“If you think—”
“Octavia, shh!”
“No, you started this, so—”
“Octavia, shut up! Look!”
She grabs my shoulder and jerks me toward the hole in the ship wall, pointing at the scene on the ground below. The three gray-suited people who had been combing the dirt are all still, fingers to one ear. They stand frozen, slightly hunched, listening to their comms. Then, as if called by a single whistle, they drop what they’re doing and run toward the rear of the Vagantur. I lean out of the hole, trying to watch their progress, but they either disappear inside the ship or go around under the tail to the other side.
“This is our chance,” Alma says, and throws one leg through the hole, out into the sun.
“Wait.” I hold her by the arm. “What if they come back?”
“And what if they come inside? The guards who caught me probably already commed back to N’Terra and told them they found me!”
She’s right, but I feel the way the myn feel in the stream, every shadow a lurking predator. Either way carries a threat: ahead and behind.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”
The side of the Vagantur is steeper than I thought. I had imagined us merely climbing out the hole the crash landing had made in the hull and sliding down the body to the ground below. In practice, this is difficult. There are other holes to be wary of, the ship jagged in places where it had met the planet so suddenly.
“No one died in the landing? Captain Williams must have been quite a pilot,” Alma mutters.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
We’re both stalling. I lay my hand on the pocket housing the captain’s pin, and once more make a silent promise that I’ll put her to rest one day.
“It’s the only way,” I say, trying to sound more confident than I feel. We might have gone on sitting there indecisively if the sound of shouting from inside the ship hadn’t reached our ears.
“Did you hear that?”
“What did they say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
She grabs my hand, squeezes it, and pushes off, yanking me with her.
The wind in my ears feels as if we’re dropping from a cliff. The momentum immediately tears our hands apart, and I clamp my lips inside my teeth to keep from screaming. Just in front of me, the side of the ship opens in a row of fangs, the exoskeleton torn, and I’m sliding straight toward it. I slam my palms against the ship beneath me, trying to stop, but feel only the blazing heat of the metal, fired by the sun. Still, I manage to shove myself to the right, and I go spinning on the slick surface, careening sideways, continuing my chaotic journey to the ground hip first: the distance feels a mile long. It might be. One of the soles of my N’Terran shoes, rubbery, catches on the Vagantur, and spins me again. I tumble downward, the ground getting closer and greener and my own breath thunder in my ears, everything happening quickly and in a series of blurs.
Alma lands before me: I hear her cry out nearby before a breath later tumbling down myself. I land in a heap by a crumpled pile of wreckage, and thank the stars I hadn’t landed directly on it, surely impaled. I lie there for a moment, my lungs heaving for air, the sky a rude shade of merry blue in the face of my terror. I try to make myself sit up, but my limbs won’t respond. Every part of me seems to be catching its breath. Only my eyes obey, and when they strain upward at the Vagantur, they take in first the hole from which we’d leaped, then, beyond, the few observation deck windows from which the passengers of this ship, when airborne, had watched the galaxy passing by. And then, inside those windows, the faces of a dozen guards. If I wasn’t already motionless I would have gone still, but I realize quickly that the faces aren’t interested in me. Some look at me, but only in passing, their gazes vacating quickly to aim beyond, sweeping the clearing that had become the Vagantur’s home. They’re looking for something else, and even from here I can read their expressions like slides in Dr. Espada’s projector. Fear. Bald, blinding fear.
My limbs come alive.
“Alma,” I croak, clambering up from where I’m sprawled. “Alma, something is wrong. They . . . they went inside because there’s something out here.”
Alma doesn’t reply. She lies where she had fallen, about five feet away. I stand fully, swaying slightly, and then move to her side. She’s out cold. I don’t see any blood, but she must have hit her head in the fall.
“Alma,” I cry, shaking her shoulder. “I really, really, really need you to wake up!”
Her eyelids flutter but she doesn’t stir. I sweep my eyes over the now-empty clearing. None of the graysuits in sight, and no creature making its way out of the jungle either. But I’ve learned there are other ways of seeing. Reluctantly, as if opening a door that may suck me out into space, I slowly allow the Artery to spiral open.
It’s the silence that terrifies me. As if the invisible mouth of every animal has sealed itself, faded itself away. There is not a sound in the Artery, even when I widen it, curious: not a whisper, not a shade of color. Everyone has gone mute. It can only mean one thing.
I’ve just lifted Alma’s wrists to pull her when the roar shakes the ground beneath my feet. I squeeze my eyes shut but don’t let go, trying to fight the tremor that starts in the soles of my feet and forces its way up through my bones. I heave on Alma’s hands and begin pulling her toward the jungle. There is no plan, there is no outline: I just know we can’t get back into the ship, and we can’t stay out here in the open. For all I know I’m moving toward the dirixi, but I have to move. Alma’s head is raised from the ground as I pull her along, and all I can do is hope that a jagged rock or a piece of the ship doesn’t cut her as I drag her toward the trees. I know very well that we’re near death with a dirixi in the vicinity. But if one of us bleeds, death is certain.
I’ve just reached the tree line when the massive predator emerges from the jungle across the clearing. I glimpse its bulk in my peripheral vision, as tall as a few of the syca. I can’t look. I can’t let myself. I use every bit of strength to haul my best friend into the cover of the trees and collapse there among the duna, my muscles trembling. Alma makes a groaning sound but still does not wake. I turn my eyes to the dirixi.
It’s more terrifying than any Greenhouse projection could have prepared me for. Much of its body blends into the surrounding trees, but it doesn’t change like my suit or the Faloii’s skin. This is not camouflage. It is pure jungle: deep green with overlapping patches of brown and gray, like shadows woven between foliage, as if the beast had hatched from the forest itself, the vines becoming veins in its tough skin. I can see its teeth from here, the vicious mouth held slightly open as if laughing, as if ready to chuckle while it devours whatever’s in its path. It moves smoothly forward on all fours—too smoothly for something that large—but as it passes through the clearing, it rises occasionally to its barbed back legs, pausing and raising its powerful jaws to the sky, scenting whatever in the air has drawn it to this place. There are protrusions around the end of its snout: I can’t tell, but from here they resemble tentacles, extending out into the air and swaying every time the dirixi pauses to inhale the smell of blood. Had one of the workers cut themselves? Is that what had drawn it here? I look down again at Alma, anxiously searching for any sign of a wound. Her skinsuit is filthy from our travels from N’Terra, but while she’s covered in streaks of brown and green, no blaze of red draws my eye. I rack my brains for whatever other hunting adaptations the dirixi possesses besides that incredible talent for blood, but the sight of the beast in the clearing devours everything in my mind: knowledge, action. The only thing left is fear. I stare numbly out at the dirixi. Perhaps this is another of its skills. A psychic predator as well as a flesh eater.
“Why is the ground shaking,” Alma says, her voice groggy. I whirl around to face her and find her pushing up on one elbow, her face screwed up with pain.
“Don’t get up too fast,” I say, moving to her side. “You hit your head.”
Alma makes a sound. She chokes on it.
“I know,” I say quickly. “But if we just stay hidden . . . maybe . . .”
The frailty of this small hope crumbles as the leaves directly behind us rattle and crash. Turning my back on the dirixi is like . . . turning your back on a dirixi. But the creature in the clearing is cloned in my mind: suddenly I imagine them all around us, and I find myself clinging to Alma’s arm, both of us frozen, our eyes fastened on the place in the trees where the sounds of snapping twigs and crashing undergrowth grow louder.
But it’s not a roar that comes next. It’s the sound of a voice, addressing someone we can’t see.
“Thought you could just ambush me, did you? I don’t know how you got out here, kid, but when I get you back to the ship we’ll figure out just what’s what!”
I see the buzzgun first, emerging from the bushes behind us, and then the person holding it: a gray-suited guard with a facemask, only his angry eyes visible above its top edge. His voice sounds muffled and almost electronic through the mask, but I make out his words clearly as he breaks through the thickest of the undergrowth into the sparser area where Alma and I crouch.
“I know your face,” the guard goes on, and he steps clear from the tangle of foliage. “I don’t know where I know it from, but I know it. I look forward to getting you in front of Albatur.”
He’s dragging someone with him, someone with their hands bound in front of them, someone tall and stocky with skin the color of an izinusa.
“Rondo,” I cry.
Rondo stumbles out from the undergrowth behind the guard, and they both look as surprised to see Alma and me as we do them. We all stand there staring for a moment, the buzzgun wavering from being pointed at Rondo’s ribs, as if the guard can’t decide who he needs to threaten to shoot. And then he sees the dirixi beyond us. His face goes through the opposite transition as Alma’s had: where there had been sharp clarity a moment before is a fading expression of slackness, disbelief like a concussion that momentarily deadens his mind.
And then Rondo hits him.
With his hands bound together, the blow ends up being a double-fisted strike that connects directly with the guard’s nose, the crack of the bone as audible as a breaking branch.
“Oooh,” Alma cries, flinching.
The guard crumples, his buzzgun tumbling to the ground. The blast it emits is a combination of a bang and a slash of electricity, the projectile invisible except for the blur of energy that lances up into the trees.
No one moves. Rondo and I lock eyes and then, as if connected to one brain, we slowly turn and look toward the Vagantur.
The dirixi has paused, its monstrous head tilted away from the ship; and I glimpse one gargantuan eye, streaked with red and yellow like a vicious, shrunken sun, dart across the clearing, scanning for movement.
“You broke my nose,” the guard growls from the ground. He removes one hand from his face, swiping blindly for his buzzgun. With his face only half-covered, the fountain of blood streaming from his nostrils catches my eye like a magnet.
“Oh no,” Alma says, then repeats herself. “Oh no . . .”
I hear it before I see it. The shift in the ground as the dirixi rises slowly from all fours to its back two legs, the mammoth snout lifted into the clear blue sky, two cavernous nostrils flexing, the tip of a neon-yellow tongue appearing from between its deep-green lips, scenting the trickle of blood that the breeze carries to it . . .
I’m running before the beast returns its front claws to the ground, Alma on my tail. I shove Rondo back into the trees he had just emerged from, and we’re all shouting, but no one’s words actually sound like words. Everything is noise. Behind us, the sound of the buzzgun firing again, and just ahead of me a gash appears in a tree trunk from the blast. He’s shooting at us, the fool! We duck and run, crashing through the trees with our arms guarding our faces against the many thorny vines, Rondo with his hands still bound together. At one point he trips, and unable to catch himself, falls down with a thud, his cry of pain like a stab in my ribs. Alma and I haul him up on either side, and I think I’m babbling about keep going, keep running, and stay with me, but I have no idea where I’m leading them. There is no blaze of rhohedron, no Dr. Espada telling me where to go. There’s not even any Rasimbukar here to rescue me. It’s me and Faloiv, the planet a green haze of violence around me, and I can’t tell if the ground shaking is the dirixi close behind, jaws open, or if it’s just my heartbeat that shakes the whole world.
I suddenly smell water. It invades my brain like a dream, like the scent of ogwe that beckons me when I need to calm down. The water doesn’t calm me, but it does tell me something.
“Water,” I cry. “Do you smell it?”
“Of course not!” Alma shouts.
“Come on, come on,” I yell, making sure Rondo is with me. His face is bruised from his fall, but he’s not bleeding.
Far behind, I think I hear the guard shout. The dirixi doesn’t roar, but maybe it doesn’t need to when its prey is so easily conquered. I push the thought out of my mind and focus on the smell of water. The Artery is still empty with the exception of a few small carnivores from above eyeing my consciousness with caution, ensuring I’m not another threat. I sense that they are moving toward the water too—I don’t know why, but there’s no time for hypotheses.
“There.” I point at the dip in the land ahead, my breath ragged. My quadriceps are locking up. We’ve been running too long, and we’re all dehydrated. Closer now, the water doesn’t smell like the water we drink in N’Terra, but I forge ahead, the presence of the carnivores in the trees encouraging me. They are hurrying for the same destination, they must be.
I shove through a row of plants with thin fronds as long as I am tall: they droop forward, their tips coming to rest on the surface of the river ahead. They appear to be drinking. I watch, breathless, as one or two seem to have drunk their fill and slowly straighten until they are pointing at the sky. Several then release bubbles, floating upward, transparent with a lavender iridescence.
“I smell it now,” Alma says, panting. She looks over her shoulder at the jungle, terror making her eyes huge. “That’s . . . that’s not water.”
“It is,” I say, even though I’m not convinced either. But some combination of my nose and the Artery tells me I’m right: it is water, but strange water.
All three of us lurch when three animals drop from the trees nearby. Rondo was busy trying to wriggle out of the rope the guard had bound his wrists with, but now he stands frozen, staring at the creatures who stand beside us on the bank.
“I—I don’t know what they are,” Alma says quietly, as much to herself as to us. The animals, the same pale purple as the water, are four legged, and the toes on their front feet appear to be webbed. Their fur stands out straight from their bodies in a rugged kind of puff, every bit of them cluttered by various pollen and other tree matter. Their faces, almost flat, bear luminous eyes, perfectly round. We’re deeper in the jungle than any finder has gone: the life that surrounds us is as unknown as the lavender water.
The animals don’t know what we are either. I sense their curiosity about us as they approach the river’s edge, but their urgency overcomes any wonderment. They wade in without caution, violet splashes soaking the bank as the roar of the dirixi reverberates through the trees. It’s impossible to tell how close it is, but it’s close enough.
“What do we do?” Rondo says. He’s succeeded in removing the bonds from his wrists, and I feel like an idiot for not having helped him.
“I don’t know.” The
carnivores that dropped from the trees haven’t waded across as I expected; instead they pause there in the water, the current rocking them gently. But they stay put. They watch the shore with vigilant eyes.
“They’re using the water to hide,” Alma says quickly. “The dirixi must not be able to swim.”
“But . . .”
“They know their predators better than we do!” she cries. “We should do the same thing.”
She moves toward the water and I’m biting my lip, unsure about whether or not to follow, when Rondo grabs her arm.
“Wait!” he cries. “Look!”
Something is swarming out of the water, slithering up over the bodies of the three carnivores. Whatever it is, it’s a mass of many small creatures: too tiny to make out from where we stand openmouthed on the bank, perceived only as what looks to be a violet slime, stirring the surface of the water where the animals stand otherwise motionless.
Alma stumbles backward away from the river’s edge, falling against me and Rondo.
“What is happening?” she cries. “Are they getting eaten?”
The dirixi’s roar shatters the air again, and we stand stupidly as all prey must do at some point—there’s nowhere to hide. The dirixi is at our back. The river and its infestation of microscopic predators at our front. If the three animals in the water are being eaten alive, then perhaps they are simultaneously rotting too—that must account for the sudden smell that fills the air: a pungent aroma shoves its way into my nose like a fist. It’s so powerfully nauseating that I almost forget about the threat of the dirixi. . . . All I can think about is vomiting.
Alma actually does. It hits her suddenly, as if her organs are grabbed by an invisible claw. She doubles over, the force of her nausea choking a groan from her throat. Rondo is leaning against a tree, not yet throwing up but with a twisted face like he could at any moment. And then I see the other animals on the bank.
All of them sick.
There are at least a dozen: carnivores and herbivores alike streaming from the forest, all of them either retching or stumbling to the ground, where they lie heaving. My knees feel weak. I sink down next to Rondo where he slumps, sweating, at the base of the tree. The smell rises in waves . . . from the river. Through watering eyes, I realize I can almost see the smell: a purplish haze surrounds the three carnivores where they still continue to be swarmed by the microscopic creatures in the water. They are the only creatures present who look unbothered by the stench. Underneath us, the ground shakes as the dirixi approaches. I can’t bring myself to care: the nausea has robbed me of all ability to plan escape.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 15