Alight (9 page)

Coyotl and Farrar groan with effort. Spingate screams, a combination of fear and frustration and rage.

The door picks up speed.

I hear the spider’s hard feet clicking against the stone street lying beneath the vines, a harsh, rapid drumbeat of oncoming death.

The hinges give a final, tortured shriek—the door clangs shut with a reverberating
gong
that hangs in the air.

Everyone sags, even Bishop. If the spider can get through these doors, we don’t have the strength to run, let alone fight.

The whining sound stops.

I keep my hands pressed against the door. I hear and feel a scraping coming from the other side, hard-shelled legs scratching at thick metal, searching for a way through, a way to get at us.

The scraping stops.

That whine again. Faint…then fading…

Then nothing.

Is the spider gone? Or is it standing there, motionless, waiting for us?

“We’ll rest here for a minute,” I say, as if we could do anything else.

Farrar falls to the ground. Coyotl slumps to his butt, his back against the door. Bishop’s hands are on his knees, his stomach heaving in and out as he tries to get his breathing under control. Spingate seems the least winded; her hands are on her hips, her lips are pursed.

“Spin, what happened back there?”

She laces her fingers over her head.

“At the top…jungle on either side of the river,” she says, forcing words through deep breaths. “Trees…
real
trees, not the vines. Coyotl went in…for a closer look. I was testing the water. He came sprinting out…shouting at us to jump. I saw what was behind him…it almost got us. But…it wasn’t a spider.”

“What are you talking about? We all saw it.”

She closes her eyes, shudders.

“Five legs…not eight.”

Her correction angers me. Like the number of legs matters?

Bishop stands straight. He gleams with sweat. “So it attacked?”

Coyotl sees that Bishop is standing, struggles to his feet. “It came after us. Maybe I should have fought it…I wasn’t afraid, but there was Spingate, and…well, I
wasn’t
afraid.”

Still lying on his back, Farrar raises a hand. “I was. Glad we jumped into the pool, because when I saw that thing I think I peed in my pants a little.”

Coyotl glares at him.

Bishop nods. “It scared me, too.”

His admission of fear seems to relax Coyotl. If even Bishop is afraid, then running away from the spider couldn’t be such a bad thing.

I put my shoulder to the door again, give it a little push to make sure it’s really closed. It is. At my feet, I see mashed vines, blue-smeared curving lines on the stone where the door scraped against it.

No way I can relax, not even a bit, but with the door shut I have a moment to think.

I turn and rest my back against the door. In front of me,
trees,
more than I could ever count.

Before us lies a dense jungle, growing up and through and around blackened, burned, crumbling, vine-choked six-sided buildings. Trees also grow out of giant, plant-covered holes in the ground. There are long, open spaces that were maybe once roads, but it’s hard to tell with all the holes and trees and the endless yellow vines that cover everything.

When we first landed, I thought the sprawling city was a ruin, taken by the hands of time. What I see now shows me I was wrong. The city we landed in isn’t ruined, it is merely abandoned and overgrown: most of those four-sided buildings are still standing.

What I look at now is something else altogether.

These six-sided buildings weren’t abandoned.

They were
destroyed
.

W
e walk through the jungle.

The curving wall is on our right, tall and constant, covered with layers of thick vines. Following it takes us mostly south and a little east. We hope to run across another gate soon, but we have no way of knowing if we will, or if it will be open. I’m very worried—we’ve eaten what little food we brought with us, and we’re already out of water.

Keeping the wall on our right means the thick jungle is on our left. Tall trees with dark-yellow leaves, green or brown trunks. Plenty of vines there, too, dangling from branches and covering the collapsed buildings. Blurds—some as big as I am—dart in and out of the trees, or fly full speed into the deep canopy where they vanish from sight.

The heat is worse here than it is in the city. It’s so humid. It seems that every other step squishes into mud, which hides jagged old sticks and a brown plant that has sharp thorns. Each time we step on one, we have to stop so someone can carefully pull thorns from the soles of our feet. That slows us down, makes me hate the Grownups anew—they dressed us up like dolls, so couldn’t they have given us shoes?

The sun is descending on the far side of the city. The wall casts a growing shadow upon us. I don’t want to be outside when night falls, but it looks like we can’t avoid that. Animal noises reach out to us from deep in the jungle, the cries and howls of creatures that might be waking up from a day’s sleep to hunt when darkness fully sets in.

So many questions. These six-sided buildings, scored and gutted, covered by the undying jungle—how far do they reach? Does this massive wall go all the way around our ziggurat city?

Spingate gestures to the sprawling ruins on our left.

“Maybe a big fire burned them all,” she says. “Or it could have been a meteor shower, rocks hitting so hard they made craters, caused explosions that started fires.”

Bishop laughs at this. “Spingate, are you joking?”

“Not at all,” she says, bristling that he would doubt her. “Rocks can come from space at high speeds, partially burning up as they hit the atmosphere, and—”

He holds up a fist, which means we’re supposed to stop. We do. He faces her.

“You really don’t know what caused all of this?”

She seems defensive. “No. Do you?”

Bishop nods. “War.”

One word. So simple. And from looking at the devastation around us, so
horrible
.

We start walking again. It seems so obvious now—how could I have thought so much damage came from anything
but
war? Destruction, killing…just like on the
Xolotl,
but at a scale that is hard to conceive. How many people died? Thousands?
Millions?

On one side of this wall lie endless ruins and carnage. On the other, untouched buildings damaged only by plants, only by time and neglect. It doesn’t take a genius like Spingate or Gaston to figure out what happened. My kind destroyed a city so they could build their own in the same place. Even down here, we can’t escape the Grownups’ violent touch.

Bishop raises a fist. We stop.

He crouches down, stares off into the darkening ruins.

“Em, come here,” he whispers.

I squat beside him. He points to a ruined building. Three of its six vine-choked walls have collapsed. There is no roof to stop the young trees growing tall from within.

Bishop leans close to me. “Do you see it?”

I look, but see nothing that should cause concern. “It’s a ruined building. We’ve passed hundreds of them.”

His eyes narrow, like he’s disappointed. My heart plummets—I can’t stand the idea that he thinks poorly of me.

“Not the building itself,” he says. “Look just above it.”

Now I see it: against the barely lit sky, a thin column of smoke rises up from somewhere beyond that building.

“A campfire,” he says. “Someone is out there.”

People. People who are not
us
. We’re not alone after all.

Bishop looks at me. Once again we’re close enough to kiss, but this isn’t the time for that.

“I’ll go look,” he says. “See what’s there.”

“No, it’s too dangerous. What if it’s another spider?”

He considers this carefully, then shakes his head. “The spider didn’t try to open the door. It easily outweighs all of us combined. All it had to do was
push,
but it didn’t even try. If it’s not smart enough to open a door, it’s not smart enough to build a fire.”

He’s right. It’s an animal—an animal that attacked us.

“The spider is inside the city walls, where the rest of our people are,” I say. “We need to get back to the shuttle as fast as possible. And besides, it’s almost dark. There could be more spiders in the jungle.”

Bishop considers this, bites at his lower lip. He used to just
act
. Now, he
thinks
first. It’s definitely an improvement.

“The fire means someone lives out there,” he says. “Doesn’t that mean they must have food that isn’t poisoned by the mold?”

From behind me, Spingate lets out a cough of surprise.

“He’s right,” she says. “I mean, they could be immune to the toxin somehow, but however they beat it, we need to know.”

Bishop has a good point. And looking for food was the whole purpose of this trip.

“All right,” I say. “We’ll check it out.”

He smiles, starts to rise.

“I said
we,
Bishop. You’re not going alone.”

He wasn’t expecting that. “Then I’ll take Farrar.”

I touch the back of his hand. “No, all of us, together. We shouldn’t have split up before.”

He pauses, then pulls his hand away, his eyes cast down.

Together, he and I made the choice to abandon Bello, and did we learn from our mistake? No. At the waterfall, we let Spingate, Farrar and Coyotl go off by themselves so we could be alone together. The spider could have hurt them, and that’s our fault.

Bishop turns his head, speaks just loud enough for everyone to hear him.

“Farrar, stay on my right. Coyotl, on my left. Em and Spingate, stay close behind, but far enough back so you can run if something attacks.”

We are new to this planet, to this city, but it seems we have neighbors. In a moment, we will find out if they are friend…or foe.

Bishop silently leads us into the jungle ruins.

W
e find the fire. Whoever made it is gone.

Glowing coals cast tendrils of smoke into the darkening night. Someone built a fire pit in the middle of this six-sided ruin. With no roof and one wall collapsed, the fire-builders had protection from five sides. Maybe they cooked bread—I faintly smell burned toast.

The sun finally slides behind the city wall. The sky burns a molten-sunset red. Jungle shadows thicken. Strange, new noises rise—animal screeches, echoing hoots, beastly bellows, all completely alien to anything hiding in Matilda’s memories.

Bishop, Farrar and Coyotl move silently through the ruin, weapons at the ready. Bishop kneels by the fire pit. He pokes at the mostly black coals, careful not to touch those that still shimmer with soft waves of orange. From the pit’s edge, he pulls out a fist-sized chunk of half-burned wood. He tosses it to Coyotl, throws another to Farrar, then pulls out a third for himself.

The boys set down their weapons. They rub the charcoal on arms, legs, faces. Farrar uses his shovel to cut free several long vines, which the boys wrap around themselves, coiling them over shoulders, across chests, around waists, tying them off here and there. Finally, the circle-stars scoop up mud and grind it into their hair.