“Rumi?” Gogi asks.
“Oh, sorry!” Rumi says, snapping to attention. “No, of course I didn’t turn against my fellow shadowwalkers. Why are you even implying such a thing?”
“We weren’t,” Mez says quietly.
“No one else got all defensive about it,” Lima points out.
“I’m not, it’s just that I—I’m a little distracted—” Rumi’s gaze flicks to the canopy again.
“Rumi, is this at all related to the ‘misunderstood’ friend you were talking about earlier?” Gogi asks. “I’m sure this all has a reasonable explanation. Why don’t you try telling us?” Gogi sits as low as possible, even if it means making his haunches dirty, so Rumi doesn’t think he’s staring down at him. It’s got to be hard for the little frog, everyone literally talking down to him all the time.
“Oh my,” Rumi says, his yellow fingers dancing nervously. “Maybe I can tell you about the magical lens first? Trigonometry is considerably simpler than matters of the heart.”
Mez forces her lips back down, obviously trying to make Rumi less nervous than he is. She’s not quite pulling it off. Mez is all inadvertently exposed teeth, making the most menacing smile Gogi’s ever seen. “Why don’t we go to that camp Rumi set up for us and talk about it there, where no enemies might overhear?” Mez asks. “I think you said it was somewhere around here, right, Rumi?”
Rumi perks up. “The camp? Why, we’re in it!”
“This is the camp?” Chumba asks, lifting a paw from a puddle. A string of green muck dangles from it.
“I thought it was perfect for all of us,” Rumi says. “But I’m realizing it’s maybe more amphibian-perfect than mammal-perfect.”
“I think it’s just fine here,” Lima offers, smacking mosquitoes between her teeth.
“So, about the ‘lens’—” Rumi starts.
“Rumi,” Mez growls, “if you don’t tell us about this mysterious friend of yours right now, I’m going to get angry.”
“I’d say more angry would be more accurate,” Lima corrects, swallowing hard.
“Let Rumi tell us what he has to tell us in the order he wants to,” Gogi says. “I’m sure we’ll see the reason for all this very soon, right?”
The frog nods, takes up a twig, and begins to sketch in the mud. Gogi tries to figure out the lines, but can’t make sense of them yet. “I learned from the carvings that, long ago, the two-legs developed a magical lens to harness the power of sunlight and moonlight.”
“The removable carvings of the sun and moon that we found in the ziggurat!” Gogi says.
Rumi continues to scratch in the ground. “Right, just like those.”
“We thought they were destroyed when the ziggurat collapsed,” Mez says. “Did they survive after all?”
Rumi shakes his head. “There’s no sign of them, I’m afraid. No, the lens is a similar magic, but in its purest, most powerful form. It appears the two-legs were able to melt sand and turn it clear through their magic, and install this clear stone in a frame. It seems to concentrate light.”
“That’s some cool magic,” Lima says.
“Totally!” agrees Chumba.
“Yes!” Rumi says, face lighting up. “The carvings give some indication of the lens’s massive power. Here’s what they said.” He puffs himself up and takes on an oratorical tone. “‘Pour night into sun, and take away life. Pour sun into night, and create it.’”
“Ooh,” Lima says. “That’s got a good ring to it!”
“This lens was kept hidden away at the edge of Caldera,” Rumi says. “When the Ant Queen attacked, ages ago, it appears to have caught the two-legs by surprise, and they were trapped at the Ziggurat of the Sun and Moon without the lens. So they improvised the carvings, which is why they were able to imprison the Ant Queen, but not destroy her. The lens would have gone all the way. It seems to redistribute all the magic contained in the eclipses, for good or for evil.”
“We need that lens,” Mez says.
“And by the time the lunar eclipse comes around,” Gogi adds.
“Twenty-three nights away,” Rumi says. “Well, twenty-two now, I guess.”
“So, where is the lens?” Lima asks excitedly, hovering in the air so she can get a better view of whatever Rumi’s scratching in the mud. “Is that a map?”
“This?” Rumi asks in surprise, dropping the stick. “No, I’m just doodling because I’m nervous.”
“What have you found out about the lens’s location?” Gogi asks.
Rumi shrugs. “Not very much, sadly. I assume that Caldera has very many edges. It was impossible to ascertain a more precise direction.”
“The lens could be behind enemy lines,” Chumba says.
Mez nods. “Or even in the Ant Queen’s possession already.”
“Do we just pick a direction and start going?” Lima proposes. “Like, find any edge and cross our wings that there’s a lens there?”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Gogi says.
Mez’s nose twitches. “Hold,” she says quietly. “Something is near.”
“Is it that nasty hoatzin?” Lima chirps.
“Shh!” Mez says, slinking her body low to the ground.
Gogi peers around, looking to see what’s caught Mez’s attention. She’s got a panther’s senses, and she can pick up on minute signals that breeze right by a capuchin like him. What he has that Mez doesn’t, though, is a constant sense of where his friends are and what they’re feeling—and Rumi is pressing himself into the mud, as if to hide away, even as he focuses his attention on the treetops. “Rumi, Rumi, what’s going on?” Gogi whispers.
But Rumi doesn’t answer. All he does is say “Oh no, oh no,” over and over as he hides under the mud. Then, even more quietly, his words gurgling up: “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?” Gogi asks, voice rising despite Mez’s caution that they should all be quiet.
Then, with a crashing sound from above, he has his answer.
CRASHING BRANCHES ARE never good. Crashing branches mean monkeys falling or snakes attacking or any number of terrible things. The ruckus from above sends Gogi scurrying into the bushes, Mez and Chumba tailing right after, Rumi burrowing deeper into the mud as Lima flees to a distant tree.
The branches stop shaking. Cautiously, quietly as he can, Gogi presses down two spiny branches so that he can peer out.
There, standing insolently in the center of the clearing, is a bird. A scarlet macaw, one whose imperious expression Gogi knows all too well.
Sky.
The parrot struts through the clearing in his ungainly way, shifting from claw to claw and using his beak to lift himself up the side of a fallen log so he can approach Rumi.
Teeth bared, Gogi charges out of the bush. Once he gets his hands on that macaw, he’ll, he’ll . . . well, he’ll figure it out once he gets there.
Sky flinches when he sees Gogi charging and then raises his wings, exposing the most vulnerable parts of him. He speaks slowly. “Please. I only want to talk. Rumi promised you would hear me out!”
Rumi promised what now?! Gogi glares in the direction of his friend, who has buried himself so far in the mud that only his two big black eyes are visible.
A branch creaks, probably from Mez or Chumba stalking forward, somewhere out of sight.
“Don’t attack!” Sky says. “I know you think I was on Auriel’s side, but I was betrayed as much as you were!”
“Someone told the Ant Queen about our plan to meet here,” Lima squeaks from within the canopy. “And it was clearly you, traitor bird.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sky says. “Really I don’t.”
Suddenly Chumba appears a few feet away, stalking silently out of the brush, body low and tail straight back, ears pressed against her head so they won’t get snagged by a beak or a talon when she strikes.
“Rumi, tell them!” Sky caws shrilly. “You promised they wouldn’t attack!”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell them much ye
t,” Rumi gurgles from his hiding place in the mud. “I’m sorry!”
“Tell us what?” Gogi says. He holds his hands out, licks of flame dancing over his fingers. He doesn’t imagine the fight will be too difficult, if that’s what it comes to. A macaw may have a sharp beak, but it’s not made for out-and-out combat. And Sky’s eclipse magic—divination—won’t do him a lot of good in combat.
“Tell them to stop,” Sky caws even more shrilly. “Rumi!”
“Stop it, guys,” Rumi gurgles as he pulls himself out of the mud. “For my sake. I gave my word.”
Chumba continues to stalk forward. Gogi is sure Mez is beside her, though he can’t see the invisible panther. Sky was second-in-command to Auriel, the boa who nearly constricted Mez to death. The macaw should expect no forgiveness from the panther sisters. It will be up to Gogi to stop the bloodshed. “Hold!” he says. “Mez and Chumba, stop!”
Chumba goes motionless, ears cocked. She turns to the empty space next to her and holds up a paw.
The empty space growls. “You’re lucky I’ve got a softie for a sister, bird.”
Sky tilts his head. “Thank you.”
Rumi wriggles all the way out of the mud, rubbing his hands over his yellow-spotted body to clear it. He concentrates his gaze on Gogi, probably expecting the capuchin to have the most sympathy. Gogi doesn’t know what to think. Sky supported Auriel until the end, even warning the enemy that the panthers were about to attack him. The companions assumed that Sky perished during the fall of the ziggurat—but apparently he didn’t.
Rumi hops over to Sky and stands up on his back legs, arms outstretched, as if to stop anyone from attacking the scarlet macaw. It looks silly, but Gogi’s touched that Rumi is willing to put his life on the line to defend Sky. “When Sky announced himself, I was as suspicious as you all are right now,” Rumi says, “but then he convinced me. He was as surprised by it as we were.”
Sky cocks his head even further, so it’s almost sideways. “In macaw families, only the first two chicks to hatch are fed. The rest of the hatchlings are there as insurance, and are left to die after they are born. I was the third to hatch in my clutch. If Auriel hadn’t rescued me, I’d have perished. I owed him my life. That’s no exaggeration.”
“Okay,” Lima says, “but didn’t it make you question him a little after he opened the ziggurat and sucked everyone inside, kicking and screaming?”
Sky nods. “Of course it did. But you all took an instant dislike to me, and shut me out entirely. I don’t know if you realized how hard it was for the rest of the shadowwalkers to get the attention of your tight little group. Auriel was the only one who showed any sign of caring about me. I wanted to be the same to him. Staying loyal to him as long as I did was a mistake, I know that now, but I hope you can understand why.”
“I actually believe you. But none of this means that you’re coming with us,” Mez growls. She shimmers into view, in full attack position, crouched just one body length away from Sky. “We’ll have enough to deal with fighting the Ant Queen, without having to keep one eye on a treacherous squawkface the whole time.”
Mez takes a step forward, and Sky startles. He flaps into the air and then forces himself to land again, holding his trembling wings out in a surrender pose. As much as Sky’s playing at coolness, he’s terrified. “You’ve gotten very good at your invisibility, Mez. Remember how I helped you discover your power?”
“Only so Auriel could choose who to constrict next,” Mez growls.
“I didn’t know that was what he was doing with the information,” Sky says. “You’ll just have to trust me on that.”
“Trust you? No chance,” Mez says.
Giving up on Mez, Sky focuses one glittering eye on her sister. “Chumba, it is nice to meet you. I helped Mez see a vision of home. It’s through that vision that you discovered where your sister was, and came to rescue her.”
Chumba nods, gaze darting to Mez. It’s true that Sky’s vision allowed Chumba to track her sister down, but Chumba’s not going to let Sky pit them against each other.
Gogi rubs his palms together. “So, Sky, I think that Mez is right, that we shouldn’t—”
“Gogi!” Lima shrieks.
“What? What?” Gogi shrieks, whirling around to inspect his tail. It’s always wrapping itself around things and getting him in trouble. Once he even discovered he was tickling a large caiman, quite accidentally.
“Your fire!”
Gogi looks down to see he has flames sprouting from each palm. He extinguishes them. “Yipes, sorry! I’ve been working on my impulse control, I promise. But then . . . sometimes I forget.”
“You were saying?” Sky prompts, cocking his head in the other direction, looking at Gogi curiously.
“Yes, um, right. I was saying that . . . Oh, now I remember. I was saying that . . . no, that can’t be it.”
“How Mez was right that . . . ,” Chumba prompts.
“Oh yeah! Mez is right that you shouldn’t travel with us. I’m sorry, but no. No way.”
“Who said that I wanted to travel with you?” Sky replies haughtily. “Maybe you should be the ones asking me to come along with you.”
“That’s rich,” Lima says.
“You guys should know that Sky—”
“—has information that would be useful to you,” Sky says, cutting Rumi off.
“You see, this is the thing that made it hard to be friends with you,” Lima says, flitting down so she’s right in front of Sky. “It’s not that we were excluding you, it’s that you do this I-have-to-control-all-information-all-the-time routine.”
Sky sighs. Well, he makes a sort of wheezy caw that Gogi assumes is a sigh. “Here’s what I know. I grew up far from here, in a copse of the tallest ironwood trees in all of Caldera. There the macaws come in huge numbers to eat salt from the clay lick, before going back to their home territories. Macaws are very chatty—”
“Except for you, you’re not chatty,” Lima corrects.
“Yes, except for me,” Sky says, cocking his head at the little bat. There’s a twinkle in his eyes. It’s the first time Gogi has seen Sky show something like warmth toward any animal. The macaw continues. “I know a lot about many parts of Caldera as a result of the macaws’ many conversations happening all around me. That could be the wellspring of my magical power to divine. I often think our powers are related to our innermost hearts.” He cuts an eye to Mez, whose invisibility, they all know, reflects how she felt in her home family—her cousin Mist got all of Aunt Usha’s attention.
Gogi looks down at his hands, which just a moment ago were filled with accidental fire. This represents him? How does that work out?
“One of the conversations I heard was among the green parakeets of the north. They talked about an animal that lives near them, an animal older than any other in Caldera. She lives in a sluggish river, where she’s been alive so long that—now it starts to sort of be rumor—she was around when the Ant Queen first attacked the two-legs. She might have witnessed their extinction. There’s a chance she knows where they kept the lens. If anyone would, it would be her. The boto.”
“What’s a boto?” Lima asks.
“There’s a ‘chance’?” Mez asks at the same time, kneading her claws into the mud.
“Jinx!” Lima exclaims. But Mez is definitely not playing.
“Yes,” Sky says. “Only a chance. But what else do we have to go on? Believe me, Mez, I understand why you wouldn’t like me. I don’t like me. I’ve long ago given up any desire to be something as simple as ‘liked.’ But the boto is an important source of wisdom. And a little dose of wisdom seems to be exactly what this ragtag group needs.”
“There was no need to add ‘ragtag’ there!” Lima squeaks. “That’s just rude!”
“So there we have it,” Sky says, shrugging his wings. “Leave me here alone, if you don’t want me with you. Or take my life if you like. I’m already living on borrowed time; I knew it would come due eventually. Maybe that tim
e is now.”
“Now, now, no need to go there,” Gogi says.
“We’re not going to kill you,” Mez grumbles. “Even if we might want to.”
“‘Pour night into sun, and take away life,’” Gogi recites, trying to remember what Rumi told him about the two-legs’ carvings. “That could be our hope of stopping the Ant Queen. We need the lens to do that, and the boto might know where the lens is. It’s not much to go on, but at least it’s something. But before we go dashing off to this ‘boto’ lady, Sky, I’ve got a question. Were you there a year ago, when we discussed reconvening at the ruins?”
“He wasn’t there!” Lima chirps. “Remember? It was just me and you and Mez and Chumba and Rumi and Banu the sloth and Calisto the trogon—oh! Do you mean Sky might have been snooping?”
“Sky was—” Rumi starts.
“—I can speak for myself, thank you,” Sky says. “I was not there. I did not hear your plan. Rumi let me know about it, once he knew he could trust me. But that was the first I heard of it.”
Rumi stares furiously at the ground.
“Okay, then,” Gogi says. He’s not sure if he believes Sky, but he doesn’t know how to get to the truth right now. He’ll have to talk to Rumi alone sometime soon. “Sky, do you think you could just tell us where this ‘boto’ is?”
Sky shakes his head. “The location of her watery lair defies explanation, I’m afraid. I’d be relying half on instinct to get there. Magnetic navigation lines in the atmosphere and such. Bird stuff.”
“Ooh!” Rumi says, perking up for the first time in this whole conversation. “That sounds very interesting!”
“Somehow I figured as much,” Gogi says. He looks around at his friends, gauging their reactions to this latest development. Mez is usually the one to make decisions, but the weirdness of the situation seems to have scrambled her—she’s looking at Gogi to decide. He appears to be in charge of matters of the heart. Maybe this level of responsibility is what comes along with being a twelfth. He combs his hair down flat on top of his head and tries to strike a heroic pose. “Okay, then. We’re all off to the boto’s lair. Sky, tell us how we start.”
The Lost Rainforest #2 Page 6