by Kekla Magoon
Colonel Ramos stood alongside and spouted riding advice. “Keep your knees tucked in. Gentle pressure on the reins.”
“Here we go,” Carly said, nudging Thunder toward the mouth of the tunnel. His eyes brightened as he trotted closer to the dark hall. Carly immediately knew the Weaver eyes would allow for much better visibility than her small flashlight had.
“Good luck,” Colonel Ramos said. “Perhaps I’ll see some of you again.”
“Yup, it’s official,” Gabriel said. “You, sir, definitely have a future as a motivational speaker.”
Chris and Carly laughed. Colonel Ramos, of course, made note of the observation.
“We’ll see you,” Chris said. “Count on it.”
The three riders nudged their mounts, and the horselike creatures took flight.
“Whee!” Carly cried. Her Weaver’s wings stirred the air. The breeze lifted her hair off her neck, and as she tugged the reins, the black horse dipped and tilted according to her whim. She could feel the creature’s wildness, its spirit, but the Jackals had them impeccably trained. “This is amazing!”
Gabriel sat atop his horse, steady but uneasy. He clutched the reins with one hand and held the other loosely at his side. Chris held himself rigidly in the saddle, craning his neck left and right.
“Ready?” Carly asked, swooping ahead of the guys.
“Let’s do it,” Gabriel said.
They flew into the darkness.
—
The Weavers’ glowing eyes lit the path ahead. Thunder’s “headlight” beams washed over the scarred stone walls with the subtlety of oil-lamp light. It wasn’t just like the effect of a stronger flashlight. The tunnels simply seemed to glow with light.
They rode three abreast for a short while, until the tunnel narrowed.
Gabriel nodded to Chris. “You lead us in. I’ll lead us out.”
“Go ahead,” Carly said, reining in Thunder to allow Chris on Knight to go first, as they’d agreed.
Chris loosened the reins, and Knight charged ahead. Knight had the brightest eyes, and his shyness faded as he strained to get ahead of the others.
“The caverns have changed so much,” Chris called. “It’s nothing like I remember, and nothing like the map.” His raised voice carried clearly, echoing off the stone walls. It was a bit like talking in a vortex, with sound being snatched and swirled and lifted by the Weavers’ wind.
“Ramos warned us,” Carly said. “The maps are out of date.”
“And constantly changing,” Gabriel said. His MTB lit up with the Saws’ moving dots. Carly’s adapted program seemed to be working. That, at least, was a good sign.
Some of the tunnels were as wide as a freeway, while others were as narrow as a country lane. Some vaulted high like church ceilings, while others were short and narrow.
I wouldn’t want to meet the Saw that chewed its way up there, Gabriel thought as they flew through a high but narrow passageway. It was tall enough for the three Weavers to ride through stacked one above the other. Soon, the ceiling sloped back down and they were flying single file again.
Thunder instinctively avoided tunnels with Saws. Carly wasn’t sure how he knew—if he heard or smelled or sensed the eels somehow. He would often snuffle or whinny an instant before Chris’s tag pinged or Gabriel called out a course correction.
Which…hadn’t happened recently, Carly realized.
Gabriel had been uncharacteristically quiet for a while now. Carly looked over her shoulder to make sure he was still behind her.
He was…sort of.
Gabriel was not flying straight. At all. The headlights on his Weaver zigged and zagged back and forth across the tunnel as he practically bounced off the walls.
“You okay back there?” Carly called.
“I’m good.”
It didn’t look like it to Carly.
“Maybe you’re holding the reins too tight?” she suggested.
“I’m doing this on purpose,” Gabriel called to her. “Don’t worry about me.”
I’ll bet, Carly thought. But she didn’t say anything else. Riding a horse wasn’t exactly easy, she knew. Let alone a flying one. She didn’t want to make Gabriel feel bad.
Gabriel continued his epic swooping, touching each wall as often as he could. It would be too hard to explain his plan in flight. Carly would understand soon enough.
Even though Chris was in the lead on Knight, Thunder seemed to be the senior Weaver. He whinnied and snuffled from time to time, and when he did so, Knight would instantly change course. The horses seemed to be communicating with each other on a level their riders couldn’t understand. There was an order to things, in the Weaver world, apparently.
Thunder reared up suddenly, clearing his throat. They were approaching a Y, where the cave split yet again.
“Saws!” Gabriel called. “In both directions!” He could see the trajectory of two eels on his MTB. One was headed this way, coming straight down the right-hand tunnel toward them.
The left-hand tunnel looked clear for the moment. Gabriel studied his map again. The second Saw appeared to be in a side tunnel that would soon intersect with the main tunnel. And the image he was looking at could be several minutes old—there was no way to tell how far the Saw had gotten since then. If they went left, they could fly directly into its path.
The lanyard on Chris’s chest pinged softly. Then louder. And louder.
“Retreat!” Carly shouted.
“But there’s a cavern just ahead,” Chris answered. Down the left-hand tunnel, he could see the glistening lake.
“Can we get there before the Saw crosses?” Gabriel asked. On the map, it looked tight.
“We have to try,” Chris decided. He nudged Knight to take the left turn.
Thunder followed reluctantly. He whinnied a warning as he flew. “I know, boy,” Carly whispered. “We’ll be careful.”
It was worth the risk, possibly. The deeper they went into the tunnels, the more likely they were to get hopelessly lost. The water ahead glittered with promise.
But the tunnel was long. Longer than a football field, Gabriel figured. Halfway down, a second tunnel dead-ended into theirs. The Saw could be coming out of that hole at any moment.
Chris flew by the tunnel first. His lanyard emitted a loud, sustained pulse. He turned to look down the tunnel.
“It’s close,” he shouted. “Hurry!”
Thunder flapped harder than ever. He surged forward.
Carly didn’t need to turn her head to look. The Saw arrived, just as she reached the intersection.
Snap.
“What do you mean it’s working fine?” Dash bellowed. “Obviously it’s not working fine, or we’d be talking to them!”
STEAM held up his robot hands imploringly. “I’ve run the diagnostics, yes sir. The ZRK Commanders have been in and out of the system as well. Everything is in order.”
“Then why can we not reach them?” Dash lamented.
STEAM whirred and grunted. “Dozens of possible reasons, yes sir. Would you like them as a list, a graph, or a table?”
“Never mind,” Dash said, tossing himself into his captain’s chair. “I can imagine plenty of reasons all on my own.”
“Imagination is a powerful thing, yes sir,” STEAM said. “Like a runaway train, like a boulder rolling downhill, like a lion about to—”
Dash jumped up again. “How long do we wait before we go down ourselves and try to figure out what’s happened?”
“We can’t,” Piper said. The Cloud Cat was down at the surface. “We just have to be patient.”
“What if they’re in trouble?” Dash wondered aloud. “What if they need our help?”
Piper shook her head. “If there’s some horrible trap waiting down there, we can’t walk into it after them. The mission has to go on.”
Dash really didn’t like the sound of that. He knew Piper was just being reasonable and logical, but talk like that didn’t do anything to take the edge off his worry.<
br />
Horrible trap.
The words echoed in his brain like clanging cymbals. A horrible trap, on Infinity.
Dash’s eyes widened. Imagination was one thing. Memory was another. Dash remembered something suddenly, something Chris had said while they were in Gamma Speed.
“I’ve figured them out,” Chris had said. “The Jackals won’t trick me again.”
They had been talking about the upcoming challenges of the new planet, just the two of them. Chris had seemed to think the dangers of this planet were more manageable than some of the others. “Everything that might hurt you, you can see coming.”
“Let’s pull up everything we can on the Jackals,” Dash said to Piper. “There might be something we don’t know. Something about them tricking people. Some kind of Jackal trap.” Maybe Chris really hadn’t told them everything he knew. Surprise, surprise.
“I was exaggerating,” Piper said. She regretted the choice of words. “I don’t think there’s really a trap. I think they’re just too deep underground.” She tapped on her tablet screen, accessing the ship’s database.
“What does it say about the Jackals?” Dash asked.
“It’s a very short entry,” Piper said. “There’s even less than what Chris told us in the briefing.”
“Read it anyway.”
“ ‘Jackals are hybrid humanoid-canine in appearance, bone structure, and musculature,’ ” Piper read aloud. She glanced up. “Do you want to see the picture again?”
Dash shook his head.
“ ‘They are detail-oriented, highly intelligent, and strict in protocol. Their culture places a high premium on data collection and scientific research. Members of guest species are universally welcomed, afforded special quarters, and invited to extend their stay.’ ”
Dash waited for Piper to continue. When she didn’t, he said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Piper reported. She paused. “What do you think that last part means?”
“Chris said the Jackals are big on hospitality.”
Piper frowned. “What if it’s not that simple?” Her brow furrowed thoughtfully.
“What are you thinking?” Dash asked.
Piper didn’t want to say out loud what she was thinking. She was wondering about the nature of the “special quarters” and how firmly the Jackals’ guests would be “invited” to stay.
“Nothing really,” Piper said. “I was just wondering again if Chris actually told us everything we should know about the Jackals.”
“ ‘Invited to extend their stay,’ ” Dash murmured, already hovering around the same train of thought.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Piper said, making her voice as upbeat and reassuring as possible. “It hasn’t been that long, considering the tunnels and the Weavers and the whole scope of the mission. They’ll check in as soon as they can. Until then, we wait.”
Dash clenched his fists. Waiting, apparently, was not his strong suit. Doing something, anything, was better than doing nothing.
“Run the comms diagnostic again,” Dash told STEAM.
“Repeat the procedure unnecessarily? Yes sir,” said the robot, going to work on the console.
—
Snap. The Saw’s jaws took off the corner of the rock wall. Carly and Thunder soared by in the nick of time.
Gabriel was about to be less fortunate.
He yanked on Barrel’s reins. Luckily, his zigzag flight pattern had caused him to fall behind the others. Far enough behind that he had an extra few seconds to react. He narrowly avoided slamming smack into the Saw. Instead, he zigged ahead of it.
Barrel stretched his short front legs forward. He tucked up his back legs under his haunches as he vaulted past the snapping Saw. Its metallic jaws crunched down where Gabriel’s body had been a split second before.
“Yaaah!” Gabriel cried as a cloud of the Saw’s construction-dust breath overtook him. “Too close, guys. Too close.”
“Are you okay?” Carly asked.
“I live for a wild ride,” Gabriel choked out. He coughed and shook the cave crumbs off his shoulders.
Chris slowed to a stop. Knight flapped his wings and brought himself to a hover, then set down. Just up ahead, the tunnel gave way to a cavern.
Carly landed next to him. She glanced over her shoulder as Gabriel bounced off the wall a final time and stuttered to a landing. She wondered if he was too busy half crashing, or if he might be thinking the same as she was—Chris’s decision back at the crossroads had been a little reckless. Racing a Saw for no reason? They could have turned back and looked for a safer route. The map showed plenty of other lake caverns in the area.
None of the rest of the crew would have made that choice. Chris had endangered them, in favor of what seemed easy. Did he care about them at all?
Carly tugged Thunder’s reins until he walked up next to Chris on Knight. “You can’t keep doing things like that,” she said.
Chris looked at her. “What?”
“Putting us at risk without explanation. Acting like you’re in charge.”
Chris’s eyes flashed with confusion. “The nature of the mission involves risk.”
“Yes, but—” Carly began.
“I’m doing more to protect you than you realize,” Chris said. “Everything has gone quite smoothly, in fact.”
“We just almost got eaten. For the second time.”
Chris appeared to be thinking. “Colonel Ramos has allowed us…Do you have any idea how many years it took me…”
Carly shook her head. He wasn’t getting it. “On the ship, you can be mysterious and do your own thing,” she told him. “On planet, we have to act as a team. It can’t be every man for himself.”
Chris tilted his head slightly. “You and I are not exactly ‘men.’ ”
“It’s a saying,” Carly answered. “But I think you already know that.” She dismounted, and strode ahead toward the mouth of the tunnel.
She found herself standing on the pebbled shores of a glistening blue lake. The Weavers’ eyes illuminated the dim cavern beyond the threshold. Here, the walls were silvery smooth and slightly damp. They reflected the Weavers’ light like mirrors.
Thunder reared back gently onto his hind legs and pointed his eye beams upward for a moment. The space stretched higher than his light could reach.
“It’s gorgeous,” Carly breathed. The scenery was postcard pretty. She stood for a while, appreciating the awesomeness of being one of only two Earthlings ever to set foot in the heart of Infinity.
“Extra cool,” Gabriel agreed as he came up beside her. Carly noticed him shuffling with something along the edge of his belt. She couldn’t see what it was.
The lakeshore sloped down from the tunnels to the water line. It consisted of glittering pebbles of all kinds of color. They glinted in the Weavers’ sweeping eye-light. Some appeared solid and dark like rocks, while others gleamed with the transparent clarity of jewels. Carly was dazzled by the pebbled shore. She knelt and picked up one of the small stones.
“Sawtooth feces, I believe,” Chris commented. “Undigestible impurities in the rock.”
“Ewww.” Carly wrinkled her nose and dropped the pebble. She rubbed her hand rapidly on her pants leg.
“Awesome!” Gabriel said. “The Saws poop jewelry?” He scooped a handful of the stones into his jacket pocket to take home with them.
Carly giggled. “Well, when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad.”
A thick fuzz of moss grew on the walls, with clusters of gnats or flies buzzing around the largest moss clumps. Tucked within the moss patches, Carly noticed snaking green tendrils similar to those on her mossflower. But no more actual flowers in sight.
Finding the lake cavern was the first step to locating some Stingers. Carly looked up and could barely see the topmost reaches, even with the light of all the Weavers. Small things fluttered in the sky space above. Those must be the Stingers.
Behind her, Chris spoke softly
. “Look where we are,” he said. “You cannot imagine how long it took me to get this far, the first time. The Jackals keep a very close eye on their…guests.”
Carly glanced back at him. On the ship, he had said he wanted to smooth things over with the Jackals for them. “What aren’t you telling us?” she asked.
Chris stared into the lake cavern, like he was seeing some other place or time. “You don’t need to know everything,” he said. “You don’t want to know everything.”
Carly felt a flash of frustration. Who was Chris to decide what they needed or wanted to know?
“This place is huge,” Gabriel observed. Looking up gave him a hint of vertigo. “How far underground are we?”
Two of the batlike creatures did a flyby. Gabriel flinched backward.
“They won’t leave the cavern,” Chris reminded them. “They need the moisture of the lake. The caves are too dry.”
Carly watched as the Stingers zoomed for the moss clusters. Two tiny mouthfuls of gnats became Stinger food.
“Whoa.” Gabriel stuck his hand across the threshold into the lake cavern. Amazingly, he could feel the difference. It wasn’t like water on his skin or anything; it was more like stepping out of an air-conditioned building in the early summer. The air was instantly a few degrees warmer, and just a bit thicker. He sensed that if he went all the way in, he might begin to sweat.
The Weavers stamped impatiently along the lake cavern threshold, eager to cross inside and fly higher.
“It’s okay, boy.” Carly patted Thunder’s mane. “You’ll get your chance in a minute.” The cavern was both inviting and a little scary. The tunnel felt like a protected space—you knew what was immediately behind and beside you. Once in the cavern, that certainty would be gone. The small flitting Stingers moved so fast it was hard to even see them individually.
“We’ll need the nets ready,” Chris said.
Gabriel had already unhooked his net from his backpack. Carly moved to free hers too.
At the far side of the cavern, a Saw slithered out of another tunnel. It wriggled across the sloping shore to drink from the lake. The slurping sound it made was almost as harsh as its chewing. The noise echoed in the cavern.