“I guess we’re doing this,” Gogi says, gaze flicking nervously to the sky for any sign of the deadly harpy eagle. “Ready, Banu?”
“Now you have to leave me behind,” Banu says. “You need to get to the Ant Queen before they can warn her. I’ll meet you there. Mist will have to pass this way, and I’ll use my water powers to stop him. Then I’ll come join you. You can count on me.”
“Bye, see you up there,” Lima says as she springs into the air.
“Good luck, Banu, and thank you,” Gogi says. He sprints up the mountainside, already darkening from the orange shadow that has begun to cover the moon above.
The Night of the Eclipse
GOGI DASHES THROUGH the night heedlessly, tripping over rocks and slipping through slick patches of upturned earth, falling onto his side and pulling himself to his feet, eyes on the sky, ready for ants to overwhelm him, or the eagle to take him like one once took his mother. He watches for the sight of Mez or Chumba, but the panthers are too stealthy to detect. Instead he follows Lima’s trills in the night sky, leading him upward, upward, toward thudding earth, toward strange wet sounds, toward massive shapes looming in the night. Always upward. Gogi’s lungs ache.
He blunders forward, heedless of the teeming ants under his hands and feet. He might be running right into danger, but what option does he have? Mez and Chumba are somewhere ahead, so he has to keep—
“Gogi, up here!” It’s Mez.
Gogi stops short so suddenly that he falls over, skidding in the soil. He scrambles to his hands and feet and follows the voice, falling headfirst again, this time right into a bush. He flails, panting and gasping, pushing at the leaves whapping his face, then climbs the trunk of a tree tailfirst, until he’s on a branch well above the jungle floor, the panther sisters purring nearby. “Hush,” Chumba says urgently, laying a paw on Gogi’s forehead. “Be as quiet as you can.”
Stilled by the urgency in Chumba’s voice, Gogi forces his breathing to calm, despite the pounding in his temples. He goes onto his belly and creeps forward along the branch. Mez’s paw is on one shoulder, and Chumba’s is on the other. “I can’t see anything,” he says, staring out.
“That’s because of the lunar eclipse,” Chumba says.
Gogi looks up and sees, through the dark leaves of the tree, that the curved orange shadow is nearly halfway across the moon.
He increases the amount of glow he’s casting over the area, and sees that he and the panther sisters are on a branch of one of the few remaining trees, stripped bare of vegetation and left dead. From their perch, he looks out to see a flood of ants passing through the rainforest, massing and swarming toward the top of the mountain.
“So, where’s the queen?” Gogi asks.
“Don’t you see?” Chumba hisses back. “It’s horrible!”
“See what?” Gogi gasps. “Oh. I thought that was part of the mountain.”
Last time he’d seen her, the Ant Queen was the size of a full-grown panther. But now she’s bigger than any creature Gogi has ever encountered, bigger than any creature should ever be. She is the pinnacle of the mountain.
The queen is twenty monkeys high, and as thick as the broadest fig trunk. The top half of her body is familiar, even though it is many times its previous size. It’s constructed of invulnerable purple-brown plates of armor, with yellow hairs sprouting from them, and her impassive, beady-eyed face ends in two sharp mandibles. The Ant Queen could slice a capuchin or a panther in two with the simplest click of those mandibles.
Her abdomen has bloomed out to an enormous size. It’s a massive, pulsating sac, so heavy it roots her to the top of the mountain. “Is she sick or something?” Gogi whispers.
“No, watch. There, another one’s coming,” Chumba answers.
In front of Gogi’s eyes, the bottom of the Ant Queen parts, and out comes a glistening white egg. Then another. They pass into the horde and are soon carried away. More come. The queen is focused on her task, eyes toward the eclipse and the heavens.
“So this is where the hordes of ants are coming from,” Gogi says.
“There will be more and more and more,” Chumba says. “Until there are enough to overrun the rainforest.”
“Do you think she knows we’re here?” Gogi whispers to his friends out of the side of his mouth.
“I don’t know,” Mez whispers back. “I hope not. She seems to be focused on producing all those eggs.”
Gogi pats the woven sack, with the fungus stick inside. “So I guess we . . . go and face her?”
Mez and Chumba nod grimly and get to all fours, making the yowling noises they always make before a fight, their hackles sticking up. They bow their shoulders to the branch, haunches high in the air, to stretch their muscles. Gogi tries the same, but it feels ridiculous. He’s not sure what to do with his tail.
He peers down over the edge, to where moonlit swarms of ants cover the ground, dotted with the white glow of eggs being passed along from their queen. “I wish the enemy was just a little nearer,” Gogi says.
“How’s this for you?” comes a screeching voice from above.
Harpy eagle!
The mere sound of it sets Gogi shrieking. He whirls just in time to see the wickedly hooked beak of the raptor, open wide as it streaks toward him.
Gogi scrambles without a thought to what direction he’s going, fear bursting him off his hands and feet, out of the tree entirely and dropping through night air. It means the eagle isn’t rending his flesh, but now he’s in free fall, the shrieks and cries of his battling friends soon distant.
He plummets for another few shuddering, stomach-dropping seconds, and then he’s crashing through branches, the sound of breaking wood all around him, serrated edges of leaves lashing his face. He reaches out, trying to stop his fall any way he can, but he’s going too fast; everything he touches whips through his fingers and shreds his palms.
Finally Gogi lands in a mammoth fern. Though it bows dramatically under his weight, it doesn’t break. He’s tossed into the air and then back into the fern, and he’s able to grip the greenery with his tail this time to prevent himself from being bounced out again.
Gogi sways heavily. He might be totally disoriented, and hanging on by only his tail, but at least he’s in one piece. He shuts his eyes for a long moment, trying to keep the contents of his stomach from rising into his mouth. Once he can, he cracks his eyes open.
The eagle. Mez, Chumba, and Lima. Where are they?
He whips to the underside of a frond, quickly judges the distance to the jungle floor, and drops, hitting the ground on all fours to prevent any one limb from breaking. He shakes out the tingling sensation in his ankles and wrists. “Ow, ow, ow.”
As soon as he can, he’s darting through the night foliage. He draws up short before a swaying trunk, trying to make out the nearby shapes in the darkness. He’s gotten himself totally switched around, and he needs to know where his friends are before he can go saving them. As a reflex, he also reaches down to pat the fungus stick through his woven bag.
The bag’s not there.
The Ant Queen is as big as a mountain, he’s lost his friends, there’s a harpy eagle after him, and the item that could have saved Caldera—if it even worked—is gone. Even the twelve pebbles that represent his rank are gone. He has nothing. Gogi feels like his legs might give way, right where he is.
But he doesn’t let them give way. He keeps moving. Because no monkey of any rank would abandon his troop, not if he has any breath left in his body. And his friends are his troop.
Gogi pauses as he listens for the cry of the eagle, the yowl of a panther, anything that will help him figure out where his friends are. There are ordinary rainforest sounds on the left, undefinable ruckus on the right. He chooses right.
“Wrong way, idiot,” comes a familiar voice. Mist.
Gogi turns to see the white panther with the woven sack slung around his front, grinning.
“I can’t believe you thought a sloth would stop me. I
avoided him easily. And now I have your magical pebbles. Why are these so precious that you looked right away for this sack? Some precious capuchin superstition?”
Mist hasn’t mentioned the fungus stick. And why would he? It looks just like regular forest debris. He’s focused on the stones. Interesting.
“Those pebbles are more precious than you know,” Gogi improvises. “Mist, the lunar eclipse is moments away. If I . . . don’t have those pebbles . . . when it happens . . . all of Caldera will be lost!” He throws his hands in the air for extra dramatic effect.
“Less competition for me, then,” Mist says, stroking the sack. “I can rule alone.”
“But that’s not really ruling, see?” Gogi says. He makes a big show about being unable to see anything, hammily flailing his arms back and forth. Meanwhile, he tries to get a good look at the bag slung around Mist’s chest. Can he see the outline of the stick still in there? He thinks he can.
“I will bring these pebbles to the Ant Queen, and she will decide what to do with them,” Mist says. “She will figure out what you’ve planned.”
Gogi finds himself almost wishing it happens, just so he can see what the Ant Queen does when Mist interrupts her to give her some ordinary pebbles.
Somewhere above, Gogi hears the harpy eagle crying, and the sounds of a scuffle. The raptor could easily kill Chumba or Mez—the sisters will be lucky to get away. If they’re not already done for.
Mist looks up fearfully at the sound of the eagle’s cry, then controls his face and, with visible effort, stops his tail from thrashing.
He’s scared of the eagle too. Useful.
Gogi has an idea. He says, “Give me the bag back, it doesn’t belong to you, you silly cat”—only he sings it. To the tune of “Lima the Healing Bat.”
“What are you doing?” Mist asks, face twisting. “What is this about?”
Gogi flicks his eye to the sky, hoping to see a little black blip heading his way. But there’s no sign of Lima. Okay. It was a long shot, he knew that.
Gogi sighs and wiggles his fingers to warm them up, to get the fire magic flowing. Looks like he’s going to be fighting Mist. Alone.
Gogi and Mist go still, staring at each other, fire already licking from Gogi’s fingernails. He puts some fire in the tip of his tail, too, for extra effect.
It seems to work. Mist’s eyes widen, twinkling in Gogi’s light. The lips on the non-ruined side of his face pull back from his teeth. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s aggression, but at least Gogi definitely seems to be having an effect. He steps forward.
Mist bolts.
Stunned, Gogi watches the white panther streak through the night. Mist heads up the mountain, toward the Ant Queen, screeching, “I have the magic pebbles, my queen!”
“‘Magic pebbles.’ This should be interesting,” Gogi mutters as he races after Mist. He increases the fire from his hands and tail and extends it to his feet, too, sizzling the ground with every step. It’s a mistake—even though Mist is pure white, and running madcap along the barren mountaintop, Gogi’s so dazzled by his own flame that he loses sight of him. His vision is full of purple blobs. All he can really make out is the last remaining sliver of the moon above them, already turning orange from the lunar eclipse.
Tears streaming out of his eyes, Gogi loses track of where he’s going. He has to take a moment to close his eyes, to listen for the wet sounds of the birthing queen, the continuing cries of the harpy eagle, and . . . a song?
“Lima, the Healing Bat! Ferocious-er than a piranha! Scarier than a cat!”
Gogi watches, amazed, as Lima swoops in front of the eclipsing moon, and then down. Ahh—there’s Mist! Lima zooms alongside the unaware panther, then agilely gets her feet around the bag’s knotted strap. She unties it and lifts it from around his neck. Mist doesn’t even notice.
Gogi lets out a single flare, so Lima will know where he is.
Lima’s got other plans, though. She doesn’t head toward Gogi—she heads up the mountain, after Mist’s departing shape.
I see where we’re going with this, Gogi says to himself as he races after. “I’m coming, Lima!”
He follows Mist and Lima to the summit, climbs the same tree he hid in before with Mez and Chumba. There’s no sign of his friends or the harpy eagle, though the branch is still full of the panthers’ scent.
Having seen the Ant Queen in her egg-laying state once doesn’t lessen the horror of seeing it again. She’s still impossibly large, devoted to her mission, eyes turned toward the eclipsing moon as more and more glimmering white eggs emerge from her.
Mist stands before her, tiny. He pulls himself up as tall as he can and speaks, but the words are lost within the tumult of the egg laying. Gogi can’t hear a word he says, and it doesn’t seem the Ant Queen can, either.
Gogi cranes his neck, stepping from foot to foot to prevent the ants from climbing too far up his body. Where’s Lima?
There she is, soaring over the queen. She bobs frantically, dipping in the night sky. The bag must be heavier than she is; it jostles more and more as she dips and twists.
Pebbles scatter through the air, tinkling on the impenetrable plated armor of the Ant Queen. She doesn’t notice. Mist rears back, though, hissing. Now Gogi can just make out his voice. “The magic pebbles!”
Last thing to tumble out is the stick. It’s black in the eclipsing night, but Gogi can still make out its outline as it falls through the air, striking the Ant Queen’s pulsating abdomen before it fragments into bits.
Lima flies off in another direction—maybe she has a bead on Mez and Chumba. Gogi looks up longingly, trapped as he is on this barren wasteland with Mist and hordes of ants.
Or wait, the iguana is here too! Not exactly better.
The lizard slinks from around the backside of the Ant Queen, heading right for the spot where the fragments of the stick fell. It noses the earth, tongue licking the night air. Mist approaches and points his paw at the moonlit pebbles. But the iguana ignores him, continuing to sniff the earth. Investigating the fragments of the fungus stick.
Amid the tangled vines of the jungle floor, specks of fungal white have begun to appear among the red-brown ants. The fungus has already started to infect them.
The Ant Queen takes her attention from the looming eclipse and finally looks down at the ants surrounding her. She surveys the horde, rearing up on her hind legs as she clacks her forelegs in the night air, emitting an eerie harmonic sound. Is she aware that something is wrong?
She stays motionless amid her horde of ants, waving them forward to where the stick fragments fell. Her iguana henchman barrels over and uses its thick tongue to lap up streams of the insects, drawing them into its gullet.
“Of course,” Gogi says to himself. “Iguanas are very talented eaters of ants. He’s eating the infected ants before the fungus can spread. I should have predicted this.”
The Ant Queen whips from side to side, antennae flaring. Gogi looks for Mez and Chumba, but his friends are nowhere near.
The iguana continues to sweep up massive swaths of the infected ants with its tongue but has switched to gnashing them with its teeth and then spitting out the pulp. Its belly is probably full. A slurry of ant parts drips out of its jaws.
The queen’s eyes glaze as she brings her front legs up, like a panicking animal. But Gogi has learned by now that the Ant Queen does not panic. The Ant Queen only strategizes.
As she brings her forelegs down, a seismic thud goes through the soil. It makes Gogi’s hands and feet tingle where he’s hiding in the bushes, but it has an altogether more severe impact on the ants. Some of the ants behind the Ant Queen—her healthy forces—still and quiet, but the main impact is on the horde before her, near the bits of fungus stick. When the queen sends out her seismic signal, they go motionless, only gradually recovering their senses.
With horror, Gogi sees that some of the queen’s eggs have split, parted by her seismic attack, the larvae inside killed.
By ruthlessly
killing healthy and infected ants alike, though, the queen is stopping the threat of the fungus before it begins.
Gogi casts his gaze to the sky, hoping to see any sign of his friends and their harpy eagle assailant. But there’s no sign of them.
It will be up to Gogi alone to stop the Ant Queen, while she’s still distracted.
He knows exactly what Mez would tell him: You only get the element of surprise once. Don’t waste it. So he stops himself from racing into battle and instead creeps higher in his tree, so he’s right above the teeming edge where the zombie ants meet the Ant Queen’s army.
He closes his eyes, to sink as deep as he can into the depths of his power, to channel and direct it. He smells smoke rising from his skin, unbidden.
Gogi allows his eyes to open.
He unleashes an inferno.
GOGI’S ONLY EVER tried this particular fire trick when he was alone, in quiet moments back in the capuchin forest. He’s not sure if he’ll be able to pull off the concentration it requires now, with millions of ants and an iguana and maybe a harpy eagle somewhere zooming toward him . . . oh right, and the Ant Queen herself, to top it all off. And when precisely will the eclipse be at its fullest? How’s he supposed to know that?
Focus on what you can control, Gogi.
To help himself get into as calm a state as possible, he pretends he’s getting groomed by Alzo, imagines little monkey fingers from the tips of his ears down to his toes. Then he senses his own skin as fully as possible, setting his attention to each smoking pore and follicle. He hears fighting, senses the already dim light in the clearing turning pitch-black, but he forces his attention not to wander from his own skin. Success.
He sets it all on fire.
I am the monkey of fire. I am the monkey of legend, he tells himself as every hair follicle on his body ignites. The smoke blurs his vision, makes him able to see only vague outlines of everything around him.
It also attracts the attention of his enemies. He sees the iguana stop mopping up ants and turn its gaze to Gogi’s branch instead.
The Lost Rainforest #2 Page 18