The Lost Rainforest

by Eliot Schrefer

  The ocelot and caiman groan. Mez fixes them a withering look. Come on, did you really think I was going to let you eat my friends?

  “I will help you, Léon,” Sky caws to the kinkajou. “You will be my first subject. We’ll begin as soon as possible.”

  “And with that, I must head back out. There’s one last shadowwalker to fetch,” Auriel says.

  “Meanwhile, you and I will go figure out the mystery of the sigils!” Rumi says to Mez. He turns hopefully to Lima and Gogi. “Unless you two want to come help too?”

  “I, um, have some gnats to eat,” Lima says, looking away.

  “And, uh, I’m way behind on my grooming,” Gogi says. “I’ve got this tick in my armpit I’ve been trying to pull out for ages.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Rumi says. “As long as I have Mez helping! Mez, looks like it’s you and me. How fun!”

  Mez nods, wondering just why it is that no one else wants to come along.

  The little tree frog bounces excitedly down the steps of the ziggurat, soon disappearing from view. He makes his high-pitched chirps as he goes, so Mez can keep track of him. He also keeps talking, but the words become a little harder to make out. “Sealing ritual . . . the two-legged animals . . . last eclipse . . . runes . . . chants!”

  “Uh-huh,” Mez calls as she pads down the steps. “You know you’re going to have to repeat all this once I’ve made it down there, right?”

  “. . . so excited that you’re willing! Everyone else has gotten bored and stopped wanting to help. . . .” His words fade away again as he turns a corner on the ziggurat, then come back in when Mez catches up to him. “Scholarship is important, right? As if ancient engravings could be anything but fascinating. Okay, here we are!”

  Mez slinks down from the last layer of stones to the mud of the forest floor. Rumi is holding on to the tip of a skinny branch, brushing the ziggurat and then gliding away as night breezes sway his perch. He’s got a click beetle pinned between his lips. The bug is frantically trying to fly away, its abdomen glowing as it does. Rumi squints, reading the stone’s carvings by its ruddy light.

  Mez leans in so she can see the carvings too. “Oh, wow,” she breathes.

  She’d thought the stone block had been scraped up, but what she’d taken for accidental gouges are actually intentional markings. “Start in the top left corner,” Rumi says. “That’s where the markings have the most erosion and moss growth, which makes me think they’re the first ones carved.”

  Mez stands up on her hind legs, front paws against the stone, craning her neck to view the markings. Rumi hops to the top, leaning down with the click beetle in his lips so that Mez can see more easily. The engraving shows strange two-legged animals, sort of like tall monkeys, arms around one another, looking to the horizon. The next image shows them running, chased by swarms of ants. Mez looks to the next panel over, but it shows only grasses. “I don’t understand. These weird tailless monkeys . . . turned into a field?”

  “The panels aren’t in order,” Rumi explains. “Look in the corner of each—there’s a number of notches. That’s the order. This has one notch, so it’s the first panel. Now we have to read the one with two notches in the corner . . . and that panel is over here. . . .”

  Rumi leaps into the night. Mez follows the glowing trail of the click beetle, eventually finding Rumi a long way down the ziggurat.

  This panel makes Mez wince: the ants are overrunning the two-legs, the tailless monkeys writhing as they succumb to the swarm. Mandibles slash into arms and legs.

  “What’s interesting in this panel,” Rumi says, “is that it’s not just the two-legged animals that are being eaten. Trees, snakes, other insects, birds. Look—even other ants!”

  “Yes, I see,” Mez says before turning away. “It’s all very gruesome.”

  “Now for the panel with three notches. Time to go up a level!” Rumi says, before leaping away.

  Mez hauls herself back up the ziggurat to reach him. Huffing with exertion, she’s starting to understand why the others claimed to be too busy to help Rumi research. “Here’s where it gets really interesting!” Rumi says.

  The ants cover almost the entirety of this panel. Gnashing mandibles and teeming antennae fill the scene from horizon to horizon, except for a huddle of desperate two-legs pressed into the middle. They cower and shield their faces from the onslaught. “Look at this crazy tailless monkey, though,” Rumi says. “He’s pointing to the sky. See? There’s the moon on one side, and the sun on the other. And the arrows? They’re pointing toward each other! Next panel!”

  Rumi springs away.

  “Couldn’t you . . . just . . . tell me what’s on it?” Mez asks, still breathless.

  In the next scene, some of the two-legs are trying to fight off the ants with their bare hands while the others are hard at work, cutting stones and arranging them into a pyramid shape. One of the two-legs is pointing to the sky—the sun and moon are almost on top of each other. “Next panel!” Rumi calls out.

  “I was worried you were going to say that,” Mez says, taking a deep breath before following Rumi back up the ziggurat.

  This panel shows more and more ants amassing, the two-legs huddling on the top of the ziggurat as the insects scale its levels. At the front of the ant horde is one that’s far bigger than the rest, the size of a buffalo. She rears back, her many legs tapping the air. “The Ant Queen,” Mez says.

  “Yes,” Rumi says, nodding. “Look at those huge mandibles the artist gave her. And all those sliced-up two-leg bodies littering the ground—look, there’s a severed leg hanging out of her mouth! I’m hoping the artist was exaggerating.”

  Mez is speechless. They’re going to fight this giant armored murderer?

  “Um, if you can peel your eyes from the Ant Queen, take a look at the sky,” Rumi urges. “The sun and moon have nearly joined, see?”

  “So where’s the next scene?” Mez asks.

  Rumi spits out the click beetle. It chirps in outrage before zooming off into the night. “That’s the problem. It should be the one with six notches. But there isn’t one with six notches. Or seven, or eight. Those panels are missing.”

  “Oh,” Mez says, looking around. The ziggurat is made of hundreds and hundreds of stones.

  “I’ve looked everywhere,” Rumi says. “Nothing. All the other stones are either blank, or have carvings that seem to be just decorative.”

  “Hmm,” Mez says.

  “Whatever secret the two-legs had to defeat the Ant Queen is probably in those last panels,” Rumi says glumly.

  “Well, at least show me those glowing blue sigils you were talking about,” Mez says.

  Rumi leads her to the far bottom corner of the ziggurat. The rainforest hems in closely here, the night sounds of chirping frogs and creaking branches tight at their backs. Remembering Auriel’s warning about enemies patrolling the forest, Mez draws near to Rumi.

  Four of the stones have large runes carved into them, glowing faintly in blue. Mez tries to see if the shapes will tell her anything, but they’re abstract figures, lines and squiggles and circles gouged deep in the rock. Maybe those symbols meant something to the two-legs, but they say nothing to her. “They’ve been winking out, and now it’s down to these four. It was five when we arrived,” Rumi says.

  “And if they correspond with the magic the two-legs once used to restrain the Ant Queen . . .” Mez says grimly.

  “. . . then it’s not good. Not good at all.”

  One of the runes is right at ground level. Mez noses it, and finds the glowing sigil isn’t warm; it’s as cold as the rest of the night-chilled stone. “Look at this,” she says. “This rune is like the one above it, but only half is here. And these blocks on the bottom level are much shorter than those above them.”

  “I guess the two-legs were in a rush,” Rumi says.

  “I don’t think it’s that they were in a rush,” Mez says, a smile growing across her face. “I think the ziggurat has sunk.”


  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a mudflat near my den,” Mez says. “When we leave an animal skeleton there after a hunt, each night less and less of it is visible. It’s not because more mud appears—it’s because the weight of the skeleton itself makes it sink.”

  “So you’re saying that we’re seeing only the top part of the ziggurat?”

  “It’s clearly been around a very long time,” Mez says. “You yourself pointed out all the moss and erosion. And the ground here is soft and muddy.”

  “So the panel that explains the magical ritual that the two-legs used to seal away the Ant Queen . . .”

  “. . . might be below us,” Mez says.

  “Finally we’re getting somewhere,” Rumi says.

  Mez stares down at the grass and soil beneath her paws, wondering what mysteries and marvels—and dangers—might be trapped beneath.

  IN THE CHILLY dawn, a panther, a frog, a bat, and a monkey stare down at the creature before them. They stare at it for a long time.

  “So. That’s Niko,” Lima finally says.

  “I wouldn’t have thought . . .” Mez starts, her voice trailing off.

  “I know,” Gogi finishes.

  “Well, he must have hatched when the sun’s and moon’s powers were combined, like any of the rest of us,” Rumi says, tapping his lips with a webbed finger. “I wonder if any vertebrate at all has the potential to be a shadowwalker. Or even if there could be a shadowwalker slug! The possibilities are—”

  “—fascinating, we know,” Lima says.

  “I was going to say ‘endless,’ actually,” Rumi sniffs.

  “I mean, how do we go scouting underground with . . .” Mez starts again.

  “. . . something that has gills?” Gogi finishes, his hands on his hips.

  Niko is floating in a hollowed-out gourd set on the ground before them. The kinkajou rigged it up with his nimble fingers, eating the fleshy insides of the gourd as he went. The caiman helped fill it with water, and now they’re using it to transport Niko. He’s a sorubim catfish, and not a big one at that, his body small and spiny, not much bigger than a minnow’s. He seems able to sense their voices, swimming to whichever part of the gourd is closest to whoever is talking. But whenever he tries to speak, all they hear is a gurgle.

  “How did he even get here?” Lima asks. “It seems very difficult for a catfish to travel to a ziggurat.”

  “I know the answer to that, would you believe it?” Gogi says. “So nice to be helpful sometimes. You remember that river at the bottom of Agony Canyon? He traveled down that. Auriel found him in a far-off estuary, and directed him here to come live in the pond behind the ziggurat.”

  “Don’t worry, my new little fish friend, I’m not going to hurt you,” Gogi continues as he reaches in, gets his fingers around the fish, and dexterously lifts it out of the water.

  “—not my fault,” Niko is saying, his voice clear now that he’s in open air. “I’m just a fish! Besides, you need my power over the earth.” Mez wouldn’t have thought that a fish could look indignant, but here it is: the barbels on either side of Niko’s mouth are quivering in outrage.

  “It’s, um, unexpected that a fish would have power over the earth. Because fish, uh, live in the water,” Lima says, her voice starting to rush. “Which you obviously already know, being a fish and all.” She ends with an awkward chirping sound.

  “Are you kidding? Having earth powers is amazing! I can bring all sorts of mud up from below the water, mud that has plenty of little eggs and insects and worms in it to eat. There’s as much earth beneath the water as there is beneath the open air, after all.” Niko’s gills begin to pump more and more wildly. “Umpleaseputmebackinthewaterrightnowplease.”

  With a startled gasp, Gogi drops Niko back in. The fish flits around and around the hollowed gourd, frantically running water over his gills.

  “This is hopeless,” Mez says mournfully. “How are we even going to be able to communicate with a catfish?”

  “Now I begin my new career—translator!” Rumi announces, before plopping into the gourd.

  He swims for a while before popping back up. “That was a joke, by the way. I guess I’m not so good at jokes. Have to study up on them. Anyway. Niko has a lot to say,” he reports. He promptly hops back in, his yellow body swimming circles around the catfish, arms and legs kicking.

  “And I should put my nest-making skills to use on a new project,” Gogi says. “Here, Mez, help me find some nice strong vines.”

  Together, they root through the brush, Mez biting off vines and Gogi using them to rig a makeshift harness for the gourd. Carefully, Gogi lifts the sloshing gourd onto Mez’s side, strapping it on tight. It’s as big as her rib cage and takes away all of her stealth, but by staying low to the ground Mez is able to walk without sloshing any of Niko’s water over the side.

  “Okay, team,” Rumi says. “There’s a whole world beneath us. Here’s the plan: We look for a small cave or crevice that will bring us as far as we can go under the ziggurat. Then we use Niko’s power to move the earth from the underground stones, exposing their carvings. Gogi’s fire will light them up so I can study them. That’s how we’ll learn how the two-legs imprisoned the Ant Queen in the first place.”

  “What am I going to do?” Lima asks.

  “Someone needs to eat any gnats we encounter,” Gogi offers.

  Lima nods, satisfied with herself. “Mission accepted.”

  Rumi travels on the edge of the gourd, his arms flung over the side, as if he’s luxuriating at the edge of a hot spring. Occasionally he’ll dunk down below, communicate with Niko, then pop back up. “He senses the ground opening up off to the left,” he’ll report, then: “Quicksand up ahead!”

  They quickly change direction.

  Around the base of the ziggurat the ground is marshy and swampy, given to broad brown mosquito-clogged pools of standing water. The bloodsuckers seem to go straight for Mez’s sensitive nose, and Gogi is constantly scratching at bites, but Rumi and Lima and even Niko soon have full bellies and satisfied expressions on their faces.

  Lima cocks her head at one point, as if listening to something far away. “What is it, Lima?” Mez asks.

  She shakes her head. “Nothing, I don’t think. But let’s be alert.”

  The weight of the ziggurat puckers the ground. They travel around its broad perimeter, through the thick ferns and mosses that have grown up along its edges, looking for any openings.

  They’ve gone only a short way before Lima stops them with a sharp clicking sound. The rest of the companions hold still while she pivots her head, wide ears craned. “It’s that sound again. The howler monkeys,” she says softly.

  With a shiver of dread, Mez looks to the treetops.

  At first she can see nothing but swaying branches and misty vines. But then she sees them in the distance, black shadows among the branches, tails wrapping around their faces or whipping through the air as they make their way from tree to tree, toward the eclipse-born below. One begins to hoot, and then the others start in.

  “Are they saying words?” Mez asks.

  “Something like ‘Health to the ant pearls!’” Lima says. “But that doesn’t sound right. Oh wait, I got it! ‘Left by the unnamed girls!’ That doesn’t sound right, either. Oh, now I hear it. ‘Death to the unnaturals!’”

  “Um, guys, I know I’m just a seventeenth, but I have to say it seems like those howler monkeys are about to—” Gogi says.

  The howler monkeys attack.

  They surge down from the treetops with sudden ferocity, making their guttural howls and baring long teeth as they plummet. More and more join the attack, emerging from the trees all around, crying and shrieking, their deafening roar enough to rattle Mez’s thoughts. She hops this way and that, whirling to face each new sound, Niko’s water splashing each time she startles.

  “Death to the unnaturals!” shrieks one of the howler monkeys again, before it drops right on top of Gogi, teeth gnashing
toward his exposed neck. As she sprints toward the stricken capuchin, Mez catches sight of movement from the direction of the ziggurat. At first she senses only a massive force, as if a tree is falling on top of them, but in the split second it takes Mez to spring away she realizes it’s Auriel, streaking through the companions and toward the nearest howler monkeys.

  He bellows, using all the force of his cavernous lungs, the power of it enough to set Mez’s whiskers quivering. The howler monkeys pause their attack and go silent. The one that was about to sink its teeth into Gogi’s neck backflips away, a fear grin plastered over its features. The diamond-colored scale on the side of Auriel’s head glows.

  When the howler monkeys start a retreat, Auriel wastes no time pursuing them, whirling and slaloming through the clearing, whacking monkeys off their feet, sending those that are still able to flee staggering headlong into the trees. Clearly the howler monkeys have decided that it would be futile to fight back against the powerful constrictor.

  “I’ll chase them farther off on my way out!” Auriel shouts, not even sparing a glance at the eclipse-born as he scans the treetops for any remaining attackers. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Now, go find the underground entrance before they return!”

  He doesn’t need to ask twice.

  Mez turns and stalks through the undergrowth, away from Auriel and the howler monkeys. She feels Lima and Rumi on her back, and sees Gogi beside her, his skin visibly pale even under his fur. “Are you okay?” Mez asks as they rush along.

  The capuchin nods, gray-lipped. “Just a little rattled.”

  Auriel’s furious roars fade at their backs as the group presses deep into the foliage. “My echolocation is showing some hollowness to the ground,” Lima says. “Wait—turn left!”

  Under Lima’s direction, Mez darts through an arch in the brambles, tracking the rotting trunk of a fallen tree until she comes to a clearing where the standing swamp water becomes a sluggish stream that disappears underground, a tight, airy passage above it. Thick tendrils of ants stream along the edges.