick tent poles without a tent. A long stick points out the back, as if the cart has a tail. He uses the toy to knock the spider on its side. He sets the cart down, looks at us.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “What does he mean?”

Spingate thinks for a moment. “Maybe he wants our help destroying the spiders?”

Barkah knows I was with Visca, knows the spiders saved me at the fountain, so he has to know the spiders are on my side. Is destroying the machines the price of peace between our two cultures? This could be the bargaining chip I need.

I pick up the little spider toy, hold it so everyone can see it.

“We can make these go away,” I say slowly. “We can make it so they never hurt you again.” I tap the drawings he made of the plants and animals. “But we need food.” I point to my open mouth. “
Food
. Can you help us?”

Barkah stares at me, trying to work out my meaning.

“He doesn’t understand,” Spingate says, frustrated.

A short horn blast echoes through the jungle outside, the same sound from when the Springers set fires to herd us.

Barkah rushes to the doors, peeks out. He then hops between two of the strange statues and brushes dirt away from the warped wooden floor there. He slides his fingers into a small hole and lifts: a trapdoor, leading down.

He waves to us, wide-eyed and urgent.

“He wants to hide us,” I say.

I grab my spear. Spingate and I run to the trapdoor, the floor squeaking beneath us with every step. Barkah is letting me keep my weapon, so if this is some kind of trick it’s not a very good one.

The old stairs creak even more than the floor. Spingate is right behind me.

At the bottom, I step into standing water that comes up to my knees. This is a confined space, smelling of rot and mildew, dark save for a long, thin sliver of light—coming through a slot left by a missing board, just above ground level, that looks out on the jungle in front of the steeple’s doors.

Noises from outside…I hear something coming.

The trapdoor quietly shuts behind us.

I can see through the tangled old vines outside the slot—Springer feet, legs, tails. Five Springers out there, maybe more. I see gun butts resting on the ground next to those feet.

The Springers talk. I recognize Barkah’s voice. I squat down, changing my angle, and I can see his face. He’s just in front of the steeple doors. He’s talking to a blue, older and bigger…and then I see the blue’s copper necklace.

“The king,” Spingate whispers. Her breath is warm on my ear. “Is Barkah handing us over to him?”

Out in front of us, one of the Springers turns, looks around. Did it hear her talking?

Spingate and I stay motionless.

For a half-second, I swear the Springer’s three eyes are staring right at us, but it looks away—it didn’t see us through the thick vines.

I glare at Spingate, hold a finger to my lips.

The king’s tail comes around quickly, slaps into Barkah’s head. Barkah staggers, then straightens. He doesn’t react, doesn’t fight back. Some kind of discipline, parent to child? We don’t even know if they
are
parent and child. We know almost nothing of these creatures.

I see Springers walking past Barkah and the king, coming from inside the steeple…they’re carrying the dead. Then two more Springers, pulling a rolling cart with Lahfah on top. He’s bundled up in a blanket.

Will they search the back of the church? If they do, they will surely find Visca’s body.

The king’s tail slaps Barkah’s head once more, then the older Springer hops away toward the trail. His entourage follows, pulling the cart with Lahfah on top. They slide into the jungle. Just like that, they are gone.

Spingate’s breath in my ear again: “Should we go up?”

She’s getting on my nerves. How can she be so smart in her lab and so dumb about just staying quiet?

“Just
wait,
” I whisper.

That’s exactly what we do. We stand in calf-deep water, our feet growing colder by the second. I try to imagine the king and his followers moving down the trail, try to project how far away they are.

The floor directly above us squeaks. When Barkah finally opens the trapdoor, we’re shivering. He waves us up.

Save for his drawings and the statues, the room is empty.

Barkah seems shaken, upset.

Spingate steps close to him.

“Food,” she says. She points to her mouth, her belly. “Food.”

She’s so single-minded she doesn’t seem to understand how close we just came to getting caught. What would have happened to Barkah for hiding us?

“Maybe I can draw the purple fruit,” she says, then moves to the fire. She flips over a sketch, picks up a piece of charcoal and starts to draw.

That catches Barkah’s attention, makes him excited. He glances at the closed doors, then two hops take him to Spingate’s side.

She sketches an oval. She starts to shade it in. The charcoal is messy. She’s pressing too hard, sending dust everywhere.

She holds up the sketch for me to see. “Does this look like the purple fruit?”

“It looks more like a turd.”

I hold back an embarrassed laugh. When Matilda was a little girl, saying the word
turd
would have gotten her punished. Badly. Our father didn’t like nasty language of any kind.

Barkah squints at the drawing. He mumbles something I don’t understand. I get the feeling he’s not impressed with Spingate’s artistic skills.

Spingate sighs. “Let me do it again.”

She puts the fabric back on the ground, starts to draw, hesitates, wondering how to make it look better.

The air erupts with a
boom
so loud and hard that it shakes dirt down from what’s left of the steeple’s ruined ceiling. The sound echoes through the jungle even as another sound joins it, a steady roar that makes everything around me shudder.

“Oh no,” Spingate says, then she’s up and out the doors. Barkah and I rush out behind her.

High in the sky, a trail of white. Memories flashfire, more of Matilda’s childhood floods in, and with a wash of heartbreak, fear and despair, I recognize what it is.

“A ship,” Spingate says. “It just entered the atmosphere, it’s coming down.” She looks at me, dread in her eyes. “It has to be the Grownups.”

Barkah hops into the steeple.

The twelve-year-old inside me cries out:
This isn’t fair!
We were so close. We’ve worked so hard, lost so much. Brewer told us there was only one shuttle; he lied.

Barkah comes out with my spear in one hand and his musket in the other. He tosses the spear at my feet. He waves his hand outward in a gesture that needs no translation:
Go away.

Spingate shakes her head. “No, we have to learn from each other, we—”

Barkah opens his wide mouth and roars: a grinding, hideous noise. He holds the musket in both hands, shakes it at us. He’s leaning forward, his tail out straight behind him. Open aggression looks the same on his kind as it does on ours.

Spingate takes a step back, surprised, maybe even hurt.

I grab her elbow, gently pull her away. “Let’s go.”

“But why is he mad? He must have also seen our shuttle come down.”

“Look what happened after it did,” I say. “Eight of his kind are dead because of us. We have to take Visca’s body and get back to our people.
Now
. Look where that ship is going.”

She looks to the sky. The white line descends toward the horizon. It’s coming down fast.

Whatever it is, it will land inside the city walls.

“Maybe we should leave the body,” she says. “It’s going to slow us down.”

“
He’s
going to slow us down,” I say. “Not
it
. We’re taking him.”

We run around to the back of the ruined church. We each take a pole of Visca’s cart. It hurts so much to hold the pole, more to pull it, but pull it we do.

We head for the trail, Visca’s tied-down body bouncing along behind us.

B
y the time we reach the city gate, night has fallen. Spingate and I are drained. The cart is on wheels, but that didn’t make the hike through the muddy trails any easier. Raw blisters cover our palms, our fingers. My hands feel like Visca’s ghost hit them with his sledgehammer.