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Andy had been keeping watch through the cockpit at the far end of the fuselage.

“Hey, you guys,” he yelled. “They’re leaving
without
us!”

The humans and the hendropods moved forward and looked out through the patchwork windshield of the B-29.

Thatcher stayed, sitting near the door, and checked his watch.

Two Navy ships were leaving glowing green wakes of bioluminescent phytoplankton churned up by their propellers as they shipped out. Rounding the cliff below, a ship appeared, heading north.

“The
Trident
!
”
Nell shouted.

Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. “Eh?”

“It’s the ship from
SeaLife,”
Zero explained.

“Oh,” Geoffrey said.

“I never thought I’d be so glad to see her!” Nell said.

“Wait a minute!” Zero pulled out a palm-sized short-range video transmitter from one of his pants pockets and unfolded the transmission dish.

He quickly hooked up a jack to the camera and another to a speaker and handed the transmitter to Geoffrey.

“Aim the antenna at the
Trident,”
he said. “There may be just enough juice left! This thing’s only got a seven-hundred meter range but we might get a bounce off the water. Come on, Peach!”

Peach was playing Halo 5 with earphones on, listening to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys and crunching spicy cinnamon Red Hots between his molars.

He vaporized a gallery of monstrous aliens with furious efficiency and, suddenly, his Spider Sense detected a status message in the upper right corner of the computer screen:

INCOMING TRANSMISSION
.

Peach lifted an earphone. “What the—”

He jockeyed the keyboard and swiftly brought up the feed.

Nell, Andy, and Zero waved frantically in a window on the screen. Behind them stood a cluster of creatures that looked like something from his videogame.

He was stunned for a beat, then fumbled for the volume.

“Peach! Peach! Are you there? Help!”

Peach could not unravel his tongue. He fumbled with a microphone jack. “Zero? Is that you, man?”

Peach pulled an extra wireless headset mike out of his hair and positioned it in front of his mouth. “Boss! Boss! You better get in here!”

The door of the bridge banged open and Cynthea ran in, startling Captain Sol and First Mate Warburton.

“Stop the ship, Captain,” she said breathlessly. “Drop the anchor!”

“Are you insane? Not when the U.S. Navy just told us to reach minimum safe distance from a NUCLEAR BLAST.”

“It’s Nell and Zero and Andy. They’re stranded on the island, Captain! They need help!”

Captain Sol cocked his head at her. “Andy? The poor lad is dead.”

“We’ll be out of range of their transmission if you go any farther,” Cynthea pleaded. “Stop the ship!”

Captain Sol frowned but reluctantly nodded at Warburton to cut the engines, testing the sincerity in Cynthea’s eyes with a hard look. “Radio
Enterprise
and tell her we’ve got a distress call,” he ordered Warburton.

“No!” Cynthea shouted. “You better come see this first.”

Captain Sol’s frown deepened. “Lady, so help me if this is some kind of publicity stunt—”

“What should I tell them, Captain?” Warburton asked.

Captain Sol gritted his teeth. “Tell them…we’ve got engine trouble.”

“You are my
god
, Captain Sol!” Cynthea kissed both whiskery cheeks. “My sea god!”

“All right, that’s enough of that now!”

Captain Sol shook his head at Warburton, then hurried off the bridge after Cynthea.

The first mate spoke to the
Enterprise
in the smooth voice of a
late-night dee-jay: “Hello there,
Enterprise
, we’ve got a little engine trouble and we’re working on it right now. We should have the problem fixed momentarily.”

Captain Sol and Cynthea watched the monitor above Peach as he patched in the audio. The picture was frazzled by static.

“Now why the hell shouldn’t I tell the Navy to send a rescue crew, damn it, Zero?” the captain demanded.

“Maybe because they don’t want to rescue what we found,” Zero said.

“They may be deliberately abandoning us, Captain,” Andy said.

“Well, what in God’s name could you possibly have found?” the captain asked. “Everything on the island’s about to be nuked! How much worse can it get, for Chrissakes!”

“Captain Sol, please take a big breath,” Andy said. “Did you take one? OK. Now close your eyes and when I tell you, open them…”

Captain Sol did no such thing.

“Andy,” Nell sighed.

Moving Hender into view, Andy yelled, “OK, open them!”

Hender’s fur flushed with fireworks of green and pink light as his eyes darted in different directions.

Peach whispered, “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

Captain Sol swallowed a curse. “I am not allowed to make a decision like this, people. The Navy’s orders are to shoot first and ask questions later if anything is smuggled off this island!”

“But these beings are
intelligent,”
Nell insisted.

“Go ahead, Hender,” Andy urged, and whispered to Hender.

“Hello, Captain Sol,” Hender fluted, and he waved two hands human-style. “Please. Help. Us.”

Captain Sol grabbed the back of a chair to keep from keeling over.

Cynthea put an arm around him, looking at the screen. “You’re recording this, right, Peach?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, Boss.”

“These new tri-engines are temperamental as heck, and I guess they’re a bit rusty,” Warburton crooned on the radio to the
Enterprise.
“One of them gets out of sync, it sets off a chain reaction, and before you know it, they all just… freak out!”

The first mate winced at his own B.S.

“What’s the ETA on engine repairs
, Trident?” came the response from the
Enterprise. “Over?”

“Uh, not sure,
Enterprise.”

“OK.
Trident,
you are drifting closer to shore, there, copy?”

“Yes,
Enterprise
, we copy. We’ll drop anchor and continue to effect repairs.”

“Marcello!” Warburton gestured to the seventeen-year-old crewman, who was kissing his St. Christopher’s medal.

Marcello let go of his medal and dropped anchor at the same time.

The steel claw bit into a solid rock holdfast two hundred feet below the surface.

“Copy that, we think that’s a good idea
, Trident!
Uh, you’re going to need to get moving within one hundred nineteen minutes or abandon ship. Is that well understood?”

The anchor bit rock and the line stretched taut as Warburton started letting it out farther toward the shore.

“Understood,
Enterprise,”
he answered, gritting his teeth. “It takes a lot less time than that to fix these things, usually!”

“OK
, Trident.
Keep us informed.
Enterprise
out.”

“So they might not want us to get off the island, Captain Sol,” Andy said. “Do you get it now, what we’re trying to say?” “Yes, Andy,” the captain said. “I think I get it!” “Can’t we launch the mini-sub?” Cynthea asked. “With two Sea-Wolf anti-sub attack submarines listening for
exactly that? Christ, they can probably hear what we’re saying right through the hull of this ship.”

“We gotta do something, man,” Peach said.

Captain Sol nodded, stroking his beard. “Maybe we can let out the winch on the Zodiac and let the tide carry it in closer….But how the heck can you get down to us?”

Everyone in the B-29 cockpit turned to the right to look at the basket hanging from the branch of Hender’s tree.

“Hender,” Geoffrey pointed. “Exit?”

“Water hazar-doo-us. Hender no water.”

“Of course, they go at low tide!” Nell said.

“Exit OK Hender,” Geoffrey said. “Exit safety OK?”

“Dane-jer! Dane-jer!” Hender shouted, pointing down.

“Humans below help,” Nell said. “Safety. Raft. Safe!” She pointed down and nodded.

“Rescue, raft!” Geoffrey added. “Safety!”

“Raft.” Hender nodded at Nell with what she could have sworn was skepticism. He closed his eyelids for a moment, then looked at Nell with both eyes. “OK. Safety.”

Hender turned and spoke to the other hendropods.

“OK, Captain Sol,” Andy said. “We’re going to be coming down in a basket sort of elevator thing…”

“What?” Captain Sol said.

“Go on deck and look up at the cliff. We’ll wave some lights so you can see us.”

Geoffrey motioned to the other humans, and they each scooped up some bug-jars.

They waved them in the window of the cockpit.

Thatcher glanced over his shoulder at the others as he slipped out the door.

He checked his Timex Indiglo watch, pressing the crown to light up its face, and peered down the hillside. He heard the engine of the Humvee and saw headlights beaming from behind the B-29’s rotting wing farther down the slope. He sighed as a wave of relief washed over him. Then he ran toward the lights.

In the control room aboard the
Trident
the video started to fizzle and fade.

“We’re losing you, Zero,” Peach said.

They heard the cameraman’s voice as the transmission died:
“Look up … for us!”

Moments later, they saw the
Trident’s
deck lights flick on and off twice. “They spotted us,” Geoffrey said.

“Come on, Andy,” Nell said. “Let’s pack their stuff in those specimen cases.”

Nell and Andy ran to the other end of the fuselage to start packing the hendropods’ possessions into the aluminum cases. The other hendros ran past them and climbed into the hole to the spiral stairs that led to Hender’s elevator. But Hender paused beside Nell, watching her place his things inside one of the cases.

“Go now, Hender. Exit,” Geoffrey said, behind him. “Nell will come with us.”

Hender twisted his head around and looked at Geoffrey. “Nell will come with us,” Hender repeated, nodding. He turned to Nell and both his eyes bent down and looked into hers. Suddenly, without warning, he embraced her, wrapping four arms around her.

Nell was alarmed as his four hands pressed against her back— but his touch was surprisingly gentle, and as her fingertips reluctantly touched the smooth fur on his belly colors expanded like petals blossoming. Pink and orange blooms of light opened all over his silvery body, along with shifting stripes and dots of green, and without warning she was laughing. Tears spilled over her eyelids as she realized that she had found her flower, after all.

“Thank you, Nell.” She felt his voice hum through her like an oboe.

She ran her fingers gently over the thick, glossy coat. “Hender go now,” she said. “OK?” “OK, Nell. Hender go now.”

As Thatcher ran down the slope, he dodged weird transparent fern-like growths that sprouted over the clover fields in the gloom. Down the slope about a hundred feet, the headlights went dark. Thatcher could hear the idling engine cut off as he finally reached the Hummer.

The alpha spiger launched its two-ton body off its rear legs and catapulting tail, lunging up the hillside in a thirty-foot leap, as it followed the tracks of the Humvee up the slope in the moonlight.

Behind the red beast two smaller spigers the size of polar bears, the two members of its pack, pounced up the hill.

Drool lubricated their vertical jaws and their eyes darted rapidly on stalks, canvassing the hillside around them in vibrant, vivid detail. An army of parasites, from scavenging disk-ants to centipede-like worms, coursed through the giants’ fur like sea monsters battling all attacking bugs to a standstill and protecting its wounds so they could heal.

The alpha spiger bore a deep scar on one side of its face where a wolf-sized rival had slashed its head before it had bit the youngster in two. The others in its pack had devoured the spiger’s other half.

The alpha spiger spotted the Humvee rolling to a stop on the slope above. It doubled its speed.

Nell and Andy packed the cases to the brim with the haversacks of each hendropod and started stuffing as many fossils as they
could squeeze into the rest, even slipping some inside their pockets, reluctant to leave anything behind.

“Nell,” Andy said. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Coming back to get me.”

“Oh! No problem, sweetie.” She laughed and gave him one of her signature hugs.

“I thought I was dead,” he said, tearfully. “I couldn’t believe they saved me. But the hendros really took me in, Nell, they really did. Considering what they’re going to do to the island…” He paused, eyes closed tight. Finally he sighed, and opened his eyes to meet hers. “Anyway,” he said, “thanks.”

“Thanks for finding them, Andy.” Nell let him go and squeezed his shoulder. “Your name will go down in scientific history as the one who saved the hendropods from extinction. Come on—we don’t have much time. We need to go.” They each carried two stuffed cases up the stairs, leaving the fifth case for a second trip.

The cataract of the Milky Way filtered through the screen of the tree’s dome-like canopy. A heavy branch reached out over the cliff from which a row of branches protruded like monkey bars.

They watched as the hendropods turned headstands on the wide branch and, with their four long legs, reached out and grabbed the side branches. The creatures swung across, rotating with one limb after another.

When the hendropods reached a pulley that hung from the bottom of the branch, they jumped down the thick cable into the big basket.

“Mmm.
I don’t know…” Andy quavered, assessing their precarious escape route. “Hey! Where’s Thatcher?”

The others shot quick glances around.