Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  And heading straight toward Anna.

  Anna realized the problem with Plan A—with the three of them spread out on bungee cords, she was too far from the flame.

  She went for her own flare.

  “Save it!” Molly yelled. “Javi, pull us closer together!”

  Javi grabbed both the cords leading from his belt and yanked. Anna felt herself slewing sideways through the air, headed in toward Javi. Molly came flying in from the opposite side, the flare hissing in her hand.

  The birds’ formation split and went shrieking in all directions, a storm of wings enveloping Team Killbot just as Anna and Molly crashed into each other. Anna clung to the gravity device and Molly shrieked—the smell of burning hair filling Anna’s lungs. The two bounced back, tumbling through the air, and Anna saw the flare go spinning down into the jungle.

  “Ouch! Crap!” Molly yelled, batting at her smoking hair.

  Anna looked at the shredder birds. They had streamed past, but a moment later the flock was wheeling around again.

  “Incoming,” she said.

  “I’ll use mine!” Javi held his flare up.

  “No! We’ve only got two more!” Molly cried. “Go to Plan B.”

  Anna smiled—she’d been really wanting to try Plan B.

  She switched the device off, then back on again as quickly as she could. A sickening jolt of normal gravity hit her stomach.

  Weightlessness came back a moment later, but the sudden burst of gravity had bent their course, sending the three of them downward through the trees. The shrieking birds missed again, passing overhead as fronds and branches slapped at Anna’s face. Then a bungee cord snagged and went taut. Anna found herself spinning, wrapping around a tree like a tetherball.

  Finally, she crashed into Javi, sending a shower of leaves in all directions.

  “Ow,” he said.

  “Sorry.” Anna noticed that the explosion of leaves around them was weightless, expanding like a balloon in the air. “Whoa, that’s pretty.”

  “They’re turning around again!” Molly shouted from above, where she was tangled in the cords. “Don’t they ever stop?”

  “They didn’t stop coming at me until I was on the ground.” Javi stared at Anna. “Not until you …”

  “Turned the device off,” Anna said.

  She looked at the glowing machine in her hands. Maybe the birds were attracted to it somehow. Which meant she should turn it off, except—

  She looked down at the ground, at least fifty feet below. With normal gravity on, they would all tumble to their deaths.

  “Fly to the ground, quick!” Molly unclipped the bungee cord from her belt and kicked off downward from the tree. She pulled her way past branches like a diver descending through seaweed.

  Javi managed to unwind himself and followed. But as Anna unhooked the clip from her belt, she realized that a bungee cord was wrapped around her leg. She was roped to the tree, tight.

  The shredder birds were drawing closer, their screams rending the air.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “Anna! Get moving!” Molly called from below her, dangerously close to the edge of the device’s range.

  “I’m stuck.” Anna hooked herself to the bungee cord again, then flung her arms around the tree trunk. “Grab on to something in five! Four! Three!”

  At zero, she turned the device off.

  Normal gravity struck, and Anna skidded down the trunk a little. But the bungee cord bit into her leg, jerking her to a halt. She swayed in the air, the narrow treetop sagging under her weight, but she didn’t fall.

  The birds came shrieking in, but it was like a targeting beacon had been switched off. The flock scattered through the branches, slicing off fronds and leaves, only a few razor-sharp beaks nipping at Anna’s arms and face.

  A moment later, they had disappeared into the mists again.

  She clung to the tree, ignoring the blood seeping from her wounds and the cord squeezing the life from her leg.

  “You okay?” Molly called up.

  “Fine.” Anna’s voice sounded calm in her own ears, but her heart was beating hard now. “Can you guys hold on another minute?”

  “No problem,” Javi called.

  A minute sounded right to Anna. She was happy hanging on to this branch for sixty seconds before turning the device back on if it meant the shredder birds were long gone.

  “One, one-thousand. Two, one-thousand. Three, one-thousand,” she calmly counted.

  But her mind was aflame again, her numbness erased by the pulse of danger in her veins.

  Weird, how a bunch of birds would be attracted by a machine—especially one that had never existed before. Because a device that bent the laws of science had to be brand-new, right?

  “Eight, one-thousand. Nine, one-thousand. Ten, one-thousand,” she went on, feeling tingles in her bungee-wrapped leg.

  Of course, this whole jungle was pretty much outside the bounds of science. The white sky, the strange birds and plants, the fact that the airplane crashed in a jungle instead of ice and snow.

  This place was just as weird as the device.

  By the time Anna had finished counting to sixty and was ready to turn the machine back on and drift down to the ground, she had come to a conclusion that she knew was very strange, and yet made perfect sense.

  The gravity device and this jungle were connected somehow.

  This sucks.” Javi waved at the insects buzzing around his head. “It’s even worse than flying.”

  Molly thwacked away a vine. “No deadly birds, though.”

  “True.” Javi gave the white sky a nervous glance, then checked the branches for dangling snakes.

  “If we can figure out what attracts the shredder birds to the device, maybe we can fix it,” Anna said. “And go back to jumping.”

  Javi frowned. “Since when are they called shredder birds?”

  “Since they tried to shred you,” Anna said.

  “But I discovered them!” Javi said.

  “Discovered them?” Molly asked.

  “Well, I saw them first. I should get to name them.”

  “Okay, what do you got?” Molly was in front, whacking away vines and fronds with a survival knife. Her hair was singed on one side from the flare collision, and she wore a linen airplane napkin tied into a headband to keep the sweat out of her eyes. All that, combined with the knife, made her look like she was in a low-budget pirate costume.

  “Um.” Javi thought for a moment. Shredder birds was a pretty cool name, but it didn’t seem fair to have his only shirt ripped up and not get naming rights.

  Now he was wearing a button-down salvaged from a random piece of luggage in the hold. It fit perfectly, which only made it creepier that its real owner was dead. Javi wondered how long it would be before they were all wearing dead people’s clothing.

  That thought sent all the good names for birds from his mind.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he muttered.

  “Shredder birds it is!” Molly cried, slashing through a vine hanging in front of her.

  “Can I use the knife next, at least?” Javi asked.

  “I called next,” Anna said.

  “Whatever,” he said. “But I get to name the next scary thing we run into!”

  Molly didn’t answer, just gave him a sharp look, like she didn’t want to be reminded that there were plenty more scary things out there in the jungle.

  But Javi figured there probably were.

  At first, leaving camp behind had lifted his spirits. The crashed airplane seemed haunted by the ghosts of all those other passengers, its broken frame a reminder of how badly everything could go wrong. But out here in the deep jungle, Javi had learned one thing: Technology might fail sometimes, but nature didn’t care either way.

  Nature was also messy, he thought as he clambered over a fallen tree. The trunk was split open down the middle, and things with too many legs skittered around inside.

  At least the flying insects
were pretty. They glowed a soft Christmas-light blue. Maybe he could put a bunch of them in a jar and make a lantern, like fireflies in summer.

  Lanternbugs? Bluebugs?

  It would be pretty awesome, arriving home and announcing that instead of winning a robot-soccer championship, he’d discovered a new animal.

  Of course, to do that he’d actually have to get home in the first place.

  “It’s getting louder,” Molly said.

  For a moment Javi thought she meant the buzz of insects. But then he felt the rumbling beneath his feet. He cupped his ears to place the sound—the waterfall was still straight ahead.

  “Yoshi!” Molly called into the jungle.

  “He won’t be able to hear you,” Anna said. “That waterfall’s too loud.”

  “Onward through the bugs!” Javi cried.

  Half an hour’s march later, the sound of rushing water had grown thunderous enough to make the fronds tremble. Clouds of spray drifted through the jungle like wandering ghosts, chilling to the touch.

  The scent of water made Javi thirsty. His bottle had been empty for a while. This rescue mission had taken longer than they’d planned, and he didn’t want to think about how worried Oliver would be.

  But finally Molly let out a whoop and led them forward to a clearing centered around a huge waterfall. It tumbled down out of the mists, crashing into an outcrop of rock. A rippling pool formed beneath the falls.

  Javi stepped forward greedily, empty bottle in hand.

  “Wait a second.” Anna put a hand on his arm, looking around. “This is a watering hole, but there aren’t any animals drinking.”

  “What?” Molly asked. “You think it’s poison or something?”

  Anna shook her head. “There might be predators around. Watering holes are a favorite place for ambush hunting.”

  Javi stared at the cool, glittering water. “Ambush hunting, seriously? Why does nature have to be such a pain in the butt?”

  “It’s funny that you think nature cares about your convenience,” Anna said.

  Javi rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well at least civilization never tries to eat me.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Molly asked. “Just sit here and … wait, what’s that?”

  Javi followed her gaze. In the red vines tangled around the edge of the pool lay a dark blue shape—arms splayed out on the vines. Was that a body?

  Javi almost cried out, but then he realized what it was. A shirt.

  The same color that Yoshi had been wearing.

  “Theories?” Molly asked softly, barely audible above the roar of water. “Conjectures?”

  “He went for a swim?” Javi suggested.

  Molly shook her head. “Then where is he?”

  Anna shrugged. “Well, either it’s safe around here and he went wandering off. Or the local predator took him, and it’s already fed. In which case the watering hole should be safe for the rest of the day.”

  Javi stared at her. “That’s cold. Even for you.”

  But she was making a horrible sort of sense, and the shirt didn’t look bloody. Not from this far away, in any case.

  “I’m going to check it out,” Javi said, and set off across the viney floor of the clearing.

  As he drew closer, he noticed how neatly the shirt was arranged, like it was laid out to dry. A fancy shirt like that, Yoshi had probably just wanted to wash it. Score one for the no-predators theory.

  Plus, nothing short of a T. rex could’ve taken Yoshi without a struggle, thanks to his sword. Javi looked carefully. No bloodstains.

  So where was the guy?

  Then Javi saw something in the undergrowth beside his foot, a glimmer of white among the rusty hues. He knelt to look closer and swallowed.

  It was a cluster of bones about the size of a finger.

  “What?” Molly called. She was making her way over from the edge of the clearing.

  “Wait a second.” He leaned closer and realized that there were too many bones for a human finger, a whole string of them three inches long.

  He pushed aside the undergrowth a little. It was a tiny spine, the size of a mouse’s, maybe. Just a random skeleton.

  Javi swallowed. No big deal. When animals died in a jungle, nobody buried them.

  But then he saw another little spine a couple of feet from the first one. So maybe there was a predator around here.

  “Um, I think maybe we should …”

  “Hey!” Molly shouted.

  Javi looked up. Halfway across the clearing, her arms out for balance, Molly was struggling to lift her leg, but it was stuck somehow.

  Then Javi saw the vines stirring beneath her, as if an army of snakes was swirling around her feet. He leaped up—

  —or tried to.

  A vine was wrapped around his right wrist, like a rope. He tried to pull away, but it slid tighter, coiling up his arm.

  “What is this?” he yelled.

  “Don’t know!” Molly cried. “Stay off the vines, Anna.”

  Javi pulled again, trying to use the strength of his legs to uproot the vine. But it was useless. The vine was too strong, and now his ankles were entangled as well!

  Then he remembered the flare in his pocket. He grabbed for it with his left hand, pulled it out.

  But as he moved, another vine sprang up and coiled around his left wrist.

  He struggled. More of the vines were snaking their way up from the undergrowth, wrapping around his waist, his legs. One was slithering toward his neck. He couldn’t bring his hands together to tear the top off the flare.

  Clearly, whoever had designed this stupid flare hadn’t taken predatory vines into account!

  Javi leaned his head down and took the tear-away top between his teeth. As he pulled back, a geyser of sparks hit him in the face. Smoke stung his eyes and filled his lungs, but he waved the gout of flame as much as he could …

  A hissing sound reached Javi’s ears, and a smell like burning grass. A moment later, the grip on his left wrist went slack.

  He managed to open his tearing eyes and waved the flare at the vines holding his right arm. They shot back into the undergrowth as fast as snapped rubber bands.

  “Anna! Throw me your flare!” Molly called.

  Waving the gusher of sparks around him, Javi finally managed to gain his feet. But then a single vine came shooting from the ground. It wrapped around his hand and squeezed, as painful as a handshake from one of his weight-lifting cousins. The flare dropped from Javi’s grasp and into the undergrowth.

  A pulse went through the vines, spreading out from where the hissing, sputtering flare lay. But the cord wrapped around his hand stayed firm.

  “Why won’t you die?” he cried out, kicking at its roots.

  Then, out of nowhere, a flash of metal sliced through the air.

  The pressure on his hand was gone, and Javi stumbled back, landing at the edge of the water. Before him stood a shirtless Yoshi, swinging the samurai sword at the thicket of vines. The sword moved faster than Javi could see, whistling in the air, slicing through the leafy strands like they were spiderwebs.

  A moment later, the vines had disappeared again.

  Yoshi stood there panting, his sword held ready. The smoke from the sputtering flare wreathed through the clearing, roiled by the spray from the falls. Molly stood ready to ignite the flare Anna had tossed her. But nothing moved in the undergrowth.

  “Um, thanks,” Javi finally said.

  Yoshi slowly lowered the sword, his eyes darting from side to side. Then at last he extended a hand.

  “I guess we’re even now,” he said.

  Javi frowned as he took Yoshi’s hand and pulled himself to his feet.

  Then Javi remembered—he’d found the sword in the luggage. “Um, okay. But you’re pretty good with that thing.”

  “Against a plant? Not exactly a challenge.” Yoshi inspected his blade. “You’re just lucky I came back for my shirt. Tanglevine is tricky if you don’t meet it with steel.”
<
br />   “No kidding,” Javi said. “And there’s also these birds that …”

  Javi’s voice faded. Tanglevine.

  He let out a soft sigh.

  “Cool name, dude.”

  It’s getting dark,” Molly said. “Maybe we should stop here. It’s tricky enough flying in daylight.”

  “It’s really just jumping,” Anna corrected her.

  “Still tricky.” Molly glanced at Yoshi, who didn’t seem remotely surprised by all this talk of flying. When Anna had demonstrated the gravity device for him, he’d only nodded. Maybe a little thing like antigravity didn’t seem strange to the discoverer of tanglevine.

  “Hang on,” Javi said. “You want to spend the night out here?”

  Molly nodded. “It’s better than crashing through the trees in the dark.”

  “I’d rather be in the trees than down with the carnivorous vines!” Javi looked accusingly at the undergrowth. “And who knows what else comes out at night in this place?”

  “We can’t fly blind,” Molly said.

  Anna nodded in agreement. “Two words: shredder birds. Not fun in the dark.”

  “That was seven words,” Javi said. “And what about the predators down here?”

  Everyone looked at Molly.

  “We build a fire,” she said, trying to sound certain. “That will keep us safe.”

  She led the four of them to a bare, rocky outcrop. No one wanted to camp anywhere near the thick undergrowth, even with the roar of the waterfall a good distance away. Obviously, the tanglevine hunted near watering holes, but Yoshi had said he’d sensed it before he’d reached the falls.

  They collected kindling along the way, and the fire starter soon had it smoldering. The night hadn’t turned cold yet, but an open flame seemed to scare off the animals in the place. The ones they’d met so far, anyway.

  Maybe the nighttime had a whole new batch of predators.

  Molly put that thought aside. What they needed was a way to fly home without being shredded.

  “Tomorrow we’ll jump lower,” she said. “If we stay below the treetops, we can hit the dirt much quicker if the birds appear.”

  “Sure,” Javi said. “But what if the dirt has tanglevine lurking in it?”