The Lost Rainforest #2

by Eliot Schrefer

  Dedication

  For those who fight for the Earth’s real—and really magical—rainforests

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Excerpt from The Song of the Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Excerpt from The Song of the Five

  Verse Two

  (Translated from the original Ant by Rumi Mosquitoswallow)

  Their enemies vanquished, the shadowwalkers returned to their homes for a well-deserved rest

  [“In one year we will return,” they said

  . . . though they couldn’t know that not all of them would.]

  Lima the Healer,

  Mez the Unseen,

  Rumi the Windbringer,

  Gogi, Monkey of Fire

  (and their untested fifth)

  . . . went their separate ways.

  . . . but the eternal powers of Caldera do not need a year to rest.

  After centuries of sleep, the Ant Queen

  was again freed to make the rainforest

  what it was destined to be.

  [The Five did not understand our queen.

  They did not understand how peaceful oblivion can be.]

  And little did the Five know that our queen was not the only ancient force . . .

  awakened by the eclipse.

  CREAKING STICK, SNAPPING branch—an intruder is approaching.

  From her spot high in a fig tree, Sorella goes still, sniffing the air. The hairs along the back of her neck rise.

  If a predator has spotted her, the best plan for the uakari monkey is to stay as motionless as possible. Eagles and ocelots respond to movement.

  When a few long moments go by with no more sound, Sorella returns to foraging. She’s soon got a nut between her hands and is working her teeth into its hard casing. Uakari are the only monkeys around with the strength to break into this kind of nut, but that doesn’t mean it’s exactly easy. She loses herself in gnawing and piercing.

  Another crack. But it’s not from the nut.

  Sorella whirls, drops her nut, and races farther up the tree, primed to attack or flee. Leaves, branches, and even an unfortunate praying mantis rain down on the clearing below as she squawks and demonstrates. Teeth bared, she howls in the direction of the intruder—until she sees who it is.

  It’s a sloth.

  Sorella has been snuck up on by a sloth! So embarrassing. Her bald red face turns even redder as she leaps to the ground, shakes out her stinging ankles, and races back up the tree, teeth bared at Banu where he holds on to a branch of the next fig tree over. “What do you think you’re doing? You don’t sneak up on someone like that!”

  The sloth yawns, staring at her blankly from his branch. A wasp picks its way across the hair of his eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” Banu says, in the slow and deliberate manner of all sloths. It makes them sound either incredibly wise or incredibly stupid, depending on who’s doing the listening. “I’ve never managed . . . to sneak up on anyone in my life. . . . I’m not sure a sloth can sneak up on anyone . . . and certainly not someone so alert and powerful . . . as a young uakari like yourself.”

  Sorella sniffs and allows her shoulders to relax. “I suppose you’re right. You didn’t sneak up on me. That would be impossible.”

  Banu nods, satisfied with himself.

  Sorella starts poking through the underbrush, lifting leaves and sniffing underneath. “You did make me drop a nice fat nut, though. I was just about to get it open.”

  “Sorry about that,” Banu says, nodding. “Try . . . between . . . the fronds of . . . the scrubby palm.”

  By the time Banu’s finished speaking, Sorella has already searched the palm twice and emerged victorious, the nut held high in her palm. She peers up at Banu and squints her hard, dark eyes. “So, what’s a nice sloth boy like you doing deep in uakari territory?”

  He blinks at her. “I’m on my way to the ruins! . . . Remember, after we defeated Auriel, and the Ant Queen escaped . . . we all promised we’d spread the word back home . . . then reconvene at the fallen ziggurat . . . to discuss what we’d discovered. What . . . did you fall out of a tree and hit your head . . . or something?” He grins. Slowly.

  “Of course I remember all that,” Sorella grumbles. “But the moon has three cycles to go before a year has gone by.”

  Banu holds up a clawed arm in mock surrender. The move takes a few seconds. “When you move at the pace I do . . . you have to get started early for any trip. Took me six moon cycles to get home. . . . I had to turn right back around . . . to get back in time.”

  “That’s too bad,” Sorella says.

  Banu shrugs. “It’s the life of a sloth . . . not bad or good. . . . Do you want to travel . . . with me?”

  Sorella shakes her head. “No offense, but I’d drive myself crazy having to go at your speed.”

  “Is Gogi . . . around?” Banu asks.

  “The capuchins are in the north, not west like us uakari.”

  Banu nods. “Too bad . . . I like that . . . friendly little monkey.”

  “His magical streams of fire are pretty useful too,” Sorella says.

  “I discovered . . . my power,” Banu says. “Water. I . . . can move water.”

  “Sounds very, um, slow,” Sorella says.

  “Well, I shouldn’t . . . dillydally anymore. Do you have any more . . . of those tasty nuts around here . . . that I could take on the road?”

  “You get started, and I’ll bring them to you,” Sorella says dryly. “I think I’ll be able to catch up.”

  By the time Banu reaches the edge of the clearing, Sorella has cracked open four nuts. She lays the meaty white bits into one of his claws. “When you have a sloth metabolism,” he says gratefully, “this much food . . . will last many days. . . . Thank you, Sorella.”

  She watches the sloth leave. Sorella was the most brutish and aggressive of the shadowwalking animals, but after she nearly died in the final assault at the ziggurat, she’s come to see there’s a time and place for being competitive, and there’s no way to go back and show kindness to those who are now dead and gone. Who knew? Even a uakari can show some heart . . . at least every once in a while.

  Sorella feels a prickle under the fur of her knee and reaches down to scratch it. Crack and squish. It was a soldier ant, but she’s gotten to it before it could sink its mandibles into her. Luckily, she has plenty of thick, wiry fur.

  She forages through the greenery, enjoying the whistling sound her breath makes through her sharp teeth. The light shifts, going from blinding white to a more orangey tone as the afternoon wanes on. The ants become more and more of a nuisance, streaming over the spongy orange piles of dead leaves. Sorella switches to the canopy, but then she finds columns of ants streaming up there, too. She tries not to let it worry her—maybe there was a heavy rain somewhere nearby and the ants are fleeing it.

  She hears another cracking sound, and again goes perfectly still.

>   Maybe it’s Banu, returned for another nut?

  The tree trunks around her start to shimmer, but Sorella, her eyes trained in the direction of the noise, can’t spare even a moment to investigate.

  The fronds of a giant fern begin to tremble and then part. Whatever it is, is big.

  Sorella sees the antennae first, then the smooth plane of a head and two giant mandibles, each big enough to spear a uakari.

  It’s the Ant Queen.

  As big as the largest buffalo, she’s made of shining, invulnerable plates, interlocking in sharp and narrow joints, the many surfaces reflecting the ruddy late-afternoon light. The queen’s purple-black surface is unmarred except for stiff yellow hairs sprouting along the broad plates.

  Sorella shrinks back against the tree trunk, making herself as motionless as possible while the Ant Queen comes closer and closer. Once she emerges from the scrubby palm, the insect’s many legs are as noiseless as a panther’s, the only sound the sighing of wet leaves being tamped under the monster’s weight.

  Sorella forgets her desire to stay hidden away and shrieks out an emergency call, to warn the rest of the uakari troop that an enemy is near. There’s no specific call for a centuries-old ant ruler, so she uses the warning for eagles and ocelots—she just makes it very loud. She hopes that some of her family will hear her.

  In the clearing down below, the Ant Queen flicks her antennae, maybe in irritation, maybe from some other, unknowable ant emotion. Then she tilts her head until she’s looking right up at Sorella in her tree. The uakari gasps. She’s forgotten how horrible it is to look at the Ant Queen: there’s infinite depth in the queen’s shiny black eyes, but no feeling there. “Before you call out any more hysterical warnings, maybe you should hear what I have to tell,” the Ant Queen says. She has a low, resonant voice, harmonic, sounding neither male nor female, but something older than both.

  Sorella climbs farther up her tree, hands and feet flailing so she can feel for obstacles, not daring to take her eyes off the emotionless jewels of the queen’s eyes. The Ant Queen’s voice is hypnotic and strangely calming. It’s as if nothing in the current moment could matter as much as the long history the queen has witnessed, or her centuries of imprisonment at the hands of the rainforest animals.

  Sorella feels her short tail press against a branch and instinctively brings her legs up onto it, climbing farther out into the forest canopy, craning her neck to look down at the Ant Queen, teeth bared. The enemy is far below now, and well out of reach.

  Her fur feels bumpy and crackly. Sorella is confused, until she realizes she’s crawling with ants. So that’s what the shimmering was. Ants are all through the clearing now, in concentrations Sorella has never seen before, swarming over their queen and across the jungle floor—and up into the trees.

  “I will give you a choice,” the Ant Queen says. “It is not complicated. One option will result in your continuing to live, and the other will result in your death. I hope you will listen carefully.”

  I would rather die than help you, Sorella thinks. There’s no question about that. The shadowwalkers saw the carvings the two-legs made ages ago on the stones of the ziggurat at the center of Caldera, depicting the queen and her minions overrunning the rainforest, slaughtering the animals they came across, multiplying as they consumed everything in their path.

  “I must go and build my horde,” the Ant Queen says in her harmonic and otherworldly voice, “so our numbers will be great enough for absolute conquest. We need sustenance for our army, but ants have always been good at procuring food—we have mulched the trees and foliage as we fanned across Caldera, creating fungus farms that we tend and harvest. These farms are self-sufficient and, unfortunately for you, this means we have little need for other animals. Almost all of you will have no role to play in the Age of Ants.”

  Sorella climbs higher and higher in the tree until she’s at a dizzying height, crushing as many ants as she can beneath her fingers as she goes. “Why are you telling me this?” she yells down to the queen.

  “You haven’t heard all I have to say. Almost all animals will die. You, however, could survive. If you agree to my demands,” the Ant Queen continues. “I will be . . . occupied for some time. I need animals to work for me while I am away. They can place logs across streams so the army can pass across. Flying creatures can carry new seed colonies of ants to the distant regions of the land. I will not need many to help me, but I will need some. And those who are so honored will be rewarded . . . with their lives.”

  “Never,” Sorella says. “We will stop you!”

  The Ant Queen makes a sort of grating sound that Sorella comes to realize is a horrifying chuckle. “Forgive me, but I don’t see how that is possible.”

  While Sorella stares down at the Ant Queen, she scratches through her fur. More and more ants cover her, working their way to her skin. She rubs her back and limbs against tree bark, hoping to crush as many of the ants as she can. They’re everywhere she looks, shimmering throughout the clearing.

  “You would not be the first to join me,” the Ant Queen calls up to her. “Animals you know have come to my side, friends of yours. I still have room for more allies. This is your last chance, Sorella of the uakari. Side with me, or perish.”

  Sorella’s bald face, already a bright red, turns even more livid. She bares her teeth. Then she lifts her mouth to the sky and lets out the most piercing shriek she can. It’s not a louder version of the ocelots-or-eagles call this time. It’s the most serious alert a uakari can make in the rainforest—it’s the warning of a flash flood, the warning that the homeland must immediately be abandoned. If the other uakari hear her call, it might be enough to save some of her troop, even if there is no hope for Sorella herself.

  “I will never abandon the uakari and the shadowwalkers,” Sorella says proudly, fixing the Ant Queen far below with a furious glare. “And you will be stopped. Someday you will remember my words and realize that Sorella the Uakari was right.”

  The Ant Queen opens and closes her sharp mandibles, clacking over the drone of the late-afternoon cicadas and the rustling chatter of thousands of ants. The queen’s body pulses and bulges, like it’s infested with worms. “I was afraid that would be your answer. I will never understand why any creature would choose death when it could choose life.”

  At least Banu is already well on his way, Sorella thinks, blood quickening through her veins as she prepares for the fight.

  The Ant Queen waves her antennae, tapping them together once. The clearing stops shimmering as all the ants go still.

  Sorella detects a tang in the air, and she realizes the queen has released a pheromone, a chemical signal to her minions. She whirls around, desperately brushing as many ants as she can off her body. But there are so many.

  The last wisp of pheromone enters the porous armor of the ants, and they receive the signal as one. And as one, every ant on Sorella pierces her skin with its stinger and releases its venom.

  No, she thinks. I had so much more to do.

  The poison of a thousand ants courses through her bloodstream. It paralyzes her arms and legs, her lungs and her heart. She tumbles from the branch, plummeting through the air, dead before she even hits the ground.

  WHAT A BEAUTIFUL day it is!

  Gogi the Twelfth stretches out in the sunshine, so that the length of his belly is exposed to its warmth. There’s a whole day ahead of foraging and grooming, all part of the agreeable life of being in the best capuchin troop in Caldera. He’s made it up to number twelve in the rankings! Eleven is so near, he can almost taste it. What a great year it’s been!

  Outlined by the sun, combing one another among the broad leaves of a fig tree, are Gogi’s foraging companions for the day: Lansi and Pansi (ranked fifteenth and sixteenth), Urtinde (seventh), and Urtinde’s baby (not yet ranked). Of course, a number seven like Urtinde gets the bulk of the grooming attention from the others, but every once in a while Gogi gets some love too, and the feeling of nimble monkey fi
ngers picking parasites out of his sun-warmed fur while he dozes is almost too much joy to take. A year ago, after his mom died, he’d dropped to a seventeenth—which meant he was never groomed by anyone, was always the groomer. Not anymore! He cracks his knuckles and smiles up into the sky.

  “Morning, Gogi!” calls a bright voice. Gogi’s best troopmate, Alzo, leaps from one treetop to the next, showering the rest of the foraging group with leaves and bugs. While he waves back at Alzo, Gogi plucks a katydid from his arm fur and absently bites its head off. Capuchins usually stick to fruits and nuts, but sometimes it’s nice to have something crunchy between your teeth.

  While the others grumble at the interruption, Alzo bounds down to sit next to Gogi and groom him. Alzo is younger than Gogi, but is already number eight. Even though Gogi traveled far from the homeland, saved the world from a treacherous magical boa constrictor, and has the power to shoot fire out of his palms, Alzo is ranked higher because he’s funny and has such good hair. The world just isn’t fair sometimes.

  Hard to get mad at Alzo, though—not when he’s an eight willing to groom a twelve. Not when he flashes that goofy smile. “I’m going to go check the nutty palm to see if it’s ripe yet. Want to come?” Alzo asks.

  Gogi checked the nutty palm the day before and knows for a fact that it won’t be ripe for days, but an outing with Alzo is not to be passed up. He nods.

  The two young males head off, pelting each other with pebbles and sticks, tickling and giggling and guffawing all the way to the nutty palm. Sure enough, the nuts are green and shiny, like they were yesterday. “Not ready yet,” Gogi says.

  “That’s too bad,” Alzo says, running his tongue over his lips. “They would taste so good!”

  Gogi imagines it: the tart skin breaking, the juicy orange goo inside, the crunchy seeds rolling under his molars, some getting trapped between his teeth so he can enjoy them one by one all the rest of the day. He wipes a line of drool from his chin. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if we just ate one or . . . I mean, if we . . .”

  “I totally agree!” Alzo says. He bounds up the side of the tree and shakes a branch. The nuts don’t fall on their own—another sign they’re picking them too early—so Alzo gets a stem under his teeth and begins to gnaw. “Just . . . one more . . . second . . . could you help?”