Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Almost barfed.” Javi looked up at the plane. “Are Molly and Oliver still in the front?”

  “No, they finished. They’re in the luggage hold now.” Anna frowned. “Oliver keeps saying he shouldn’t be here.”

  “Oh, crud.” Javi swallowed. “You know his mother wasn’t going to let him come to Japan. Molly talked her into it.”

  Anna nodded. “But Oliver talked Molly into talking his mother into it. He wanted to come.”

  “Yeah,” Javi sighed. “But maybe he’s changed his mind for some inexplicable reason. Did they find anything useful in the plane? Like, three hundred miles of wire?”

  Anna pointed at the pile: backpacks, blankets, plastic bags, soap and shampoo from someone’s carry-on, and a handful of phones—no signal, but maybe they’d be useful as flashlights. Also two of the Killbots, which Molly had salvaged first from the cargo hold.

  “Soccer-playing robots. Super useful,” Javi said. He started to hand the knife back to Anna, but Kira reached up and plucked it from his hand.

  “Naifu,” she said solemnly, then placed it on the ground and began to draw it. Her Aero Horizon logo was finished—a nearly perfect copy, Anna noticed.

  Javi pointed at the trees. “So do your biology thing. Is there any food we can eat out there?”

  “Of course,” Anna said. “The problem is, we’re food out there.”

  He glanced at Kira and the knife. “We can protect ourselves.”

  Anna shook her head. “Nature’s full of stuff that isn’t afraid of knives. Like poisonous plants, bloodsucking insects, parasites that eat you from the inside.”

  Javi gave a dramatic sigh. “You’re always so comforting, Anna. And just so you know, I’m being super sarcastic.”

  Anna had known, and sometimes Javi’s sarcasm was funny, but not now. She still felt that numbness that had overtaken her after the crash. Too many things didn’t seem real about this. The missing passengers. The weird jungle. Even the darting birds sounded wrong.

  Of course, the birds were probably edible. But how to catch one?

  A clunk came from the pile next to the water bottles. Akiko was rummaging through it, taking a closer look at everything.

  “What’s all that junk?” Javi asked.

  Anna shrugged. “Stuff that the girls found in the wreckage behind the plane.”

  Akiko held up something questioningly. Black plastic straps woven together.

  Anna frowned. It looked like something designed to keep luggage from bouncing around in the hold. “Cargo webbing?”

  Akiko repeated the words haltingly, then picked up another piece of wreckage.

  Anna took it from her, peering closer. “Huh. I don’t know.”

  The device was donut-shaped, a little too big and heavy to be a bracelet. A set of symbols went around the outside of the ring, another on the inside. Anna didn’t recognize any of them.

  Was it aircraft equipment of some kind? An antenna? A transmitter?

  Now that would be useful.

  Anna looked for a switch to turn it on. Nothing.

  “Probably just a toy,” Javi said. He was bouncing on the bottom section of the inflatable slide, making the plastic squeak.

  “Probably.” Anna looked up at his bouncing. “You know if you puncture that slide, Molly will kill you, right?”

  “I’m testing its strength,” Javi said, still bouncing. “And it’s not like we need a life raft.”

  “We could collect rainwater with it.” Anna turned back to the unknown device. There was a groove along the inside. If she could twist it open and see its guts, maybe she could figure out what it was.

  But when Anna twisted, the device didn’t open—its outer symbols slid clockwise, each aligning with one of the inner symbols.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Looks like some kid’s secret decoder ring.”

  Javi laughed. “An essential part of every jungle survival kit!”

  “Yeah. Unless it has some kind of batteries we can …” Her voice faded. Two of the aligned symbols—one outer, one inner—lit up, pulsing for a moment.

  “That’s funny,” she said.

  “Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” Javi asked, still bouncing.

  She pressed the symbols, and they stayed lit. The device began to tremble in her hands. “Funny … scary?”

  “That’s not a funny.”

  “It is now,” Anna said. Her head went light and fuzzy, and then she realized something really weird.

  The object wasn’t heavy anymore.

  A moment ago, it had felt like metal in her hand. But now it weighed no more than hollow plastic.

  “Um, this is odd,” Javi said.

  She looked up at him. “What is?”

  Javi opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. His expression turned to queasy astonishment as he descended—way too slowly—back down onto the inflatable slide.

  His next bounce carried him high into the air.

  What the …” Javi started.

  He was still climbing, wafting up toward the white sky. But he had no sense of motion or momentum. It didn’t feel like flying, exactly, more like the ground was falling away. It was as if the crashed plane and the jungle itself had all been fake, a film set that was dropping away beneath him, leaving him here, suspended in midair.

  He stared down at Anna and the two girls, who stared back up at him. The device still flickered in Anna’s hand. The air seemed to ripple around her.

  The machine was doing this—whatever this was. Javi’s guts felt suspended in his body. His clothes didn’t hang on him. Everything floated together, weightless.

  Was he ever going to stop climbing? Or would he just go up forever until he disappeared into the white cloud above?

  No. Javi realized that he was slowing at last, then falling toward earth again. Though it felt more like the other way around—the ground was rising up to meet him, as slow and stately as a giant ship easing into port.

  Down below, Kira was floating, too, only a few feet in the air. Her sketch pad and the survival knife hovered beside her, and the bottom of the inflatable slide was wafting up.

  Anna’s long hair was floating wildly around her head. It was like gravity had been canceled. Or at least dialed way down.

  Which meant that when he hit the slide again, Javi would bounce up again. Not good.

  As he drifted downward, Javi readied himself to crumple his legs. Like on a trampoline, he would stifle all that energy with his own body.

  But the moment before he hit the inflated plastic, a completely different idea—a wild, irrational one—overtook him.

  Maybe he should go higher.

  His first bounce had taken him almost to the tops of the trees pressed in tight around the airplane. They hid the rest of the jungle, and anything else that might be out there. But now Javi had a chance to see beyond them, from a bird’s-eye view.

  More than anything else, he wanted to know what on earth was going on.

  So when his feet touched down, he bent his knees, then launched himself upward as hard as he could. Straight into the sky.

  “What are you doing?” cried Anna.

  “Taking a look!”

  Javi shot higher, until he was above the trees, staring down at the broken plane laid out across the jungle. He saw how its spine gaped open as if a giant claw had traveled down it, how the wing on the far side lay snapped in two.

  He gazed back along the trail of the landing path. The first marks of the crash were miles away, where the plane’s belly had sheared off the jungle canopy. A little closer were the trees bent by its passage, and finally the splintered remains of those it had ripped straight through.

  The jungle was so thick. Cutting through a mile of that dense growth, the plane should have been torn to pieces. Just like it should have tumbled out of control from the sky, instead of coming down in a straight line.

  But something had protected it.

  Javi looked around—nothing but jungle in all directions, th
ough the mist made it hard to see very far.

  He heard a rumbling, though. He’d felt it down on the ground, a low, persistent noise that seemed to come from everywhere. But from this height Javi could hear where it actually came from—in the distance off to the left of the crashed plane.

  It sounded like a waterfall. Which meant there had to be water around somewhere.

  As he began to descend again, Javi felt a sudden jolt of panic. If gravity came back now, the bouncy slide wouldn’t be enough to save him. His legs would break, and his guts would turn to jelly.

  Why had he jumped so high?

  “Don’t panic,” he told himself, and surveyed the jungle one last time, to make this trip into the sky worthwhile.

  Way out there, he saw something beyond the trees. At the horizon, in the direction the plane was pointed, something flat and formless glimmered.

  But a moment later Javi was too low to see anything but trees … and birds.

  Screeching like demons, a flock was skimming through the jungle canopy. They were small, bright green, and formed into a tight pack. They seemed to ripple among the branches, the sunlight glinting from their long, sharp beaks.

  They were coming right at Javi.

  Maybe he should try to scare them off?

  “Shoo!” he shouted, waving his arms as he slowly fell.

  But the birds kept coming, and he barely had time to cover his face before the whole flock shot past in a roar of feathers and shrieks.

  “Ahhh!” he yelled, feeling slivers of pain open up all over him, like a dozen paper cuts had appeared on his skin. Why were birds attacking him?

  Javi opened his eyes after the fluttering had passed. His shirt was ripped and torn, and blood seeped through in a few places. The backs of his hand were bleeding, too—he’d covered his face just in time.

  He was still falling toward the ground, but not fast enough. The flock was whirling around again, coming at him.

  “Help!” he yelled.

  Anna was looking up in horror. She grabbed one of the floating pieces of metal from the wreckage pile—the emergency door. It had weighed maybe sixty pounds, back before gravity was optional. But Anna sent it hurtling toward him like it was a cafeteria tray.

  What was he supposed to do with it, though? Use it as a shield?

  The birds were closing in when Anna shouted, “Third law of motion!”

  Javi tried to think. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction? Like jumping forward from a skateboard, and it rolls backward …

  Just in time, he understood. He grabbed the emergency door as it passed, which sent him spinning, then hurled it as hard as he could straight up into the air.

  Which sent him careening straight down toward the ground.

  The flock of birds shot past again but most of them missed, passing overhead. One bird crashed satisfyingly into the door, and a floating cloud of feathers exploded above Javi.

  The flock was already wheeling around again. But he was descending much faster now, thanks to the door.

  Below him, Kira had stuck the survival knife into the ground. She was clinging to it with one hand, and to Akiko with the other.

  As Javi hit the slide, he imagined himself bouncing back up into the air and being torn to pieces. But then Anna did something with the device …

  Full-strength gravity hit like a punch in the gut, and Javi flopped back onto the inflated plastic. There was a clatter as the floating piles of water bottles, survival tools, and wreckage all hit the ground together, along with grunts from Kira and Akiko.

  “Incoming!” Anna cried out. “Get under the slide!”

  Kira and Akiko were already crawling under cover. Javi tried to scramble off the plastic, but his muscles felt weird and wobbly. He slipped to the ground just as the roar of the flock filled the air above him …

  … and kept going.

  He looked up and saw the birds disappearing into the trees.

  “Javi!” Anna screamed. “Get under here!”

  He shook his head. “They just—”

  “Door!” she cried, as a huge metal crunk came from behind Javi, making him leap into the air.

  He spun around to find the emergency door crumpled on the ground. It had gouged a fat hole in the dirt, maybe five feet from where he stood.

  “Whoa,” Anna said as she emerged, staring at the door. “I forgot about that when I turned the gravity back on. Are you okay?”

  Javi looked down at himself. He was covered with tiny cuts, but none of the razor-sharp beaks had found a vein. Just lucky, he supposed. And he’d been lucky with the falling emergency door, too.

  But the prospect of being crushed wasn’t why his knees were shaking. What was making Javi feel sick was the phrase that Anna had just uttered so casually.

  When I turned the gravity back on.

  What was that thing?

  We have to go look for Yoshi,” Molly said. “It’s not safe out there.”

  Caleb crossed his arms. “Not a good idea.”

  “Look at what those birds did!” She pointed at Javi. His shirt hung in ribbons, and the bandages from a first-aid kit were strewn across his torso. “Yoshi doesn’t know about them, and he’s been gone for hours. That means he’s miles away, and lost!”

  “It’s too dangerous out there,” Caleb said. “We could get lost, too!”

  “We’ll figure something out.” Molly’s mind raced. The compasses didn’t work, and the clouds were too thick to navigate by the sun. They couldn’t even tell how soon night would fall, but she didn’t dare mention that to Caleb. “Maybe we can mark our path, like with bread crumbs.”

  “Bread crumbs?” Oliver murmured. “I’d rather eat them.”

  Molly looked at him. “Sorry—metaphorical bread crumbs. Or we could build something taller than the trees. Something we can see from far away.”

  The two inflatable slides stacked up would have been perfect. But one of them was growing more limp by the minute, hanging from the wing like an old rag doll. It had been torn when all the wreckage had come tumbling down.

  Everything was going wrong.

  Including gravity.

  Molly and Oliver had heard the shouting and had come out the front emergency exit just in time to see it all. Javi suspended in midair, attacked by the flock of screeching birds. Kira and Akiko floating a few feet off the ground, along with the water bottles, survival gear, and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. And Anna with that thing in her hands, the air pulsing and rippling around her.

  Anna still held the device, clinging to it like it was a winning lottery ticket. Kira stood next to her, drawing the symbols one by one.

  “I’m not sure what you kids got up to while I was gone.” Caleb spread his hands to encompass the strewn survival gear, Javi’s wounds, the sagging slide. “But you made a mess.”

  “What we got up to was changing how gravity worked!” Javi cried. “And you’re worried about a mess?”

  Caleb gave Javi the same sarcastic look as when he’d first heard the story. “Right. You found a toy that let you fly.”

  “Not fly, jump,” Javi said. “It turns down gravity, somehow.”

  “But now it doesn’t work anymore,” Caleb said with a snort. “That’s convenient.”

  Anna shrugged, handing the device over. Caleb stared at the symbols, gave a tired sigh, then tossed it back. He didn’t notice how Akiko and Kira flinched when he touched it.

  Molly had to agree that the machine’s sudden failure was a little too convenient. She wondered what Anna was up to.

  “Whatever happened here,” Caleb said, “I’m not going to let you go marching off into the jungle.”

  Molly laughed. “Let us go into the jungle?”

  Caleb stood taller, his muscles bulging. “You heard what I said.”

  “Who died and made you scoutmaster?” Molly asked.

  He looked at her, totally serious. “About five hundred people.”

  The words hit like a punch in the stomach
, and without thinking Molly turned to Oliver and put an arm around him.

  Till now, no one had said it out loud—no one else on the plane had survived. Mr. Keating, the crew, all those other passengers—rows and rows of people had filed into the aircraft’s countless seats, and now they were all gone. Flung out into the jungle somewhere back there.

  No one spoke. Kira had even stopped drawing, sensing that something serious was being discussed.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Oliver said. “They’re all dead.”

  Molly squeezed him. “We don’t really know what happened, Oliver. None of this makes sense.”

  He pulled away, fists clenched. “Anna said she saw them being thrown out.”

  Molly glared at Anna, hoping she wouldn’t mention the weird lightning they’d seen on the plane. If Oliver lost it now, the rest of Team Killbot might just fall apart.

  But it was Javi who spoke up first. “The important thing right now is to find Yoshi.”

  “You’re right,” Molly said thankfully. “Figuring out what happened can wait.”

  Oliver looked like he wanted to say more, but he just shook his head and looked away. There was a moment of tense silence.

  Luckily, Caleb still wanted to argue. “We’re not going to find anyone in that jungle. It’s pointless to try.”

  “Okay, scoutmaster,” Molly said. “Then what’s your plan to help Yoshi?”

  “Maybe if we made a sound.” Caleb gave a shrug. “Something he could hear from miles away. So he can find his own way back.”

  Molly frowned—it wasn’t a terrible idea. “But if he’s close enough to hear us, wouldn’t his radio work?”

  “It could be broken.”

  “The plane was full of alarms,” Javi said. “They went off while it was crashing. We just need power to run them.”

  Oliver wiped his nose with the back of his shirtsleeve. “We’ve got plenty of flashlight batteries.”

  “We’ll work on that,” Anna said. “And we won’t make a mess, Caleb, we promise. But maybe you can scout around in the meantime? Just in case Yoshi’s somewhere nearby, and he’s hurt.”

  Caleb gave them all a long look, like he still thought they were up to no good. But finally he nodded, grabbed a knife and a flashlight from the open survival kit, and headed off into the underbrush.