by Devon Hughes
Finally, you learn to jump up instead of out, and you learn to flap quickly instead of steadily. You climb into the air this time before you fall. And the next time you do it you flail for a half a second longer.
Your hunger makes you stupid, and your flapping scares away all the bugs. But eventually, you learn to trust your voice, your wings, your muscles.
“Food?” you call out, and the sound loops back to you with information. It seems to say, “Right here!” and a firefly zips into your mouth with a pop.
The darkness feels like it has layers as you dip and dive through it, and though your eyesight is bad, you see blue, and orange, and white streaks as you sense the heat of other creatures around you. The world makes sense.
Your instincts are so good, you begin to believe you can’t miss.
Sometimes, you still do. It is only when you think you know where you are going that you are deceived. The path changes, the prey migrates, a door is opened that was closed before. It is only when you expect routine that you falter.
You end up with a bump on your head, a torn wing, an empty stomach.
Trust your path, you start to remind yourself each night. Trust the layers in the darkness. Trust your instincts.
27
CASTOR AND JAZLYN WERE BACK UNDERGROUND, BACK where they started on the train tracks, back on the path to the Greenplains. This felt like a new journey, though. It was deliberate—they weren’t running blind anymore. Castor’s eyes had never been more open.
Castor had thought that when his mentor died, his education would end. Pookie had been so old, and he’d seen so much of the world, that Castor didn’t think he could learn more from anyone else. But the first new thing he had learned was that, it turned out, lots of different creatures could teach you about the world, even when they didn’t know they were doing it. They could show you the kind of dog you wanted to be . . . and, just as importantly, the kind you didn’t.
Now, Jazlyn was padding along by his side in the musky gloom, matching him step for step, and Castor didn’t doubt that he’d chosen the right path.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For what you did back there. Leaving with me.”
Castor stopped in his tracks. “You don’t have to thank me for being your friend, Jazz.”
“I just know it must’ve been hard, is all, to walk away from your family.” Her voice trailed off as she loped ahead of him into the darkness.
“Hey.” Castor gave Jazlyn’s tail a tug so she would turn around. “They walked away from me. From us. You’re my family now.”
Jazlyn’s nose twitched a little uncertainly, but her eyes were bright. “Yeah?”
Castor nudged past her, giving her a playful bump with his shoulder. “Yeah.”
“I think I just purred.”
“Do panthers purr?”
“They do now!” Jazlyn laughed. “Maybe I really am still evolving.”
That’s what the news on the buildings had said—Castor had read the headlines just before they disappeared below. He and Jazlyn fell silent thinking of the images that went with those headlines: 3D video of their friends being captured. For Castor, it was almost worse to watch the second time, when he wasn’t terrified and running for his life. He could really see Enza’s anger as she swiped at the metal that gripped her, and from the way Samken’s body went slack, he seemed devastated.
“It’s so quiet without Samken,” Jazlyn said after a few minutes.
“I know. And who will insult me now that Enza’s gone?”
“I could try. Your growl is not as mean as you think, Underdog!”
Castor barked a laugh. “Still too nice.”
“Do you think they really made it to the Greenplains?”
That was what the ads said. But with the humans and their brightly projected reality, how could you know what was real?
“Definitely!” Castor answered, anyway. If he could say it, maybe he could believe it. “I bet if we speed it up, we can probably see them before nightfall. We’ll all have a feast together under the stars and sleep on a soft bed of grass.”
“Hey, if you wanted me to go faster, all you had to do was say so!”
Jazlyn stretched her panther legs and kicked up a cloud of dust in front of him, and Castor was left panting after her, his tail wagging.
They went on like that for a while, until they saw light ahead. It wasn’t quite direct sunlight—there was some sort of filter—but it wasn’t the fluorescent glare of NuFormz, either.
“Maybe it’s opening up to the outside!” Castor shouted.
A little farther, they started to see trees. They looked a little more limp and sickly than Castor had expected, with leaves that were more yellow than green and branches that sagged, but they were still real trees.
“Maybe it’s the start of the Greenplains!” Jazlyn yelled, and surged forward even faster.
She didn’t see that the track ended suddenly at a sharp drop-off until she was nearly there. Jazlyn put on the breaks, but she was going so fast her head and shoulders kept traveling, even as her legs skidded on the earth. The soft rocks at the edge broke away and fell, and Jazlyn was on her way to following them. Castor sprang forward and snatched her up with his talons.
“Gotcha!” he panted, yanking her back just before she went over the cliff.
It wasn’t really a cliff, though—more of a crevasse. The earth dipped into a wide bowl below and a vast, round ceiling was carved overhead. It almost looked like the inside of the Dome, but underground. It was some kind of machine graveyard. Castor saw metal boxes with windows like he’d seen on the tracks before—Jazlyn called them subway cars—but this time, there were dozens of them stacked on top of one another, piled all the way to the ceiling, like makeshift buildings cobbled together. There were ladders and ropes climbing up them.
In the bottom of the bowl, there were little dirt paths snaking through the stacked metal cars, and more wilted plants. There were also carts like the ones in the Dome, with smells that made Castor drool, and tables laid out with colorful items and hand-drawn signs that reminded Castor of the window-lit images on the buildings in Lion’s Head—advertisements for everything a human could want.
Oh, yeah, and there were humans. Everywhere. More humans than Castor had seen in the packed stands of the Dome before a big match. More than he’d seen walking behind the glass in the towers. Probably more humans than Castor had seen all together in his lifetime.
And all it would take was for even one of them to glance up and see a certain most-wanted winged dog and a very conspicuous bunny-eared panther hanging out at a well-lit tunnel entrance, and their journey would be over, just like their friends’.
Jazlyn was shaking next to him, doing her signature bunny freeze. Castor had to tug her back into the tunnel by her long black tail before she snapped out of it. Then she was all business, rational as ever.
“We can backtrack,” she suggested. “Go over the river instead of under.”
“What about the flying bee things?” Castor said.
“Well, if you weren’t carrying me, then you could probably outfly them, especially if you knew they were coming.”
Castor cocked his head, confused. “If I wasn’t carrying you, then we wouldn’t be going to the Greenplains together.”
“I mean, if you wanted to go by yourself I would understand,” Jazlyn said, with a twitch of her pink nose. “Like Enza said, at least one of us should make it, and . . .”
“All of us are going to make it!” Castor barked. “First you and me are going to get to the Greenplains together, and then we’ll go back for the others. If I didn’t abandon you for the dog pack, what makes you think I’m going to start now?”
Jazlyn’s eyes softened, and she hopped over to him. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me for being your friend.”
Jazlyn snickered. “That’s what I said to you when we first met. Well, looks like we’d better find another tunnel, then. Maybe we should s
tay away from train tracks this time.”
“Who cares about the tracks?” Castor said with a wry bark. “How about we just stay away from the humans?”
28
LEESA FELT WEIRD WALKING TOWARD THE JAIL. SHE KNEW her dad had been in there before—he might be in there now, for all she knew—but she’d never come to see him. Now she was here visiting some sky dude, and she couldn’t help feeling guilty.
But whatever. Her dad was the reason her pet Chihuahua had become an Unnatural, while this sky dude had actually helped her free some of them. Pete was in here because he’d agreed to help her and Marcus when no one else would, not even her supposed best friend. Now it was their turn to help him.
Joni had kept her promise and was waiting at the entrance, and Leesa saw that Marcus was already standing next to her. She noticed he didn’t have his arm sling anymore, or his skateboard. Leesa felt a weird little flutter when she saw him slouching there with his blond hair flopping over his left eye, looking way more relaxed than she felt and making her believe things would actually be fine somehow.
“Hey, look, it’s the hero,” he said, shrugging his hair off his brow to look at her. “You looked pretty cute in the publicity photo. The blue streak in your hair goes well with your scowl.”
Even though he’d just said she looked cute, Leesa’s flutter of affection turned to a twinge of annoyance. She knew he was going to be weird about not getting credit.
“I didn’t know she was going to say that,” Leesa said defensively. “I didn’t even know there was going to be a press conference. She was just using me like she uses everyone else. Like she’s using Pete.”
“Whoa,” Marcus said, laughing. “I was just giving you a hard time.”
Leesa wasn’t convinced, though. “Everyone in the Drain hates me now, by the way. Is that why you’ve been ignoring me, because you’re mad you weren’t the one she picked to blame?”
“I was grounded! Bruce even killed my simulink. I’ve pretty much spent the last week going crazy alone in my room.”
“But your parents let you come here?” She squinted at him.
“No way. Bruce is at NuFormz helping to close down the center, and my mom is at her prayer group. I snuck out.”
“Gutsy.”
He shrugged, like it was the only option. The sky boy had come a long way, considering he had freaked out about being unsupervised at NuFormz for ten minutes the first time she’d met him.
“We need to get Pete out.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Joni said, ushering them forward. “I don’t even know if they’re going to let us in. A journalist, maybe, but two kids?”
Marcus looked like he was about to say something about being called a kid, but he kept his mouth shut. They both knew Joni was their best shot.
Luckily, the guard on duty in Pete’s block was a Moniac. Not even a Moniac—a Joniac. He recited ten of her signature phrases and had her sign like twenty match cards. The guy was her biggest fan. It was all pretty disgusting, but at least it got them in to see Pete.
Pete was in gray-blue prison-issue clothes, and he was in a cell away from the others, in the solitary wing. Like he had done something really bad.
When they got to his cell, Joni rushed forward, clasping the bars.
“Pete! Are you okay?” Joni asked, her voice breaking.
Joni acted like he was receiving super-bad treatment and everything, but after seeing the Unnaturals’ cells back at NuFormz, Leesa thought he had it pretty good. There were no windows or anything, but he had a bed and didn’t have to go to the bathroom in a corner of his cell, for example.
He had deep circles under his eyes and his face looked drawn, but otherwise he seemed all right.
Pete held Joni’s hand through the bars, and Leesa suddenly felt very self-conscious about standing so close to Marcus. She tucked her hands into her pockets, and then felt even dumber, and pulled them back out.
Marcus didn’t even notice, though. He was looking at Pete like he might start crying, and then he started apologizing over and over, gripping the bars of the cell like he was going to rip them off or something.
“Marcus, you didn’t do this,” Pete insisted firmly.
“The mayor did this,” Joni said.
But Pete wasn’t going to just dismiss it like that. “I did, too, though,” he said. “I made choices, and I stand by them.”
Leesa appreciated that, but it made her wonder, too. “Does that mean you stand by the shot?” she blurted out.
Marcus looked upset that she’d asked that, but wasn’t that why they were here? They needed to find out the truth, and if Pete wasn’t going to give it to them, then what was the point of any of it?
But Pete just seemed confused. “What’s she talking about?” he asked, looking at Joni.
Joni showed him the picture. “This is floating around—I think probably distributed by Eris. The media’s speculating that you were giving the mutants steroids for guaranteed gambling wins.”
“Wow.” Pete let out a low whistle. “That’s creative.”
“I knew you wouldn’t give them shots,” Marcus said, satisfied.
Pete shifted awkwardly. “Well, I did, but like, just since the Mega Mash-up. Some of the remaining animals were pretty banged up, and I agreed to administer medical treatment while I was being held for questioning. The Invincible wasn’t responding . . .”
Marcus wasn’t surprised about that, after seeing a cement pole crush the scorpion-tiger.
“But the mayor and Bruce were convinced he could be revived. They had these vials of serum, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to try and save him. It actually worked really well, causing a jolt to the system, so then I tried it on the Vicious, too. They seemed fine at first, but then they started to change.”
“Change how?”
“Well, both animals had always been violent because of how Horace trained them, but this made their mouths foam, their eyes red. . . . Afterward, they just had this strange drive to attack. Vince was the only one who could pull them off me. He seems to have a way with them.”
“That was the first time you’d seen the serum at NuFormz?”
“Yeah. I mean, they give all the animals a shot of serum to change them into mutants. But this was different. It was in Bruce’s private lab, and I’m not usually allowed in there. But there were rows and rows and rows of them. Looked like they were planning to give them to a lot more animals than just those two.”
“But then the mayor shut down the Unnaturals. They’re supposedly dismantling NuFormz. Why would they be mass-producing this serum that makes animals crazy if they’re going to release them into the Greenplains?”
Pete sighed and ran his hands through his hair—it had gotten pretty dirty during his time in the slammer, and it was sticking up in all directions.
“I don’t know, but Bruce was acting super weird about my involvement. He’s always bossing me around at work, but he was very clear about not talking to anyone about it.”
“We’re not just anyone!” Marcus sputtered. “And you’re going to listen to Bruce?” He looked really hurt, and Leesa didn’t blame him. They’d come all this way to get some answers so they could help, and now his brother was giving them the cold shoulder? Marcus leaned forward and whispered urgently, “Pete, it’s us. It’s me!”
“I know, Marcus, but I think this is bigger than the escape. I just don’t want to get you mixed up in something I don’t even understand until we know what we’re dealing with. If the mayor’s lying about the reason I’m in here, things are probably more serious than we think.”
“We’re going to get him out of here,” Joni promised, squeezing Marcus’s shoulder. “We just have to figure out what the bigger game is that the mayor’s playing.”
“Let me know when you find out, will you?” Pete said. “I don’t much like being the pawn.”
Leesa thought about the new book she’d been reading. The girl in it, Nancy, was always looking fo
r clues. If they were going to get Pete out of jail, they were going to need something that proved the mayor was lying, and it wasn’t really his fault.
“We need something concrete,” she said. “Evidence.”
“There is one more thing,” Pete said. “I heard two of the researchers whispering about something called K-group. They stopped talking as soon as Bruce walked into the lab.”
K-group. That sounded like a clue.
29
WHILE TRACKING RUNT AND THE LIZARD, KOZMO HAD observed that the pair was not very good at gathering food.
“I’m starving,” Runt groaned. “You don’t think there are any raccoons scurrying around down here, do you, Flicker? What I wouldn’t give for a fat, juicy raccoon right now.”
The lizard flicked out her tongue, making a sound of disgust.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Runt went on. “Rats! I know, I know, rats are delicious. The thing is, I always hunted rats with my brother. Rats are mean and sneaky. You really need two dogs to hunt rats, otherwise you wind up getting ambushed by a whole bunch of them, and you end up with chew marks all over your legs, see?” He stuck out his back leg for the lizard to see. “Those are from my first hunt without Castor.”
Flicker gagged again. Of course mammals with fur didn’t sound appetizing to her, like they did to Runt! Kozmo was willing to bet that the lizard would prefer some crunchy invertebrates or a delectable bug medley. Flicker didn’t seem to hunt on her own, though—maybe she had forgotten how after being fed slop in the Room for a while.
Kozmo decided to share her bounty. One night, she found a whole nest of centipedes. She made four trips back and forth with a mouthful of wiggling bugs, but she knew it would be worth it to see their expressions of gratitude when they woke up.
Runt and Flicker seemed to sleep forever, so she thought they might need a little help.
“Hey!” she screeched. “Look what I brought you!”