Then there’s a hand darting in from the darkness, gripping him around the midsection and pulling him back into the dryness and light. A monkey finger pushes his belly, and Rumi lets out a fountain of ocean water. Once his panic fades, Rumi’s expression settles on Gogi’s worried expression. “What’s the matter?” Rumi asks.
“You okay, buddy?” Gogi asks.
Rumi nods. “Water’s not as scary to a frog as it is to a monkey. But I’m still very glad you rescued me. Now, um, you should consider rescuing yourself.”
Gogi looks down and yelps when he sees that the dark seawater is up to his ribs, and continuing to rise. “Why is this happening?” he asks, thrusting Rumi over his head to keep him out of the water for as long as possible.
“Banu’s moving upward, and he’s bringing the water-free zone up with him!” Rumi says. “Hurry.”
“On it,” Gogi says. He’s a magnificent climber, scrambling his way up the slick rocks until he’s beside Banu, the water-air boundary safely below. They’re surrounded by cool, buttery, shifting yellows as Auriel snakes through the crannies alongside them.
“All present and accounted for?” Sky asks, flapping nearby, sending gusts of cold air over them as he flutter-lands against the wet kelpy rocks.
Rumi does a quick head count of the shadowwalkers in the bubble. “Yep! All present.” They’re not looking in great shape, though. Gogi’s breathing shallowly, eyes darting about in low-level terror; Sky’s feathers are wet, which must be impeding his ability to fly, not that there’s anywhere he can go; Rumi can feel his skin stinging everywhere from the salt—that mouthful of seawater didn’t exactly help, either; Banu’s eyes are half-lidded—he’s clearly getting tired from the expenditure of magic. Auriel’s the only one who seems unaffected by their strange journey. He weaves along the rocks, tasting the air, inscrutable.
After resting a moment, Banu lurches back into motion. “All right, Banu,” he encourages himself. “Up . . . and over!”
Gogi scrambles to keep up as Banu disappears over the crest of the rock, then scrambles even harder when Banu grunts and falls on the far side, taking the bubble of open space with him.
Hand over foot over tail, Gogi just manages to keep ahead of the wall of water behind them, bringing Rumi along for the tumbling, freewheeling ride. They land on a bed of kelp. Between and under the slippery leaves is a strange surface—it’s somehow both rough and soft, flecks of jet black within the rubble. Rumi runs his sensitive fingers and toes over it. “Organic composition, but a tightly bonded mixture that I’ve never encountered before. I wonder if this is something created by the two-legs, perhaps, as a way to make their vertical trees. Do you think we could stay here for just a little while, so I could determine more of this substance’s properties?”
There’s no answer from his companions. Their focus is trained upward.
A strange corner juts into the bubble, just at the edge of its circumference. It’s the edge of one of the two-legs’ vertical trees. Auriel seems especially intent on it, lacing his way forward along the seafloor, before he dips his head into the wall of water. His radiance passes through the membrane and into the ocean, lighting up the hemisphere surrounding them. Now they can see a few feet into the gloom of the surrounding depths, ominous shapes lurking in the dark.
“Are those . . .” Gogi asks.
“—those are the vertical trees from the carvings in the Cave of Riddles,” Sky announces. “We’re in the home range of the two-legs.”
“Right,” Gogi says, letting out a long breath. “I didn’t think those were tall monsters looming over us, nope. I’m super brave, we all know that, it’s all good.”
“Could you push the water back even farther?” Rumi asks Banu.
“There’s a lot . . . of pressure,” Banu says. “But since we’re not moving . . . I think I can manage it.” His expression scrunches as he reaches deep into his magic.
Slowly the radius of the bubble pushes back farther, and farther.
Once it’s gotten far enough, they all know precisely where they are.
They draw even closer together, awed into silence.
GREAT HUSKS OF hollowed-out trees rise through the depths, so tall that they nearly break the sun-marbled surface. They’re festooned in broad swaths of kelp and seaweed, every surface covered in the little sharp white things Rumi noticed earlier, but also in larger structures—bony projections, many of them iridescently colored. Pinks, blues, greens, and oranges. They emerge from the vertical trees like horns, projecting into the open space above the companions’ heads. Are they plants? Motionless animals? Rumi isn’t sure.
Each colored horn is covered in tiny life-forms. Bony fans tickle the air, wafting back and forth even though there is no breeze. There are pulsing tentacles, grouped together like a succulent plant, but these too are moving in the motionless open air. “Are they surprised by us?” Rumi wonders. “I wonder what they’re feeling. If anything.” It’s been the puzzle of his life: how does he know what anyone is feeling?
There’s no answer to his questions from his friends. Rumi sees their attention is drawn to the seafloor, where a giant beast is thrashing, not more than a thousand frog-lengths away. It’s a hairless and muscular fish, much bigger than even the boto they met a few weeks before. Its powerful tail thrashes back and forth (the boto’s moved up and down, Rumi recalls even as fear sets him hopping backward), and its mouth opens to reveal rows of teeth.
The horror of those teeth is tempered, at least, by the fact that the monster seems to be struggling for its life. The gills on either side of its throat flap open and closed, and the beast’s pointed nose thrashes through the air.
Gogi’s hands clamp over his eyes. “Is it dead yet?”
“Bring the water back, Banu!” Rumi says. “This fish needs it to breathe! We’re killing that poor thing!”
Startled, Banu retracts the boundary of their air bubble, so that the many-toothed monster is once again submerged. It thrashes its way into the deep.
The narrowing curtain of air also means the vertical trees return to dark shapes looming in the distance. Rumi goes over the image seared in his mind, and all the other sensations that he was too surprised to process when they were first happening: the plip-plop of small sea creatures falling to the ground, the surprised fish and eels and crabs, caught halfway between their normal watery world and the companions’ airy one.
They move forward and there—right by Rumi’s feet!—is another stranded sea creature. This one is floppy and shiny, with many arms extending from its body and a pulsating sac in its middle. Two eyes blink up at Rumi while the body turns red. There are little cups all up and down the arms!
“Would you look at that, everyone—” Rumi says. But the creature has already used its many arms to crawl off into the watery deep.
“How amazing is all this?” Rumi asks his friends. “I wish I’d had a chance to try to talk to it!” The shadowwalkers stare back with widened eyes. Sky nods numbly.
“How’s everyone doing?” Rumi asks.
“You know . . . a little . . . overwhelmed,” Banu says.
Rumi nods. Apparently the intrigue of the new environment isn’t enough to overcome his friends’ feelings of intimidation at the novelty of it all. Good to know! There’s always some new complication of the heart for Rumi to figure out.
What they really need is Lima here to take the lead, to bring her cheer and excitement. But what they have is Rumi, and he’s not exactly keeping morale up. Even normally irrepressible Gogi has his hands over his eyes.
Leader? Rumi? Stranger things have happened. Just a few days ago, he thought his friends would never trust him again if they knew the truth about his origins—and now it turns out they accept him anyway. Still, even if the trust and respect are there, he’ll have to puzzle through how to do the actual leading part. Leaders are inspiring, right? They have lofty rhetoric and a call to action. Maybe he should give a rhyming speech and cry one dramatic tear at the end of it
while screaming “for Caldera!” No, that doesn’t seem like something he can manage.
Auriel slips off into the sea. That’s strange. Rumi will have to close his speech with a stirring call instead to go investigate where Auriel has gone off to.
Rumi coughs and takes a long moment to collect himself when he sees his friends staring at him. He puffs out his chest and starts. “Since the dawn of time, the animals of the rainforest have wondered. Wondered about the future of their world, about its origins and limits, wondered about—”
“Run!” Gogi shrieks.
Rumi whirls to see a tentacle—bigger than the ones on the strange little blob that slithered away before, much bigger—whip into the bubble of air and thrash around. Gogi leaps away, his head breaking through the water membrane before he hurtles back to the ocean floor, spluttering and coughing. Sky hops away from the backhanding tentacle, nearly tumbling out of the bubble and into the sea. Rumi ducks into a piece of white bone. The tentacle strikes it, but the bone holds. He’s safe—for now.
There are more of the terrifying tentacles. Two and then three of them whip through the open air, darting in and out of the ocean as they fish for the shadowwalkers. On the far side of the watery membrane, a big eye, wide as a cane toad, stares into the open air.
Banu, of course, can’t move as quickly as the others. “Uh . . . oh,” he says as he begins his stately retreat. At first the tentacles seem to be avoiding him—maybe the monster assumes he’s an inanimate object. But then one strikes him by accident, and then it’s wrapped around the sloth, once and twice and three times.
Rumi sends a blast of air at the tentacles, but his magical power seems particularly unsuited to fighting muscular wet tentacles.
Gogi, though, sends out a blast of fire as soon as he gets his feet and hands on the seafloor. It sizzles when it hits the tentacle, filling the air with steam and the smell of burning flesh. The next tentacle lashes out at Gogi and, as soon as it contacts him, wraps around the monkey’s body, pinning his tail against him. Gogi sends out a burst of flame from his skin, and the popping blast causes the arm to retreat. The capuchin rolls and goes right back on the offensive, popping small balls of fire at the tentacle gripping Banu. It slackens, and that only makes Gogi increase his attack, sending out pebbles of flame, one from each finger. Pop pop pop pop!
The tentacle leaves the air entirely. For a moment the giant eyeball is still there, lingering on the other side of the membrane—then it too disappears. Apparently the monster has decided there’s easier quarry to be found elsewhere.
While Banu was being attacked, the perimeter of the air bubble came dangerously close. Now he lets out slack so that there’s more air, enough space that the smell of burning monster and singed fur can dissipate.
“What just happened to us?” Gogi asks.
“I have no idea what that creature was,” Rumi says.
“We don’t have time to figure it out, either,” Sky says. “Auriel left, and it clearly was for a reason. I think he was trying to get us to leave the area before the monster attacked. We should go catch up to him, as soon as possible.”
Rumi looks in the direction Auriel went. A line of yellow light ribbons along the bottom of the sea. At least Auriel won’t be too hard to track. With the snake outside the bubble, the surroundings have turned dim. Another reason to catch up to Auriel quickly: it’s bad enough to be on the bottom of the sea—Rumi would rather not be on the bottom of the sea and in the pitch-black to boot.
“Banu, can you go on or do you need to rest?” Rumi asks.
“I’m a napping expert . . . but to take a nap . . . here . . . while keeping up the bubble?” Banu says. “I’d prefer . . . to keep going . . . thanks.”
“Okay,” Sky says. “Let’s move.”
“No rest for the weary, as the saying goes,” Rumi says.
“Especially no rest for the weary who are wandering around on the bottom of the sea,” Gogi grumbles as he daintily steps around a spiny many-armed star sort of thing.
Knowing their sloth friend’s limited reserves of energy, Rumi aims a jet of air at Banu’s back, to give him help moving forward. “Ooh . . . thanks, buddy,” Banu says. “You’re . . . dislodging all sorts of . . . parasites . . . that have been bothering me . . . for many Veil drops.”
Rumi hadn’t noticed those. He uses his sticky tongue to pluck the parasites from the air as they fall. Lice, yum. They’ve even got a nice salty aftertaste from the ocean water. It might have been too long since his last meal, come to think of it.
Auriel seems to know just how far he can go without leaving their bubble in the dark. He pauses in the undersea space, glowing in the depths like a click beetle, waiting for the companions to near before he inches farther out.
“Fascinating,” Rumi says. “Auriel appears to be able to breathe water, like the fish do. I never noticed any gill flaps. I wonder if they were hidden along his throat. Or perhaps Auriel can hold his breath for long periods of time, like the boto, and he’ll come back to us to breathe air eventually. The physiology of the snake is widely understudied, probably because of our bias against reptiles. Bias against amphibians—or anything without cuddly fur—is a thing too, but reptiles have it especially bad. Except for turtles, which for some reason everyone loves.”
“You’re doing that thing,” Sky says.
“What thing?” Rumi says.
Sky doesn’t even slow down as he walks along the skeletal plants at the bottom of the sea. “When you’re worried, you start getting intellectual instead of talking about whatever it is you’re feeling.”
“Talking about whatever it is I’m feeling?” Rumi asks, his voice chirping off at the end. He hadn’t considered that he might be feeling something.
“Yep,” Sky says. He raises the crest of feathers on top of his head and hops, what Rumi has come to recognize is the macaw version of a smile.
“Oh,” Rumi says, thinking about it. “I suppose the feeling I have is worry. I guess I’m worried?”
“There you go,” Sky says gently. “That wasn’t so hard.”
“Huh!” Rumi says, his face brightening as he clambers over a piece of kelp. “Saying the feeling out loud makes it go away a little bit!”
“Yes,” Sky says. “That’s how emotions work.”
“How interesting,” Rumi says. “It’s not like you provided some insight to help me, it was expressing the feeling that helped. Has anyone studied this effect?”
“Here we go again,” Sky says, shaking his head.
“Hey, this stuff stings,” Gogi says, leaping away from one of the plants with the moving colorful tentacles. He stares at his hands, where lines of red welts have appeared, like he’s been lashed. “The ocean is painful.”
“We should move around these bright live rocks,” Sky says. “Who knows what defenses they might have.”
“We . . . can’t move around them,” Banu says. He turns left and right, and as Rumi follows the sloth’s gaze, he realizes what his friend means—the bright live rocks extend high in either direction, making a wall.
“Auriel seems to have made it to the top fine,” Gogi says, pointing to the highest point ahead, where the glowing yellow snake is serenely perched, facing them through a length of ocean water.
“He’s also a magically resurrected Elemental of Light,” Sky says dryly.
“Is it wrong that I’m sort of hoping that he attracts the attention of that tentacle monster, so it doesn’t come back looking for us again?” Gogi asks, hands on his hips.
“If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right,” Sky says, nodding.
Gogi scratches his head.
Sky clucks impatiently. “What that phrase means is—”
“No more chitchat,” Rumi says, hopping to Banu’s back and holding on tight to the sloth’s coarse fur. “I have a plan!”
“Ooh!” Gogi says, clapping his hands. “Rumi’s plans are the best.”
“Sky, you go against Banu’s belly. Gogi, you hug Ba
nu, so that Sky’s trapped in the middle. We don’t want him falling away.”
Sky looks between the parasite-ridden sloth and the soggy monkey. “Are you sure this is necessary?”
“Now, Sky,” Rumi commands. Or as close as he can get to commanding. It’s unnerving to suddenly feel responsible for everyone.
Sky snaps to attention. “Okay, okay.” He always was good at following orders. The macaw stands sideways, right in front of Banu, looking around nervously.
Gogi bounds over and hugs his two friends tight. “Aww. How snuggly!”
“What do I do?” Banu sputters.
“Nothing. Actually, keep up the sphere of air. That’s, um, critically important. I figured that went without saying.”
“Let’s make it official that keeping up the air bubble goes without saying until we’re back on the surface,” Gogi says.
“Just hurry up. And it’s really a hemisphere, not a sphere,” Sky says, his voice muffled by mammal fur on either side.
“It is for now, you mean!” Rumi says. “Here we go!”
With that, secured on Banu’s back, he faces the seafloor, opens his mouth, and emits a blast of air.
The companions hurtle up from the bottom and right into the ocean, the air popping as it becomes a perfect sphere around them.
Almost as soon as they’ve lifted off, they tilt toward the coral. Before Rumi can correct their course, Gogi’s back rakes along its sharp surface. “Ow, ow, ow!”
“Sorry!” Rumi says, turning his head so the blast can correct their trajectory. Now they careen in the opposite direction, hurtling into the depths. At least there don’t seem to be any obstacles this way, just the dark, cold water around them. Rumi reverses the blast, and they go jetting off again.
“Does anyone have a sense of where we are?” he asks, turning this way and that, peering into the inky darkness. They begin to descend while he tries to get his bearings.
Rumi's Riddle Page 14
