Horizon (8 page)

“Owls with a lot on their minds,” Hoku said.

A branch rustled, and then another one. Hoku scanned the area, but couldn’t find the source. He’d never had that problem with his dark vision before.

“I don’t like this,” he said. He pushed himself slowly to his feet. “Aluna, wake up.”

“What?” Pocket asked. “Oh. You’re talking to the fish.”

“She’s not a fish, she’s a —”

And then the trees came alive. A dozen Human-shaped figures dropped out of the sky and landed around camp without making a sound.

Hoku blinked. His eyes thought they were trees, kept tricking him into thinking they weren’t people at all. He caught glimpses of rough, bark-like skin and long, gangly limbs dotted with tufts of leaves. He thought they were wearing strange capes at first, but the voluminous material hanging from their arms seemed connected to their flesh.

One of the invaders hooted to the others and made a motion with its hand. Hoku and Pocket hadn’t been listening to owls at all. They’d been listening to battle plans.

S
OMEONE SCREAMED.
Aluna bolted awake, her hands already reaching for weapons.

“Wake up!” Pocket yelled again. “The trees are attacking!”

But it wasn’t trees. Strange people darted through camp, thin Humans moving fast as eels but making no sound. They swarmed over the Upgraders’ camp in misshapen clusters, grabbing, yanking, clawing. The kludge was completely overrun.

Except . . . no one was attacking her or Calli.

“Who are they?” Calli asked. “Oh, no. Hoku!”

Aluna scanned the battle until she found Hoku.
There.
Struggling against an attacker determined to pull him to the ground with a choking wire. She snapped off her wrist bindings and used her arms to drag herself toward him, fast as a seal on dry land.

“They’ve got Dash, too!” Calli cried. “I’ll help him. You save Hoku.”

Calli’s wings unfurled with a snap, and for a moment, it seemed as if everyone in the clearing stopped to look at them.

Aluna felt a tug on her tail. She turned and kicked one of the Humans away. It let go without a fight. What was going on? Aluna started toward Hoku again, but one of the creatures now knelt in front of her, less than a meter away, blocking her way to Hoku.

The skin on its face seemed rough and craggy, like the bark of a tree. Twigs and leaves jutted from its wild hair. Without her dark vision, she may not have been able to pick out the creature from the forest behind it, even this close.

Aluna shifted her weight to her arms and swept her tail around to knock the Human off balance. It hopped up and over her tail as if it were playing a game.

“Wait,” the creature said, holding out its hand. “We come to rescue you. You and she, the winged one. We will take you to the fluttering heights! We will save you.” Its voice came out raspy, as if it hadn’t spoken in a long time and it barely remembered how.

“Don’t kill the others,” Aluna said. “They aren’t enemies!”

The creature was blocking her view of Hoku, but she could hear him grunting and gasping inside her ear. He was still alive, and his Kampii necklace would help him breathe even while he was being choked. But what if the creature decided to stab him instead?

“Go limp,” she whispered, hoping Hoku could hear her despite his panic. “Breathe through your shell. Let them think you’re dead.”

“We have no understanding,” the creature replied. “We will save you. We will kill to save you.”

“No killing,” Aluna said. “No killing!” Her muscles quivered. Her body wanted to fight. It wanted to snap every one of these creatures in half like twigs. No one was allowed to hurt her friends. No one. Not even if they were trying to help. But wading into the fray herself would only make things worse.

Aluna rolled onto her back and vaulted herself up to her tail. “Stop fighting!” she yelled. “Everyone stop or they’ll kill you!”

Hoku had already stopped struggling, but a creature loomed over him, poking him in the chest. Aluna scanned the camp until she found Dash and Calli, too. Dash had blood dripping down his face and his sword in his hand. His gaze darted everywhere. His nose flared. Equians couldn’t see well at night; poor Dash was fighting blind.

“Stop, Dash. Please!” She rarely used the word, and it had power. Dash’s eyes widened. He lowered his sword.

“It’s a trap!” Odd bellowed. “Prisoners are working with these devils! Fight, you Gizmos, fight!”

“No!” Aluna yelled, but it was useless.

Mags had three of them on her, but was twisting and turning, managing to stab them with her needles. Aluna heard a creature squeak and saw it leap away, an empty needle dangling from its neck. Squirrel fought beside Mags, jumping this way and that, slashing her attackers with something small and shiny clutched in her hand. Odd seemed indomitable, flinging his attackers off of him as if they were small as rats and bellowing into the night. Only Pocket was down, pinned to the ground and surrounded. And even so, the boy struggled and kicked.

The tree creatures hadn’t killed anyone yet, but if the Upgraders kept fighting, they would, even if just by accident. Odd and Mags and Squirrel would never stop, not until their bodies had lost every last bit of fight. If this battle continued, the kludge would be destroyed.

Aluna tried to slow her breathing and clear her head. She could stay and help the kludge fight. With her and Dash and Vachir, and even Calli and Hoku, maybe they could turn defeat into victory. Not without casualties, she knew, but they’d still have a small chance of surviving the forest and making it to Strand’s army, and then to Strand himself somehow.

But if she fought, she’d be choosing her desire to find Karl Strand over the lives of the Upgraders in Odd’s kludge. A week or two ago, it would have been an easy decision to make. But now they weren’t Upgraders, they were people. People she’d begun to respect. The fact that she’d ever thought they were expendable overwhelmed her with shame.

Karl Strand had a plan, and he didn’t care how many lives were lost while he achieved it. If Aluna wanted to make a better world than the one Strand was offering, then she needed to make better choices. No plan was worth the senseless death of good people, regardless of its goal.

“Take us,” Aluna said to the creature. “Calli and I will go with you right now. Take the horses and those two as well.” She pointed at Dash and Hoku. “Leave the others alone. Do not kill a single one of the rest, or there will be blood on both sides, I promise you.”

The Human stood in one smooth motion and emitted a series of birdcalls. It sounded so much like a night owl that Aluna would never have known the noises were made by a person unless she’d seen it herself.

A cluster of tree people surrounded her. She ground her teeth together as their rough hands grabbed her. She smelled moist soil and bark. “Hoku, Dash, Vachir — don’t fight them!”

“Fight them!” Odd countered. “Break them! Set them on fire!”

The creatures carrying her moved as one being, graceful and quick. In a flash they had maneuvered her to the base of an ancient tree and started climbing. She thought they would struggle with her weight, with the awkwardness of her body and her tail. Instead, they continued to move smoothly, tiny hooks on their feet and elbows giving them easy purchase up the tree trunk.

Calli, Dash, and Hoku were being carried up other trees.

“I can fly,” Calli said. “Just let me fly!”

But the creatures continued to hold her, and Aluna understood why. Branches and leaves clotted their path. Calli couldn’t even open her wings up here, let alone find the space to flap them.

On the ground, the Upgraders continued to fight. She saw Odd smack a tree person and it flew across half the campsite. But the creatures were leaving now, breaking off when they had openings and making their way up the trees and into the darkness again.

The horses. The creatures hadn’t taken the horses.

“Vachir!” Aluna called.

Vachir looked up from the ground, her huge eyes searching. The horse cried out, and Aluna felt the sound deep in her chest. Vachir’s massive body was no bigger than an ant, and getting smaller and smaller.

“I’ll find you!” Aluna yelled. “Stay safe! Stay with the kludge! I’ll find you no matter what!”

Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them out, not caring if the creatures saw. She tried to find the person who had bargained with her originally, but she couldn’t tell her rescuers apart. “I told you to take the horses,” she said, her hands squeezing into fists. “Rescue them, too!”

“No. Too big, too heavy. The wrong shape,” one of the people said. “They splinter if they fall.”

Aluna closed her eyes and swallowed. She couldn’t think about Vachir falling from a treetop. Her legs, so strong when they ran, were inflexible, fragile even, in other circumstances. No, horses did not belong in the treetops.

“Vachir,” she said again, her voice tired and broken.

She should check on Calli and make sure that Dash and Hoku were uninjured. She should find out where the things were taking them. Find out who their leader was and what they wanted.

But all she could do was say Vachir’s name over and over again and hope that this whole thing was a nightmare, an evil vision concocted by her brain to punish her and break her heart. It was better than facing the truth.

The creatures carried her higher than she thought possible. She began to see platforms stretched like cobwebs between the branches. Some were small, single sleeping hammocks, and some were large enough to hold huts with webbed roofs. Large glowing bugs the size of her head clung to the trees and the webbing and provided a faint light, just like the glowfish did back home. Without them, she’d have been blind up here. The tree people were almost invisible to her dark vision.

She watched one creature jump from a ledge and spread its arms. She’d thought it was wearing a loose cloth shirt, but the folds weren’t fabric — they were a membrane. A
flying
membrane. A thin layer of skin extended from the creature’s wrists down to its ankles on both sides. Another membrane opened between its ankles. The membranes caught the air and the creature glided gracefully down to another branch of the tree.

The creatures talked more up here, but only in their bird voices. Answering calls came from every direction, filling the air with a cacophony of whistles and chirps and small melodies.

Eventually they reached a wide, hanging stairway. It swung side to side as the creatures carried her up it, toward a vast area inside the trees. Leaves and branches created a canopy overhead, not unlike the curved walls of the domes back in the City of Shifting Tides. Dozens upon dozens of tiny webs surrounded a single, round platform in the center. They’d been brought to an arena.

The creatures deposited her in the center area. She tried to balance on her tail, but the shifting webbed ground made it impossible. She toppled over and braced herself with her arms. A fish in the desert was bad enough; a fish in the treetops was simply ridiculous. At least the webbing under her palms felt thick and coarse and sturdy, and not sticky and fragile as she’d suspected.

Hoku, Calli, and Dash were dropped with equal ceremony by her side. Dash helped her stand again so she could hug them and check for injuries. Blood covered Dash’s face, but he waved it off.

“I am fine,” he said. “The old wound reopened. Nothing more.”

“We’ll go back for Vachir,” Hoku said quietly.

Calli nodded. “We’ll find her, Aluna. She’s smart and brave, and she’ll be okay until we do.”

Aluna wanted to say something. Anything. She could only manage to nod.

The arena filled with tree people. They sat two or three to each small web, some dangling their feet over the edge, some crouched, some leaning against each other. Some moved like squirrels, others like insects. Aluna couldn’t tell how old they were, or if they were male or female. They all wore the same sort of muddy bark clothes plastered to their torsos and upper legs, and they all seemed perfectly comfortable despite the fact that they lived a hundred meters up in the sky.

A hunched tree person limped onto their platform with the help of a walking stick. Tattered and worn membranes hung under its arms, and deep ridges etched the skin of its face, making it look like the bark of an ancient tree. When the creature looked up at them, Aluna could barely see its eyes under the protruding overhang of its woody brows.

“We rescued you from the glints,” it said, and smiled. “A brave rescue. A good rescue!”

“Yeah,” Hoku muttered. “Just great.”