I will never obey blindly again.
But the realization is too late.
Auriel’s voice is right beside her face. “There you are, give it to me.”
Sky revealed Mez’s power, and now Auriel has led her off into the night to empty her out, just like he did Niko. Is Auriel’s underling a knowing part of this plot to steal everyone’s powers?
Numbness grows with the bands tightening around her, and Mez feels a curious lack of pain, a curious lack of any feeling at all. Her vision goes from black to white, and it takes longer and longer to open her eyelids whenever she blinks.
There are other sounds under the macaw’s shrieks. A monkey. Croaks of a frog. A bat’s high-pitched voice crying: “Let her go . . . !”
Even with the sound of Lima nearby, the coils binding Mez tell her to give in. She again feels her fur tearing and her ribs grinding, only this time it’s because the coils are loosening, sliding in opposite directions as Auriel releases his grip.
Mez gasps, her vision gaining color again, her mind filling with the painful bliss of taking in air, her ribs cracking as they fill. She hacks and sobs, her body falling limply to the jungle floor when Auriel finally releases her fully.
Inhale, exhale. Even though it’s painful, there is no other work in the world but this.
As she gradually catches her breath, Mez’s darkvision provides her with the sight of Gogi, scrawny little Gogi, standing in the dark, his arms outstretched and teeth bared, fury and terror mixed on his face. Licks of flames rise from his palms, but Mez can tell he doesn’t know where to send them. He’s a daywalker, and can’t see anything beyond the dazzle of his own flames. He has no chance against a night predator like Auriel.
Mez gets unsteadily to her paws, legs splayed and uncoordinated. Lima and Rumi can see, of course, and Mez is dimly aware of them guiding Gogi, telling him when to turn or duck or jump. She doesn’t know if they’re avoiding Auriel or looking for her, but she can’t bring her voice to work; when she tries to speak she can only shudder.
Mez startles when a wet leaf strikes her on the face, then realizes a wind has come up. Rumi must be using his powers.
Auriel’s long coils are still all around, the smallest creatures of the night chirping as they flee him and Rumi’s wind. Mez is only gradually able to make all the motion coalesce into shapes.
Auriel isn’t hunting for her anymore.
He’s racing up the ziggurat.
Despite pain lancing up and down her body, Mez struggles to make her jagged vocal cords come together into sounds. He’s going after the rest of you, she wants to warn. But she can’t.
Mez blunders through the night, tripping over vines and upturned earth. She manages to hurl herself into Gogi, nearly pitching him over in the process. He shrieks in fear, throwing fiery punches in the dark. “Oh, no you don’t, I’ll get you, I’ll get you!”
Mez manages to get scraps of sound to come out of her throat. “It’s . . . me!”
Suddenly the flames are out and Gogi’s fingers are on her, grooming through her fur. It makes her chafed skin light up as if it’s burning, but all the same she’s grateful for the grooming, can feel tears filling her eyes at the touch of her friend. “The . . .” she gasps. “Aur . . . the zig . . .”
She hears a shrieking commotion from up above, the panicked hooting of Sorella and the sloth and the growling of the ocelot, Sky’s caws above it all. Lima screaming, her voice changing pitch as she streaks through the night: “Flee! Everyone flee!”
“Come on,” Gogi says, his arms under Mez’s collarbone. “Let’s go. I’ll help you.”
“No,” Mez moans, her joints popping and grinding. “I can’t move. Let me be.”
“Sorry,” Gogi says, releasing her.
“Leave me here. You go help,” Mez says.
“Well, I can’t really see anything, that’s the problem,” Gogi says. But, in true Gogi form, he bolts off into the night anyway, in the process heading directly away from the ziggurat and tripping over a vine, sprawling on his face.
“No, come back, this way,” Mez tries to say as she staggers toward the ziggurat.
Her limbs are uncoordinated, lancing up and down with pain. She’s got none of her usual speed as she limps toward the ziggurat even as Auriel rears up at the top, looming over the eclipse-born.
From this distance, even through the shroud of the dark and rainy night, one thing is clear: Auriel has been hiding the true extent of his power. The creature at the top of the ziggurat is nothing like the gentle leaf-eating animal Mez first met. He opens his mouth wide, jaws open to the night, and the voice that comes through is powerful and raw. He might have no fangs, but Mez knows, from the agony still burning in her chest, that Auriel doesn’t need them. His true dominance is through the muscles of his body. And those are in full play now, the bands of raw power beneath his scales turning and rippling as he maneuvers, flicks of his massive tail blocking any of the eclipse-born from escaping. The colored scales encircling his head glow with a fiery intensity.
Caught unawares, the desperate eclipse-born screech and scurry. Sky’s strident caws are the loudest, but the rest of the animals express their shock in other ways, from roars to shrieks to claws scuffling on stone. Auriel is a whirl of energy, looming over the top. His topaz scale glows painfully bright, and then the very stone of the ziggurat wavers under him, like Niko would have once done, and Mez realizes she is probably witnessing Niko’s very power, that Auriel constricted it out of him like he almost did to her, that it’s the reason for that newest colored scale.
There is a giant grinding sound, and Mez realizes the doors at the top of the ziggurat are opening. She sights Sorella, arms flung over the edge of the ziggurat, trying to grip the stone. But, though nothing is touching her, something is pulling at her. It’s like gravity is yanking the uakari into the open top of the structure with many times its normal power.
Even the uakari monkey’s fur is pressed flat, pulling back and down as surely as if a giant hand were yanking it. The roaring sound is loud enough to drown out the screams of the stricken animals.
It’s like she’s being dragged into a whirlpool. Like in the cavern.
It was Auriel who trapped Niko. Auriel isn’t killing the eclipse-born now—he’s entombing them inside the ancient structure! Mez hears more stones grinding as the ziggurat’s doors begin to close. As they do the suction sound gets even stronger, and Sorella loses her grip, plummeting head over heels through the night. A flash of yellow-gold, and the trogon is gone, followed by Sky, the force pulling at him strong enough to send up a cloud of red feathers.
Despite the pain in her body, despite the scissoring of her own bones and joints, Mez staggers toward the ziggurat. She doesn’t know what she will do if she’s able to make it to the top, but knows she has to do something to help the rest of the eclipse-born. Rear legs dragging behind her, Mez tries to call out the names of her friends, but agony scrambles the sounds, and she hears herself only gasping and shrieking. Finally, despite the force of her will, her body fails her. When she tries to climb the first level of the ziggurat, the extra weight causes her front leg to wobble and give, sending her tumbling down to the muddy ground, sparks of pain in her eyes.
Then, as suddenly as all the commotion began, the thunderous sounds from the top of the ziggurat are finished. Gritting her teeth against the pain, Mez manages to raise her head and look up. She sees no one. The eclipse-born are gone. Auriel is gone.
No more screechings and scramblings.
Silence is back.
Cicadas, crickets, rainfall.
Mez drags herself into the shelter of a bush, burrowing amid ferns and flytraps and vines. As soon as she’s hidden away she closes her eyes, letting darkness take over, falling deeply into her pain.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she hears a rustling sound. Staggering awake, she whirls, teeth bared. Outlined in her darkvision, she finds Gogi still wandering about, groping his way right toward
a looming tree, arms outstretched. “Guys? Guys?” he calls out, his voice hoarse. “Where are you?”
“Gogi!” Mez manages to say, the words coming out in an anguished gasp.
“Mez!” he calls, blundering through the night, batting aside fronds until he’s near her, though facing the wrong way. “What happened up there?”
“Auriel,” she says through gritted teeth. “He betrayed us!”
“Keep talking,” Gogi says, stepping right into a big patch of nettles. “I can’t find you without your voice. Ow! Why couldn’t I have darkvision like you guys? Ow, ow, holy monkey butts, those hurt!”
“I’m over here,” Mez says. She manages to get to her paws, though pain lights up her body.
Suddenly Gogi’s grooming her, picking through her fur. She’s glad for the closeness, but this time the pain is too much to take. “Stop, stop,” she says.
“We need to find Lima to help you, right away,” he says.
“Lima . . .” Mez says. Her mind goes to the little bat, and to Rumi. Are they trapped down below too?
“Lima!” Gogi calls into the night. “Are you there?”
“Not a good idea to go shouting off into the darkness, Gogi,” Mez says through gritted teeth. “Not when we don’t know who else is listening.”
Gogi goes motionless for a moment. When he speaks again it’s with uncharacteristic conviction. “I don’t care. Let them come. You need help. Lima! Lima, are you out there?”
Mez won’t try again to stop him. She needs the help too much.
They listen to the night. Mez’s breath comes in ragged gasps—no matter how much she tries to calm it, she can’t seem to get it under control. Gogi continues to shout Lima’s name, and with every “Li—” and “—ma” Mez’s imagination supplies more and more ferocious animals and monsters hearing Gogi’s call and stalking through the night to eat them. Like an Ant Queen.
And, sure enough, something does come.
At first there’s only a change in the air, a shifting in the sounds of the night. “Gogi,” Mez whispers, “hold quiet for a second.”
She feels the monkey tense beside her, then hears the sound of wings whisking over the night breezes. She tries to follow the movement, but it’s too fast, too light—too small. “Lima?” Mez whispers. “Is that you?”
She feels a slight pressure on her temple, and she’s soon suffused by warmth, her pain dissipating, like chill in the sun.
“Lima,” Gogi whispers. “You’re alive.”
“Of course I am,” Lima says between licks. “Mez, we saw you were missing, and we all came right down. I was near you while Auriel was attacking you, but there was nothing I could do. I’m so small, and my powers are to heal, not to harm, and I think you turned invisible, did you realize that? I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to be okay,” Mez says. “Thanks to those healing powers. So no apologizing.”
“I’m so glad you’re all right,” Gogi says.
“I might be, but the others . . . I flew back up when Auriel went on the attack, but there was nothing I could do there, either. Everyone was fleeing, but no one was fast enough. Not even the trogon. I couldn’t . . . I wanted but I couldn’t . . .” Lima’s voice pinches off.
“You did everything you could,” Gogi says.
“He’s gone,” Lima says.
“That’s right, Auriel isn’t around anymore. We’re safe,” Gogi says.
“No. Not Auriel.” Lima takes a deep breath. “It’s Rumi. Rumi’s gone.”
Mez sits back on her aching haunches, stunned.
“We messed up, Gogi,” Lima continues, tears in her voice. “You scampered down to help Mez, and I flew right down with you, but Rumi, he’s just a little frog. I’m sure he was racing to keep up with us, but he was still up there when Auriel began to suck them all down and he—he got pulled right in.”
Lima’s voice becomes barely audible over the sounds of the night. “They’re all gone. We’re the only ones left.”
“Then it’s up to us to save them,” Mez says.
SOMBER AND PENSIVE, the three catch their breath at the ziggurat’s edge. Lima busily licks at Mez’s most wounded parts.
“What do you think Auriel is doing to them down there?” Gogi asks.
“I saw it firstpaw,” Mez says, wincing. “He’s sucking away their powers. He tried to drain me, and if you two hadn’t stopped him he would have succeeded. Now that he’s got them all trapped in one place, he’s . . . I’m sure he’s draining them one by one.”
“Isn’t he scared of the Ant Queen, though?”
“He’s been crawling with ants since we first saw him. And he was right down there with the queen before, because he was the one to constrict Niko. I think he might be working with her.”
They all let that sink in.
“If his goal this whole time has been to steal our powers, I don’t understand why he’d go through all this,” Gogi says. “Wouldn’t it be easier for Auriel to, you know, kill us off as he found us instead of bringing us here?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Mez says. “It seems clear so far that the eclipse magic is very important to the ants, the original shadowwalkers. If Auriel is working with the Ant Queen, maybe he’s promised us—and the eclipse magic inside us—to her. He brought us here under false pretenses. We were supposedly defending Caldera against her, but we’re actually meant to be sacrificed to her. But he’s been stealing our power on the side, siphoning as many away as he can before the Ant Queen emerges from her prison.”
“Won’t our families back home figure it out when we never come back?” Lima says. “And they’ll rally against him? Well, your families. I bet none of the bats even noticed I was missing.”
“Not if no one thinks Auriel is the one that killed us. Not if they think it’s the Ant Queen. Not if the way it’s always been in the rainforest is that animals keep to themselves.”
“But—” Gogi says, before going silent. “Oh my. They’ll all think we died defending Caldera!”
“And that valiant Auriel tried to bring us together, but was the only one to make it out of the battle alive—”
“—with all of our abilities, an Ant Queen, and the might of billions of ants at his side,” Lima finishes.
“We have to stop him!”
“Yes, but how?” Gogi says, tapping his toes on the ziggurat’s roof. “There’s no getting in there. Assuming that’s where Auriel is, of course. None of us actually saw him go in.”
The night’s chill thickens. Without speaking a word more, the friends draw tight.
“I mean, I’m sure he’s probably sealed away, never to return. Sorry for even bringing it up,” Gogi says, his arms wrapping around Mez. Her body is still sore all over, and she winces at the pain of his touch. But she does nothing to get him off her. Lima is between them, tucked under Mez’s chin. They stare out across the top of the ziggurat, looking for Auriel, for the first sign that death is on its way.
“Well, I guess there’s no point sitting around getting ourselves scared,” Mez finally says. “We need some sort of plan. And we need to get off the ziggurat.”
“We don’t know who Auriel will start with, so from here on out we’ll have to assume that he has access to any of the powers of the other eclipse-born,” Gogi says. “Actually, we’ll be able to figure out who he’s . . . constricted by which powers he has access to.”
“It’s too terrible,” Lima says. “What if Auriel uses wind? Then we’ll know that he’s . . . that he’s . . .”
“No more of that talk,” Mez says, shaking her head. “Here’s what I’m thinking: We continue with our plan. We get ready to begin the ceremony to renew the Ant Queen’s bonds at dawn. Now, if you guys would let me move, we could get searching to see where the removable sigils went during the fight.”
“Sorry,” Gogi says, Lima taking to the air as he disengages from Mez’s front. “Sometimes I clutch a little tight when I get scared. Monkey habit.”
“They�
�ve got to be here somewhere,” Mez says, pacing the ziggurat’s roof.
“Unless they got sucked into the ziggurat,” Lima says from where she’s riding on Mez’s shoulder. Gogi must be searching silently behind them, as stealthily as she is.
Wait. Gogi, stealthy?
“Gogi,” Mez whispers, “you’re getting very good at sneaking!”
No answer.
Mez turns around, but Gogi is not there. She looks farther back and finds him right where she left him, peering around in astonishment.
Eyes alert to any sign of Auriel, she slinks over to him. The jungle is quiet all around them as Mez pads near. “Are you really playing a game right now?” she asks.
Gogi shrieks in surprise and leaps high into the air. He lands on all fours, looking vaguely in Mez’s direction. “Sweet monkey breath!”
“What is it?” she asks, spinning around with her ears back, looking for enemies.
“Mez. You’re invisible.”
She gazes down at her own paws. Not there. Oh. So she is! She’s invisible! “Wow. That’s got to be useful, right?” she asks.
“Useful? It’s awesome,” Lima says. Mez cranes her neck back and sees the bat gripping empty air, wings at her side.
Gogi nods in agreement, empathetic smoke rising from his hands.
“Okay, enough conversation,” Lima says. “I’m still getting the creeps around here. It feels like the trees themselves are watching us. Let’s get searching.”
Mez and Gogi fan out, feeling along the ground with claw and hand and tail. “No boa constrictors, no boa constrictors,” Gogi whispers as he hunts.
“If there’s any sign of Auriel, we’ll hide,” Mez reassures him.
“Maybe you will, Little Miss Invisible,” he says. “A capuchin daywalker is like a sitting sloth out here.”
“You’ll follow my lead,” Mez says.
“No arguments here,” Gogi says, a hand on Mez’s invisible tail. “No boa constrictors, no boa constrictors,” he continues to whisper. He must look faintly ridiculous, tiptoeing along, led by nothing at all.
“Any sign of the sigils yet?” Lima whispers from her perch behind Mez’s ear.
The Lost Rainforest Page 17