The Lost Rainforest

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Not yet,” Mez whispers.

  “No boa constrictors, no boa constrictors,” Gogi whispers.

  “But why?” comes a voice from a tree overhanging the ziggurat. “We’re so much fun!”

  They freeze.

  “You guys heard that too, right?” Lima whispers. “I didn’t make it up?”

  “Yes. I definitely heard that,” Mez whispers back.

  At first she thinks the shock of the sudden voice has her light-headed, that fear is what’s making the night around her warp and waver. From Gogi’s and Lima’s gasps, though, she knows she’s not the only one feeling it. It’s not that just the air is shifting; the stones of the ziggurat ripple underneath her paws. Liquid rock bunches behind her back legs and nudges her forward, like a rippling wave, pulling ever toward the overhanging tree.

  Gogi springs across the ziggurat’s roof, sprinting hands over feet while Lima darts into the air. Mez leaps for a nearby palm tree, but the shifting stones prevent her from getting a good launch. She winds up striking the trunk with her shoulder and falling back to the ziggurat’s surface, pitching over on the rolling stone. She struggles to get off her back as the waves in the rock continue to drive her toward the tree.

  She’d thought it was draped by a large vine, but Mez sees now that she was wrong, that the vine is actually a snake, a snake she knows well, a snake that is slowly uncoiling and opening its broad triangular head, ready to receive her.

  Something has changed about Auriel. His movements before were always a little stuttery, as if his body was struggling to remember how to move. Now he’s almost molten, pouring like honey off the tree and onto the ziggurat’s surface, his tail going in one direction and his head in the other, so that when Mez looks at one she loses track of the other.

  She’s mesmerized by his strange movements, her limbs going senseless. She knows this might be part of his strategy, some new ability he’s siphoned out of one of the eclipse-born, but she’s powerless to counteract it. Not that she could move to save herself anyway, not with Niko’s stolen earth power sending the stones themselves rippling toward Auriel. The gravity power, wherever he got that, is also sucking at Mez, bringing her ever nearer the constrictor’s coils. How can a small panther resist?

  Mez hears Lima shriek, and looks up to see the bat, so much littler than she, courageously darting through the air toward Auriel. The constrictor snaps at Lima once she’s near, but she is too small and the snake too big; his jaws close on open air, and Lima is soon hurtling past him. She doesn’t get far before the gravity drags her back; despite Lima’s frantic flapping she’s motionless in midair, then zooming toward Auriel. He’s ready for her this time, mouth open wide. Even without fangs, he could easily swallow her whole. Lima shrieks, wings flailing.

  Mez wants to help, but she’s got problems of her own. She’s been pulled close enough to Auriel now that one of his rapidly unfurling coils strikes her on the head. Mez staggers under the blow, but she’s soon back on her paws. With Auriel’s attention turned to Lima, Mez takes the opportunity to sink her teeth into his side. The bite sticks for a moment, but then Auriel wrestles free, Mez’s sharp canines skittering. She spits out a mouthful of scales.

  When Auriel whirls to defend himself against Mez, his gravity power momentarily lapses, giving Lima a chance to dart into the canopy. Even as Mez is pushed off her paws by one of Auriel’s coils, she sees the tiny bat’s feet hanging on to a branch for dear life, the gravity field causing the top of her head to point in a straight line toward the snake. Auriel’s muscular, writhing coils bash into Mez again, sending her skidding along the ziggurat’s roof in a spray of soil and leaves and insects.

  “Heads up, snake-breath!” comes Gogi’s voice. It’s followed by a popping sound, then the scene fills with light.

  A ribbon of flame streaks from the monkey’s position at the far side of the ziggurat, as thin as a reed but hot enough to smoke the air. He’s aimed it straight for Auriel’s eyes.

  The constrictor ducks so his eyes are clear of the line of fire, but the flame hits him squarely on the top of his head, and he seems dazzled, tendrils of smoke rising from his scales. As Auriel shakes his head to clear it, the stones cease their rippling, gravity magic no longer pulling Mez toward him.

  “Gogi!” Mez shouts. “That was amazing!”

  “Compliment me later!” he shouts back. “This is our chance—scatter!”

  Lima zooms away, and Gogi scrambles farther along the ziggurat. Mez finds the tallest nearby tree and, going invisible, claws her way up it.

  It’s tough climbing, since by rotten luck Mez chose a tree whose trunk is clogged by the thorns and prickers of parasitic vines. Once she’s at the top she finally allows herself to whirl and look for Auriel. When she spots him, she cries out.

  Auriel is facing off against her friends, his long and powerful body dragging across the stones as he whips back and forth. Squinting her eyes, Mez realizes that Gogi and Lima are immobilized, pressed against the stone of the ziggurat, no—pressed into the stone of the ziggurat, as if embedded in clay, Lima’s wings and Gogi’s arms and legs spread out wide.

  “Mez, wherever you are, save yourself!” Gogi yells into the night sky. Auriel whirls, looking out for invisible Mez, then snaps his attention back to Gogi when the monkey unleashes another bolt of fire. With his hands restrained, Gogi can’t aim it, and the flame goes up into the sky, fizzling out in a flurry of sparks. Auriel rears back, enraged, as if to clamp the monkey in his fangless mouth. Mez hears Gogi cry out, unable to contain his fright, sending another bolt flaring into the sky.

  But Auriel doesn’t attack. Instead an ominous sound begins, a familiar grinding and roaring.

  The ziggurat doors are opening.

  For a moment Mez is too surprised to act. Then she’s bounding down the tree, hurtling her way through branches and thorny vines, leaping and scrambling, hurling herself onto the ragged mossy stone blocks with claws that are soon bloody and aching.

  The moment she lands, her invisible paws touching stone, Auriel’s tail disappears inside and the doors give their final shudder. She was moments too late.

  The roof of the ziggurat is empty.

  Auriel has taken the last of her friends.

  NIGHT FALLS AND yet Mez hasn’t moved. She knows she should be hidden in the trees, but can’t will herself to do anything but splay out on the stone, chin against rock. Her eyes flick open in worry whenever she thinks of what might be happening to her friends, sealed away with Auriel a few feet below, then drift closed as fatigue washes over her.

  If only Auriel were here to fight. No matter how lopsided the battle, she’d give herself up to the combat, struggle until she couldn’t, go out with claws and teeth bared. Anything but this dread that the end of those she cares about is happening right now, that she is powerless to do anything to prevent it.

  She scratches at the seam where the stone doors meet, leaps into the air and down on all fours, the way Aunt Usha once taught her to puncture an underground rat den. Of course, the mammoth doors are motionless and unresponsive. No panther can claw her way into a ziggurat.

  They’d all followed Auriel’s will so blindly—he might have simply asked the eclipse-born to walk inside the ziggurat and they would have, if Mez hadn’t turned invisible during his attack, escaped him long enough to blow his cover. The nights of following orders without question, whether they came from Aunt Usha or Auriel, are over. She will trust her instincts from here on.

  Still, her realization has come too late. Auriel will suck her friends down, one by one, until he has all the powers of the eclipse-born. Unless the Ant Queen has her own ends for them.

  If only the removable stone sigils were still there on top. But of course they’re nowhere to be found. They must have dropped inside with the other eclipse-born during the attack.

  Mez’s tail thrashes angrily.

  Whatever Auriel’s goals, he now has all he needs to achieve them. He’s already gotten power over gravity fr
om some hapless animal, and now he has Niko’s power over the earth, as well. If Sky’s not useful anymore Auriel can add his divination, which should augment Auriel’s access to the knowledge of the ants. He’ll soon have Rumi’s wind power, and Gogi’s fire . . . Mez shudders, imagining vortexes of flaming wind.

  The only eclipse power Auriel doesn’t yet have, Mez realizes, is hers. Is there some use in that?

  As the day breezes waft over the roof of the ziggurat, over this empty stone space where her friends first gathered, loneliness threatens to make Mez collapse again. At least there’s the possibility of a solution. She doesn’t know how to use it, but she has a scrap of power. Auriel wants her. She could be bait.

  The very place she shouldn’t be, Mez knows, is right where she is. Here, Auriel will have no problem finding her. She gets up to four paws, slinks to the edge of the ziggurat, then drops down to the next level and then the next. Eyes alert for danger—or prey, she adds, her stomach growling as she descends the last level into the forest—Mez noses her way into the cover of the trees.

  Hunting while literally invisible. Wow. That might make her feel a little better.

  For the following night and day, she tries her best to worry about what she does have power over: hunting, finding the safest hiding places, even napping. Adult panthers spend most of their time alone, worrying only about food and rest. She’s able to slip into that mode, beyond thought as she lets reflexes take over. It’s the only way forward.

  Her pathways often take her near the ziggurat, and each time she tries something new: she examines and reexamines the panels that are exposed, tugs at any images of the sun or moon to see if they might come free, leaps and claws at the seam on top. But the ziggurat is unrelenting. It rises silently from the rainforest, giving up no answers to what is happening inside. No sign of Auriel, no opportunity to confront him, no chance to enact her last desperate and useless revenge.

  That evening, Mez steals near the structure at dusk, hoping that this time something will have changed. And this time, something has. Unfortunately. Only one sigil remains lit.

  She returns to the jungle pathways that have become habitual to her, the scent trails that any panther hunting in the area would be drawn to, where the fattest forest birds nest and where tasty stout piranhas, rippled with fat and muscle, come near the surface. Her mind loops, again and again, to her friends. No matter how much she thinks on it, though, she can come up with no way to save them.

  It’s strange; it’s like she must stop being herself, that she’s only able to move and hunt when she forgets who she is and who she’s lost. When she does remember the plight of the rest of the shadowwalkers, it’s too much to bear, and stills her in mid-stride.

  Twilight is the easiest. The night of hunting spreads wide before her, and feels like it might last forever. At dusk she’s paused beside a still puddle to get a sip of water when she sees movement in the reflection behind her. Mez goes motionless, then slowly lowers her head, as if to take another drink. This time her senses are on high alert, watching for any sign of life, ready to turn invisible and spring away if Auriel attacks.

  A branch cracks. Mez crouches, ready to leap, letting out a low growl.

  The voice, when it comes, sets something thrumming deep inside her. It’s from someone more familiar than anyone else Mez has ever known.

  “Oh, Mez, it really is you!”

  Her ears go flat and her eyes widen. How can this be?

  It’s Chumba.

  “CHUMBA?!” MEZ SAYS.

  Immediately she’s bowled over by a ball of calico fur, licked up and down her face. “Mez, Mez, it’s you, why-would-you-leave-like-that-it-can’t-happen- ever-again-okay?”

  The ziggurat is many nights’ travel from their den. Auriel was the one who told Lima how to get here—Chumba shouldn’t even know how. Even if she knew the way, how could Chumba have survived the journey alone? It’s like Mez is seeing a ghost. Wary of Auriel’s traps and schemes, she edges away from her sister.

  “Mez, what’s wrong?” Chumba asks, ears perking in worry.

  Mez’s mind races. Many of the eclipse-born didn’t know their powers before they were sealed into the ziggurat. Maybe Auriel can steal powers away before the young animals ever know them. Maybe his henchman Sky is speeding through his divinations, unlocking powers as fast as Auriel can squeeze them out. Maybe one of those powers is the ability to create illusions. Maybe they’ve gone into Mez’s mind and pulled out the thing she cares about most in the world and made it appear here in the jungle, to trap her.

  “How—how do I know you’re real?” Mez manages to stammer.

  “What do you mean, how do you know I’m real?” Chumba asks, her pink-and-black nose trembling. “Mez, it’s me!”

  Mez hangs her head. “So much has happened, Chum. And I can’t figure out how you can be here. I’m so confused.” This looks and smells like Chumba. All Mez wants to do is go hug her sister, feel her closeness after all this time. But trust has proven dangerous.

  “I’ll explain how I’m here,” Chumba says, eyes brightening. “But first, how about this, Mez? Remember the triplets? Remember whisker-taunt? Remember how we saw that big gooey slug stuck to Mist’s tail, and we didn’t tell him?”

  A smile creeps over Mez’s face. “Yes,” she says, “I remember all that.” For a moment she’s still hesitant, then she breaks out into laughter, relieved laughter, great peals of it resounding through the nearby jungle.

  Mez approaches her sister and nuzzles close. The love that quickens both their hearts is no illusion. “How did you find me, Chum?”

  “It was maybe ten nights ago,” Chumba says. “We were on the hunt, and Mist was going really fast and I . . . I was falling behind. It’s okay, don’t worry about me, I’ve been fine,” she says, seeing Mez’s worried expression. “I was racing to catch up, and suddenly I had this . . . this vision. The whole vision felt like you, if that makes sense, like you were on the edges of everything I was looking at. You were on the side of this big stone pyramid thing, and you were crouched, and there was this bird, this red bird—”

  “That’s Sky!” Mez exclaims. “He was helping me discover my power.”

  “He had you in some sort of spell. I was yelling your name, but you couldn’t hear me—”

  “I did hear you, I did!” Mez says.

  “And as I was yelling I saw you break out of the trance and you were wounded, and everything was all chaotic, but you were limping to the top of the pyramid, and there was a giant snake attacking all these animals and that’s when the vision broke up. I tried to get it back, but it was like I wasn’t making it, I was receiving it. It was like trying to force a dream to return.”

  “Sky suspected his power was more than divination, and he was right. It looks like he’s able to communicate through his visions, too. Oh, Chumba. You don’t know the worst of it. That giant snake was Auriel,” Mez says. “He was bringing together all the eclipse-born—he said to defeat the Ant Queen. But he attacked us to steal our powers. I was tricked, Chumba.”

  “When the vision was ending,” Chumba says, “it didn’t blink out. It traveled back to me. It took me across a canyon and over a waterfall and then into the rainforest that I recognized, all the way to me, right into my eyeballs, and then it ended. So I knew sort of how to get to you. And once we were here it was a matter of finding that crazy pyramid thing, then looking for you.”

  “So Aunt Usha didn’t exile you, too?” Mez asks.

  Chumba shakes her head.

  “I wonder if you also have powers,” Mez says, “if Sky’s vision was able to reach you like that. We were born around the same time, after all.”

  “I don’t think so, Mez. There’s nothing magical about me.”

  “You haven’t daywalked, but I could almost wake you up during the day. And you’re always the first up after the Veil lowers. All those long twilights when it was only the two of us awake, remember?”

  “Those were my favorite,” Chum
ba says, her voice husky.

  “Mine too,” Mez says.

  “I don’t know what this Sky character can do, but I don’t think it’s because of some magical power that I knew you were in trouble. I think it’s just that, well, you’re my Mez. I knew there would be a sign of you, eventually. It had to happen. We wouldn’t be kept apart. Maybe that red bird knew that.”

  Something about Sky getting called “that red bird” makes Mez smile. Chumba’s right, it’s probably part of Sky’s power to allow some communication in the reverse direction. Who knows what power he’ll bring to his evil alliance with Auriel—if the treacherous constrictor lets him live.

  Mez’s whiskers droop. “I hate that night I got exiled, Chum. I should have fought back harder against Aunt Usha, I know now. But I was worried what Usha might do to me, and to you. I wish I had been braver. I told myself I was doing the right thing for Caldera, but now it turns out Auriel has sucked out the powers from four of us and the rest are probably getting sacrificed to the Ant Queen. Rumi is down there, and Gogi and Lima.”

  “Rumi? Gogi? Lima? Who are these panthers?”

  “They’re not panthers,” Mez says, allowing herself to rest her haunches on the jungle floor. “They’re a frog and a monkey and a fruit bat. Friends of mine.”

  Chumba rolls her eyes. “Wait until Aunt Usha hears about that!”

  “Yeah. Has she cooled down? Do you think we can go home? We’ll have time on our way back to figure out how I can tell her I’m friends with some non-panthers. I have to say, it’s been nice being friends with other animals instead of just eating them. Oh, Chum, there’s so much to catch you up on!”

  Chumba’s face goes serious. “Mez—I didn’t come alone. Aunt Usha is here!”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Do you think I’d make it here on my own?” Chumba asks with a wry smile. “Haven’t you been listening to anything Mist has been saying about me all these years?”

  “Yes, Mez, you made me lose one of my sister’s cubs; I wouldn’t want to lose both of them,” comes a deep and glittering voice. Aunt Usha. The beautiful panther emerges from the foliage and slinks along the far edge of the puddle, green eyes hard as gemstones.