Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  It was a while before anyone spoke again.

  “We should get back to the bonfire,” Anna said. “It’s getting colder.”

  “And just leave him?” Molly asked.

  Nobody had an answer. The thought of going into the heavy-gravity field again made Javi’s stomach churn.

  Anna shrugged. “Nature doesn’t need help burying the dead.”

  There was that word again. Dead.

  People wound up dead in a place like this. That was how nature wanted it—every animal and plant one misstep away from becoming part of the food web. Javi could feel it all around him, the patient hunger of the jungle.

  Molly looked like she was about to argue, to say they should have another funeral or even bury him. But then the rain started—a clattering sound, high in the leaves.

  It built steadily, but Javi couldn’t feel any drops. The thick jungle canopy was protecting them for now. He let the rumble of the rain numb his mind.

  “Okay.” Molly sounded relieved that a fresh problem had come up. “I guess we need to find shelter.”

  “Not this close to him,” Javi said gently. None of them would sleep.

  Molly led them away from the distortion field, to a spot where the jungle canopy was so thick overhead that there was no glimpse of sky. The rain was finally starting to trickle down through the leaves, forming cold, squishy puddles underfoot.

  Molly and Anna bent a few of the lower branches closer together and bound them with bungee cords into a makeshift shelter. Everyone huddled together on the roots of the tree, which bulged up high enough to stay dry. The undergrowth here was sparse, which gave the tanglevine less cover to sneak around underfoot.

  But tanglevine wasn’t the big worry, of course. There was still that foghorn beast out there in the distance, or maybe nearby, its footsteps drowned out by the rain.

  Yoshi said he would stand watch and wake one of the others in a few hours. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the roots, facing the trees.

  The downpour built until it was too loud to talk. Soon the glowflies had retreated to wherever insects went when it rained, and darkness overtook the jungle.

  As she refilled her water bottles from a dripping branch, Molly leaned close to Javi’s ear. “It was my idea, him going up to check the stars.”

  Javi had been waiting for this. “That doesn’t make it your fault.”

  “He’d never even used the device before.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t know about these …” Gravity sinks? Thundersucks? Javi didn’t feel like coming up with a name just now. He could still feel the awful weight in his bones, like he’d never crawled out of the high-G zone.

  Like the darkness itself had grown heavy.

  “I pushed him,” Molly said. “He didn’t even want to jump.”

  “It was just bad luck.”

  Molly shook her head. “You can’t say that.”

  “That’s what it was.”

  “But that’s even worse than it being my fault!”

  Javi stared at her. “Why?”

  “Because if I made a mistake, no matter how bad, we can learn from it.” Molly closed her eyes, her breaths coming short and sharp. “But if something like that can just happen here, then we’re all …”

  She didn’t finish, but Javi didn’t want her to.

  “Listen,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here.”

  Molly just shook her head, like it was all too much.

  “You’re going to get us out of here,” Javi persisted. “You’re going to get us home!”

  “From an alien world?”

  “Caleb said the moons were fake. We’re back to not knowing anything about where we are.”

  “That’s not useful! At least an alien planet is a workable theory. Otherwise everything we’ve seen is just … crazy.”

  Javi shrugged. “Sometimes stuff is crazy.”

  “How can you deal with nothing making sense?”

  He laughed softly. “Have you met my family?”

  “Your family are the sanest people I know,” she said.

  Javi gave her a sidelong look, but didn’t argue. Molly looked like she was about to cry. And it wasn’t fair, arguing about whose family was crazier.

  In a funny way, Molly and her mom were the same. Neither of them had ever gotten over how a random disease had just appeared out of nowhere to take Molly’s father away. The only difference was, the experience had made Molly a lot more rational—needing to know the whys of everything—and her mother a lot less.

  “Caleb’s gone, but he helped us,” Javi said. “We know that those moons are fake. That has to mean something.”

  “Right,” Molly murmured, curling up. “You’re right. We’ll figure it out.”

  He watched her close her eyes. Almost by accident, he’d said the right thing—that Caleb had at least given them a clue, a promise that this strange new world could be understood.

  But what if that wasn’t true?

  Javi stared out into the formless dark. There were monsters out there.

  He listened to the rain until he managed to fall asleep.

  The sound was different.

  Yoshi shot awake, his hand on his sword hilt. Was it the huge, mournful creature, here in their camp?

  Then he realized—the only change was that the rain had stopped. The roar had been replaced by the drip of water through leaves.

  He’d fallen asleep on watch. Unforgivable.

  He took a slow breath, easing himself upright. Kira was curled up next to him, and she stirred a little. It was still dark, but the glowflies were out again, casting a blue pall over everything.

  The others were all asleep, draped like kittens on the roots of the sheltering tree. Anna cradled the gravity device in her arms.

  Yoshi stared at it. He could just take the device now and explore all he wanted.

  Of course, that would leave the others with a long, dangerous march home. He couldn’t do that, especially after what had happened last night.

  But Caleb’s death only made Yoshi’s need to explore greater.

  Caleb had said that the moons were fake. Which could mean that the stars were fake, too. What if everything they’d seen had been designed?

  Yoshi had to know. He reached out and touched the device.

  Beside him, Kira opened her eyes. He pulled his hand back.

  “You don’t have to steal it,” she whispered. “There’s another one.”

  He stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  Kira pointed back at where they’d left Caleb’s body.

  “The area of darkness, of heaviness—what if a machine is making it that way?” She gestured at the device in Anna’s arms. “A machine like that one.”

  Yoshi thought for a moment. The high-gravity zone was circular, like the field generated by the device.

  But he shrugged. “I don’t need something to make me heavier. I need to fly.”

  “All those symbols,” Kira whispered. “Maybe the machine in there is exactly the same, just on a different setting.”

  Yoshi frowned, remembering the stands of taller trees reaching into the sky. Those areas were also perfect circles, and the same size as the high-gravity zone.

  What if they were also caused by devices? If the gravity was set low, the trees would grow taller, wouldn’t they?

  “But the device was in the plane’s cargo,” he said. “Why would there be more in this jungle?”

  She smiled. “Maybe it wasn’t in the cargo. We found it mixed in with the wreckage, but what if it was already here? The crash could have dug it up.”

  Yoshi nodded, but as he stared at the dark circle in the distance, he remembered its awful weight settling over him. The thought of crawling into that heaviness again made his heart sink.

  Still, another device would be worth it. “I suppose we could look.”

  “It’s probably buried. It’s been here long enough to make those trees grow funny.” Kira closed her eyes, drawing shape
s in the air with her hand. “But I can help you dig at the exact center of the circle. If you promise to take me with you.”

  He stared at her. “You want to go to the waterfall?”

  “Beyond. You’re not the only one who wants to know what’s going on.”

  Yoshi sighed. Chances were there wouldn’t be any buried device, and he wouldn’t have to keep this promise.

  “Okay,” he said. “Find me a way to fly, and you can come along.”

  Moving silently in the dark, Kira snuck two flares from Molly’s backpack, then led Yoshi through the muddy jungle back to the dark circle of trees.

  At the edge, she lit one of the flares and stuck it into a branch at head level. Yoshi looked back toward their sleeping friends, wondering if he should have woken one of them to keep watch.

  Kira followed his gaze and said, “We heard that foghorn thing from miles away. We should be able to hear it from over here.”

  Yoshi frowned. “Let’s make this quick.”

  Kira led him around the circle to the other side, going the long way to avoid Caleb’s body. As she walked, she peered back at the flare just visible through the stunted trees.

  Finally, she let out a satisfied grunt. “We’re exactly opposite where we started.”

  “How can you tell?”

  She lit the other flare and lodged it in a tree branch. “I just can.”

  Yoshi frowned. Kira’s drawings were always uncannily accurate, and he’d seen her draw a perfect circle freehand. But seeing that two flares, sixty feet apart around a circle, were exactly opposite?

  “Spatial reasoning,” she added. “It’s on all the IQ tests.”

  “I’ve never taken one.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  Yoshi didn’t know how to take that. “How am I supposed to tell when I’m halfway between the flares?”

  Kira thought for a moment, then sighed. “You probably can’t. Guess I have to go in, too.”

  They went on hands and knees, slowly.

  The weight felt like an evil twin draped across his back, and Yoshi was careful not to set his knees on the hard, gnarly roots of the trees. The ground, at least, was covered with a soft layer of leaves stripped by the downpour.

  Yoshi supposed that even raindrops were heavier in here.

  Something gave way beneath his knee with a wet crunch, and he paused to brush aside the leaves.

  The skeleton of a bird. He wondered how many flew through here accidentally and were captured and crushed.

  Like Caleb had been.

  Or the airplane itself. Did this heavy zone lie along its flight path?

  Yoshi shook the thought away and kept crawling. The plane had been split open from the top endless minutes prior to the crash, long before it could have run into this gravity field.

  When the flares looked about the same distance apart, he asked, “Here?”

  “A little farther.” Kira crawled past him. The extra weight hardly seemed to bother her. Both she and Akiko were short and lithe. Maybe they were suited to high gravity, like the trees around him.

  The wind picked up again, and a sprinkling came from the sky. The drops felt hard and cold, and Yoshi was glad he’d left his sword back with the others. He was less happy that he’d wrapped his jacket around it, leaving him wearing nothing but a T-shirt.

  “This is the center,” Kira finally said.

  “Nothing’s here,” Yoshi sighed.

  “I told you, these trees grew in this gravity. The device is bound to be under some dirt by now.”

  “Very heavy dirt,” Yoshi said.

  “That’s why I brought this.” She pulled out the survival knife.

  Yoshi took it and started to dig. With the dirt packed together by double gravity, it was like cutting through clay. When he came across earthworms, they were as tough as metal cables, as if they belonged here in this hard-packed dirt.

  He remembered the slide-whistle birds flying expertly in low G. Were all these creatures designed for variable gravity? Or had they evolved here?

  The cold rain was growing harder. Kira hunkered beneath a nearby tree, trying to stay dry. But getting wet wasn’t the worst part—as the rain grew heavier, the drops were beginning to hurt, like cold marbles plunking down on his head.

  “Yoshi?” Kira called. “Maybe we should come back later.”

  He looked up from his digging. She was peering at the sky, her fingers protecting her eyes from the rain.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked.

  “What if it starts to hail?”

  At that moment, a particularly nasty raindrop thwacked Yoshi in the middle of his head. But it trickled, cold and massive, down the back of his neck.

  Just heavy rain. “It doesn’t hail in jungles.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “And this isn’t a normal jungle!”

  “Then I should stop talking and dig!”

  He scooped away the water that had collected in the hole and scraped at the packed wet dirt with the knife. His fingers were growing numb, and the knife slipped once, almost cutting him.

  Yoshi wondered if you bled faster in double gravity.

  The cold, along with the awful weight of everything, was sapping his strength. Breathing was getting harder.

  He thought of lying down, just for a moment, to give his muscles a rest. But what if he never regained his strength, and the heavy, freezing water rose above his nose and mouth? Yoshi didn’t want to drown in three inches of water.

  Correction: He didn’t want to drown at all.

  He plunged the knife in again, and something hard turned the blade. A stone?

  Yoshi kept scraping until a curved smoothness emerged from the mud.

  “Got it!” he said, pulling at the device with numb fingers.

  “Yoshi.”

  He looked up. Kira was pointing—

  Hailstones were bouncing from the ground around them. One smacked his shoulder, as hard as a rock from a slingshot.

  “Told you,” she said. “What do we do?”

  “We turn the gravity down,” he said, clawing at the mud.

  Another hailstone struck him—like the slap of a wet towel on the back of his neck. Then one struck his hand, pain ringing through his frozen-limbed numbness.

  Gradually the device came free—the hard rain was actually helping clear the dirt away. He saw two symbols glowing in the dark, one of them different from the symbols that Anna used for low G.

  He’d seen her set the device many times. All you did was press hard on both of the low-G symbols at once …

  They clicked, then glowed, and the crushing weight lifted from Yoshi. He felt himself drifting into the air.

  All at once the rain seemed like a light drizzle, and the branches around him sprang out into new, fuller shapes, as if loads of heavy fruit had dropped from them. The battering hailstones eased, suddenly more like snowflakes than rocks.

  Yoshi closed his eyes, breathing deep for the first time since he’d crawled into the dark circle.

  A moment later, Kira’s voice came from next to him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Nothing that a warm fire won’t fix,” he said.

  “Are you going to keep your promise, Yoshi-chan? And let me come along?”

  He opened his eyes. “I may be a half, but I always keep my promises.”

  “Don’t be broody,” Kira said, then smiled. “They call people like you halves, but you’ve got your Japanese part, and another part as well. So maybe you’re really two-in-one. A pair—like me and my sister.”

  Yoshi sighed and leaned back, letting the rain fall on his face, as soft as feathers.

  “I just want to be myself.”

  It still feels weird that we just left him out there,” Molly said.

  Javi didn’t answer—he was busy stoking the fire. Everyone had changed into dry clothes when they got back to the airplane that morning, but they were still shivering from the cold night in the rain. Team Killbot all
wore scavenged clothes now, the wrong sizes and colors and styles, like they were pretending to be other people.

  People who were dead.

  “The jungle can handle it,” Anna said. She rolled up the too-long sleeves of her shirt, a blank expression on her face.

  Molly wasn’t in the mood for a biology lesson. The problem with the jungle was, it didn’t care about death. And Caleb’s death had to mean something, or it would be too awful for any of them to bear.

  “But we should say some words, like we did for Mr. Keating. We owe Caleb that much.”

  Javi stopped blowing on the base of the fire and looked up at her. “He went up to figure out where we are, to help us get home. Succeeding at that is what we owe him.”

  “What was the last thing he said?” Molly asked. “Urss? Maybe he was trying to say Earth.”

  “No,” Javi said gently. “It was just hurts.”

  Anna pointed. “If we want to know what he said, then Yoshi has the right idea.”

  They all looked up. Yoshi and Kira were using the forward inflatable slide to practice flying with the device they’d found, bouncing off the bright yellow plastic. Akiko watched from below, laughing like this was some kind of theme park.

  Alien World. Fun for the whole family.

  “I wish they wouldn’t make so much noise,” Anna said. “That foghorn thing is still out there, and it could be listening.”

  “Another reason not to go exploring,” Molly said.

  “But somebody has to check out what’s past the waterfall,” Javi said. “If those really were radio transmissions, it could be a scientific station!”

  “Or maybe not,” Molly said. No one else had gotten anything but static on the radios. Yoshi’s ten seconds of beeping didn’t seem like much to go on.

  “There have to be people here somewhere,” Anna said. “This place isn’t natural.”

  Molly stared into the fire, which hissed with rain-wet wood. Part of her brain didn’t want to deal with theories and conjectures—she just wanted to grieve for Caleb. But another part of her wouldn’t stop puzzling it all out.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.