by Jude Watson
Yes, because I’m more afraid right now than I’ve ever been. Because I thought there was a limit to how scared you can get. There isn’t.
Molly looked over Yoshi’s shoulder at Cal’s lean-to. She saw him standing in the threshold, looking at her. Spinning that broken watch.
If she could find out from Cal what would happen, she could know when she was slipping away. She could tell the Killbots that they wouldn’t have her for much longer. She could be like her dad, who was so brave at the end. He knew he would die even when her mother refused to face it. He had taken her hand and said there would be a corner of sadness in her heart her whole life, but she would get to live it, and that was everything to him.
She wanted to be that brave.
She wasn’t.
Not yet.
Because she had to know.
She pressed her hands to her temples. “You always think you’re right, Yoshi. You push too hard! I need some time to think, okay?”
“Fine.” His voice was icy. “Take your time. But remember, you might be taking way more than you know.”
The Cub-Tones were tuning up. Apparently they rehearsed every morning, after they marked the path to the stream. It was one of Hank’s rules.
The guy was a dictator. He even had them line up in formation. They were playing a song called “Mr. Tambourine Man” and doing this thing called “chair-stepping,” lifting their knees high while they marched. It looked ridiculous, but after a few initial laughs from the Killbots, nobody was even smiling. They were staring, rapt, and tapping their feet, applauding after every song. Maybe it was because they were remembering home. Parades, football games, the Super Bowl.
Yoshi had never been interested in any of those things.
After the marching songs, Hank began something classical, and Dana and Akiko joined in with their flutes. Yoshi knew this piece. He’d been forced to go to concerts with his father. He had spent the time twitching with impatience and longing for his phone, which he’d been ordered to leave at home.
The music soared here. It filled his chest with longing. He didn’t think that out of all the things he missed from his old life, he’d ever miss Bach.
Even Cal had left his hut and was pacing in a circle around it. The boy marked time with one hand in the air. Javi had warned the others that Cal would be unusual but … wow. Yoshi felt a twinge of pity for him, for the green veins that pulsed in his neck and the wild gleam in his eyes.
Yoshi was done. He wouldn’t stick around long enough to become that. He had taken some seed cakes and water cubes and secreted them in his pack. He had pocketed the Killbots’ antigravity device. He was ready to go.
He couldn’t just walk out, though. He needed to tell someone he was going so that they wouldn’t look for him. Someone who would understand his decision.
Kira appeared at his elbow. “Akiko is happy. She gets to play with someone really good.”
Yoshi shrugged.
“You think Anna is pretty,” she said.
He swiveled. “What?”
“You said it, when you were bitten by the scorpion back in the desert. It was a kind of truth serum. Also Molly, and Akiko, and even me. All of us, pretty.” Kira smiled. “I just wanted to say thank you for the compliment.”
Yoshi felt the blush begin in his cheeks and spread to his fingertips, which tingled with his humiliation. Well, here was another reason to take off.
“Would have been better if you’d said it without the scorpion,” she added.
Yoshi didn’t answer. He still felt the blood beating in his cheeks.
“You also said that your parents don’t want you.”
He took a breath. “They don’t.”
“So maybe you think we don’t want you. But we do. Take a look around, Yoshi-chan. Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“A frog in a well does not know the great sea.”
“Don’t go all Magical Asian on me,” Yoshi said. “I’m a hafu, remember?”
“If half of you gets it, that’s a start,” Kira replied with a grin.
Yoshi knew the Japanese proverb. It was a kind of warning against thinking you know everything when you only see what’s around you. “Are you saying that I’m the frog?”
“We are all frogs. We have to find a way to see outside of the machine,” Kira said. “It’s like Molly says all the time, the English word. Conjectures. Why did you get lost in the forest? Why does the stream change its course? Why does the ridge disappear? The answer could be that the woods themselves don’t want us to leave.”
“Woods can’t make decisions,” Yoshi said.
“Of course they can,” Kira said. “Plants make decisions all the time. They turn toward a light source. Trees decay and seeds travel on air. Why couldn’t plants twist and turn in order to fool us?”
“Because plants can’t think,” Yoshi said.
“No, but there is some kind of intelligence here that can. Remember we are trapped in a well. Someone built it. If they can make all of this, they can change it,” Kira said. “The growth cycles are off, right? Normally when we move through the forest we notice things, the shape of the trees or rocks to help us remember where we are. If there are time folds out there, they are constantly manipulating time. You can be aware, you can think you know where you’re going, but you might never reach it.” She gazed out into the forest. “I think it’s possible to get lost forever. Either in the forest, or in time. I wouldn’t want to be lost by myself.”
It was like Kira knew he was thinking of leaving.
“You’d just have to make sure you didn’t get lost,” Yoshi said. “Once a person climbed the ridge, they’d know where they were.”
“Above the trees?” Kira looked up dubiously. “These trees, you can’t get above.” It was true, the tree canopy was so dense it would be close to impossible to climb through.
Yoshi had a sudden thought. “Those trees we saw—the ones with big trunks that narrow and widen, and the upside-down ones … maybe it was because they would slow their growth, then speed up again. Maybe they’re inside time folds. So if you’re in the woods, you just avoid them.”
Kira shook her head. “You can’t know if that’s the only danger. This place is manufactured to trap and confuse. Totally artificial. Which reminds me. There are no rocks.”
“No rocks?” Yoshi thought back to his walk through the forest. He hadn’t seen a single boulder or stone. Anna had used pinecones to make her directional clock, not rocks. “That’s strange.”
“Not really,” Kira said. “Rocks come from molten magma deep in the earth. But we’re not dealing with regular processes here. We knew that already. This forest was built. Created by someone or something and maintained by robots, just like everything else we’ve seen. We know we’re on Earth, but it’s like … a biome laid on top of another biome. Or something.”
“You sound like Anna.”
“Anna’s not the only one who knows about science.”
Yoshi stood still for a moment, thinking. “Then why when I missed the snakehog did my katana clang against a rock?”
Kira cocked her head. “Are you sure it was a rock?”
Yoshi thought back to the encounter. It was hard, because he’d been lost in the heat of the moment, in his terror and determination. The missed blow had traveled up his arm, making it shake. The katana had hit something just buried by the dirt that had been stirred up by the animal’s charge.
Metal. Something made of metal, underneath the forest floor.
Molly spied Hank across the compound, stacking blue cubes for the fire. She crossed the compound and began to help him without saying a word.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“It’s funny, how you all talk,” he said. “ ‘No problem.’ ‘Thanks, dude.’ ‘LOL.’ ‘Be chill.’ Is that a New York thing?”
“I guess so. Hank … what do you think happened to Cal?”
Hank paused for the briefest of seconds. “I think the pressure of this place got to him. It broke his mind.”
“But what about the attack from the creature?”
“It was awful. Ferocious. Terrifying. The wound healed, but his mind didn’t.”
“Are you sure it healed? What about the green … rashy thing?”
“It doesn’t cause him pain. It’s like a scar.”
Molly picked up a gel cube. “If he can’t help it, why are you so angry at him?”
Hank sighed. “I’m not angry now. I was. He tried to break his clarinet. He would have smashed my oboe, too, if I hadn’t gotten away. He went for Dana’s flute. I was playing Mozart, his favorite piece, the adagio movement, Clarinet Concerto in A Major. I mean, we worked together on it, we played it. We were the music guys, total squares, in band and orchestra. Best friends. And then he tried to smash it. Destroy it.”
“But you say he was out of his mind, so—”
“No.” Hank turned and looked at her. His gray eyes blazed with sorrow and anger. “It was before he lost his mind. He was still my friend then. And he knew what music meant to me. To all of us. But he couldn’t play anymore, so he tried to take it all away from all of us.”
“When you were playing before, it bothered him. Why is that?”
“Music agitates him sometimes. We don’t know why.”
“Does he ever make sense? I mean, how does he communicate?”
“Communicate what? That he’s crazy?” Hank tossed a cube. “Look, I know you’re trying to help. But you have to believe me. I tried to reach him. Over and over and over again. The only time he’s calm is when he’s with Dana.”
Molly hesitated. “I need to tell you something,” she said.
“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“I really think you all need to come with us,” she said.
Hank was already shaking his head. “Abandon the compound? We worked hard on it. It’s survival.”
“We were told that there could be help out there for someone like Cal.”
“Someone like Cal? What do you mean?”
“Our friend Oliver. He … it’s hard to explain, but we think whoever built this place spoke to us through him. He said that the building could help me.”
“But you aren’t like Cal.”
“Not yet,” Molly said. She took a deep breath. “I was bitten by a dreadful duck, too.”
Hank sat back on his heels. “Whoa. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that bad yet,” Molly said, which wasn’t quite the truth. “Would you … look at it and tell me if it’s like what Cal had?”
Hank nodded. She pulled the neck of her T-shirt to show him the green scar. She saw him swallow.
“It’s just like his, isn’t it?”
Hank nodded. “It started to grow, travel down his neck and his back … ”
“Oh.” Molly pressed her fingers against the wound.
“I’m really sorry,” Hank said. “Just because Cal’s scar spread, it doesn’t mean yours will.”
Molly let the fabric fall. “It’s okay. I know help is out there.”
“Help is up there.” Hank pointed to the sky. “If we stay together, we’ll see a plane eventually. We can’t be that far off the map. Now that two planes have gone down, they’ll work even harder to find us.”
“It’s not distance I’m worried about,” Molly said. “It’s time.”
“What do you mean?”
Molly wasn’t good at breaking bad news. She remembered the moment her mother told her that her father had died. She remembered how it seemed to take forever for her mother to get out the words, how agonizing it was, waiting for that blow to fall, knowing she was living in a moment in which there was still hope.
“I think you might be in a time warp,” she blurted.
“What?” Hank laughed a little as he placed a cube carefully on the pile.
“You’ve been here longer than you think,” she said. “While you’ve been here in the woods, time was moving. Faster than you know.”
“How much faster?”
“Over fifty years have passed since your plane went down.”
At first Hank’s face had no expression, as though she’d suddenly hit him on the head with a shovel. Then he rocked back on his heels. “Fifty years?”
“We’re from the future. I mean, your future. Our present.” Molly wished she could see his eyes, but he turned his face away as she was talking.
Hank stared down at his hands. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Fifty years,” he repeated. “That’s nuts. We haven’t aged fifty years!”
“I know. The thing about time? We don’t really get it. How it works. There’s this area of study called quantum physics—”
“Wait. So this means you’re from the future.”
“No, we’re from the present. You’re already in the future. I don’t know how the time warp works. I don’t know how far it extends, or even if it’s a physical thing, like a force field.”
“Do you have time machines, then? I mean … ” Hank waved a hand. “Out there. In the future? My future, your present?”
“No! We can’t move through time. But some scientists say that all time could be taking place simultaneously, only we can’t break through. I mean, in the multiverse there could be many dimensions, more than we know on Earth, right?”
“The multiverse?”
“Sure. There’s more than one universe, they think. And so there could be multiple time-space continuums—”
“Were you in the science club or something?”
“Robotics.”
“Robots? Like in The Jetsons?”
“I don’t know what that is, but you create software to make—”
“Software?”
Molly sighed. “Computers are really small now, and practically everyone has one of their own.” She paused as Hank shook his head in disbelief. “We learn how to write code in school, and— Oh, never mind. My point is, even physicists don’t know this stuff for sure. They can design a theory to explain how the universe works, but they can’t say for sure what the big picture is. They can get the mechanics right, but what if they think it’s like a car, but it’s really an elephant?”
“But an elephant is a living thing, not a machine.”
Molly raked her hand through her hair. “Okay, bad example. I’m trying to tell you that a time warp is possible.”
She could tell he was hardly listening.
“Did the Russians ever drop the A-bomb? Did we? Is that why we’re in this place?” Hank asked.
“No. Everybody kind of agreed that using nuclear weapons was stupid. I mean, not everybody in the whole world, but we kind of kept a lid on it for a really long time.”
“So. Peace on Earth?”
“Not exactly.” Molly thought a moment. There was so much she could tell him. There was so much she didn’t want to tell him.
“If you’re fifty years in the future, there must be all kinds of new technology to find missing planes,” Hank said.
“Sure. Satellite technology and stuff. But I think this place is hidden, somehow. Obviously there’s technology here that’s way beyond what we know.”
“Sooner or later, they’ll find us, though,” Hank said.
“They haven’t found you after fifty years!”
“But the longer we’re here, the better the technology gets,” Hank pointed out. “Our job is to stay alive until they do. If you stayed here with us, with your engineering skills and your devices, we could really make this place like a fortress.”
“Our best way to survive is to keep moving,” Molly said firmly. “Yours, too.”
Hank shook his head. “My job is to protect my crew. We tried so many times. The big beaks attack. The snakehogs. But worse than that … something happens to us. We get confused. We get lost. I can’t lose another Cub. You’ll see. If you do leave, you’ll be back here after a day or two. You’ll never make it out of the forest.�
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“I don’t believe that,” Molly said. “And don’t you think your crew deserves a chance to decide for themselves?”
Hank looked over to the makeshift table where Pammy, Kimberly, and Dana were working with Stu and Drew and Crash, pounding berries into paste, drying flowers and fruit, and chatting.
“I can’t tell them,” he said. “Why should they know this until they have to? Like I said, my job is to protect them.”
He stood, dusting off his hands. “Going is your choice. But Kim was right—you guys could use some rest. Just stay one more day. That will give us a chance to gather supplies for you, operate the water-changer and make more cubes. Then we’ll pack you up with as much as you can carry and guide you as far as the stream.”
“One more day,” Molly agreed.
Javi liked it here. He was afraid to admit it to Molly. He liked the smell of the trees and he liked being in a place where there were chores to do and everyone pitched in. Which was funny, because at home he was always trying to get out of doing chores, and his mother would have to give him that look that meant Do it now, mister to get him to take out the garbage or make his bed.
Here the chores were pleasant, somehow. Sweeping the dirt with a rake made out of a branch with stiff bristled cones tied on with twine. Grinding seeds into paste. Dana was even teaching him how to sew with a needle made of bone, and thread made from some kind of fibrous root.
It amazed him that they’d figured out so much. He was a city kid, and he never knew what plants could do. Dana’s mother had grown herbs and flowers and was always giving her special teas and tinctures instead of medicine.
“Sounds like your mom’s a hippie,” Javi had said, and Dana had said mildly that her mom was actually quite slender. Javi guessed they didn’t have hippies in 1965. He had put his foot in it. Again.
Javi hadn’t realized how tired he was. Tired of escaping from shredder birds and tanglevines. Tired of being hungry. Tired of snatching sleep while you worried about yet another attack from a creature you hadn’t met before. Tired of fear and worry and terror that left you shaking for whole minutes afterward and trying to hide it.