Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  As he chewed, a taste flooded his mouth … not a good one.

  There was a metallic sharpness to it, like pennies on his tongue. And also a pasty, flowery flavor—ground-up chalk mixed with the contents of his grandma’s fancy soap dish. On top of it all, a fierce bitterness twisted up his mouth.

  The awful taste must have shown in his expression, because the others fell silent.

  Javi started to take a breath, but adding air to the chewed-up berries was a bad move. The smell of rotten eggs filled his head.

  His eyes watered, and he felt Molly’s hand on his shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  “Spit it out!” Anna cried.

  He managed to cough once, and a gob of green flung itself from his mouth. Everyone leaped back, like they expected the berries to come for them next.

  But the taste was padlocked to Javi’s tongue. Its tendrils were crawling down his throat, making their way toward his stomach. And every time he managed to take a breath, the rotten-eggs smell expanded. His vision went fuzzy, and he felt himself drop to his knees.

  “Javi!” Molly cried. “Drink this!”

  She waved something—a water bottle—in front of his face, but Javi pushed it away. Water would only carry the acid tendrils farther down his throat.

  But they reached his stomach anyway, and it was like a switch was thrown. His whole body lurched, and everything he’d eaten since reaching camp that morning leaped from his stomach. Hot and salty, it streamed up his throat and into his mouth, then out through his lips and onto the ground.

  Two more gigantic heaves came from him, emptying his stomach completely. A moment later, Javi found himself curled up in the dirt, gasping and clutching his belly.

  “Um, are you okay?” Molly asked from about ten feet away.

  Javi didn’t answer. The thought of his abdominal muscles flexing again, even to push out a single word, was too much.

  But the weird part was, he didn’t feel that bad.

  He felt clean inside. His vision was sharp, his eyes washed by tears. Even his sinuses were clear. The half-digested airplane pretzel smell that filled the clearing was particularly crisp, if not very pleasant.

  “I’ll live,” he whispered.

  “Whoa,” Anna said. “That was fast. It was like those berries were designed to make you puke.” Anna knelt beside him, looking into his eyes. “Your pupils look normal, as far as I can tell. This is kind of perfect.”

  Javi stared at her. “Um, which definition of perfect are you using? Because I give those berries one star.”

  “Sorry. It sucks to barf. But this is exactly what we need for food testing!” She looked up at Molly. “If anyone gets sick, we can use the green berries to flush them out. It’s like having a stomach pump on call!”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted.” Javi sat up and reached for a water bottle.

  Kira knelt down in front of him, staring into his eyes. She reached out … and flicked his nose.

  “Ouch,” Javi said. “What was that for?”

  She said something in Japanese.

  Yoshi smiled. “She says wait your turn and don’t play the hero. But I think you were brave.” He bowed.

  Before meeting Yoshi, Javi had never seen anyone bow, except maybe as a joke. It seemed somehow formal and heartfelt at the same time. “Thanks.”

  “Kira says she’ll go next,” Yoshi announced to the group. “And I’ll go after her.”

  “I feel like the straws aren’t being respected,” Oliver said.

  Molly sighed. “Maybe random chance isn’t the best way to make decisions. I’ll go after you guys.”

  “Not necessary, Molly,” Anna said. “We only have two more kinds of berries. But the rest of you don’t have to worry. There’ll be plenty of other weird stuff to try. We haven’t tried eating a bird yet, and those big green insects might be a good source of protein. You might envy Javi by the time this is all over.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Javi stood up. His legs were a little shaky, and his mouth tasted bad. The grandma’s-soap-dish taste had been washed away, but the tang of stomach acid was still there. He tried not to look at the puked-up airplane pretzels on the ground.

  He stumbled to a rock and sat down heavily.

  Yoshi gestured to Kira, indicating the other piles of berries—blue and red. She leaned close to inspect them, giving each a sniff.

  After a moment, Kira picked up a few of the red berries, closed her eyes, and popped them in her mouth.

  She chewed a few times, then opened her eyes.

  “Omoshiroi,” she said.

  “Interesting,” Yoshi translated.

  Javi leaned back and took a sip of water. “Omoshiroi,” he repeated. That was one Japanese word he figured he would always remember.

  Kira ate another handful of the red berries and shrugged. She rubbed some of the juice into the white streak in her hair, and it instantly stained red.

  She smiled at this, and Akiko gathered her into a hug.

  “My turn,” Yoshi said.

  He approached the blue berries and picked one up. After a deep breath he cautiously ate one, then another.

  “Whoa. These are really good.” He reached for more, a sudden look of hunger in his eyes.

  “Not too many,” Anna said. “You guys should wait a couple of hours, just to make sure there’s not some kind of slow-acting poison in them. The moment you start feeling weird, eat one of Javi’s berries to get rid of everything inside you.”

  “They aren’t called Javi’s berries,” Javi said. “As their discoverer, I do not permit that!”

  Anna laughed. “Okay, so what are they called?”

  Javi thought for a moment. “From now on, they shall be known as … pukeberries.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement, and Javi took another sip of water and closed his eyes.

  His work here was done.

  It still counts, Kira,” Yoshi said. “Even if you don’t vomit.”

  “Stay still.” Kira looked up from her sketch pad and frowned at his pose. While they waited to see if the berries they’d eaten were poisonous, she was drawing him.

  “I hope that boy is okay,” Akiko said.

  “Ha-bi,” Yoshi sounded out. Javi’s name didn’t quite work in Japanese, but it was close enough.

  “He was annoying,” Kira said. “He stole my glory.”

  Yoshi laughed, but Kira silenced him with a dark look. He went back to his pose—gazing up at the crashed plane in wonder, a hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Vomiting didn’t look very glorious.” Akiko glanced at the airplane-sheared tree trunk beside her, where a pile of green pukeberries sat in case of medical emergency.

  “We won’t need those,” Yoshi reassured her. “Please, play some more.”

  Akiko smiled and picked up her flute again. Well, it wasn’t really hers—she’d found it stowed in the flight attendants’ closet. Her own instrument was probably somewhere in the trail of wreckage behind the plane.

  She began to play something slow and soft, and Yoshi let the music soothe his nerves. Waiting around like a lab rat was bad enough, but posing like this was just humiliating.

  He was also dizzy from hunger. By now it was clear that Kira’s interesting-berries weren’t deadly, and the blue berries he’d tried were not only safe, but delicious. Yoshi wanted to eat a thousand of them, but he’d promised Anna to wait until sunset before eating more.

  Sunset.

  He tightened his grip on his katana, remembering the sound he’d heard last night—the huge body lumbering through the jungle. After Javi had spotted those gouges in the tree trunk today, Yoshi was less certain that it had all been in his imagination. Didn’t some predators only hunt at night?

  As the shadows lengthened, the noises of the jungle seemed to come alive.

  “How long will your drawing take?” he asked.

  The scratch of Kira’s pencil didn’t pause. “As long as it takes.”

  Akiko looked u
p, shrugging an apology as she played.

  “We’re wasting time,” Yoshi said. “We have food and water now. We should be trying to understand this place.”

  Akiko stopped playing. “Do you really think we’re on another planet?”

  “You saw the moons,” Kira said.

  “They could’ve been weather balloons,” Akiko said. “Or rescue planes, looking for us!”

  “That’s what Caleb thinks.” Yoshi looked around. “But this jungle, these animals—none of it looks like Earth. And the waterfall that feeds our stream, there’s something behind it.”

  Kira stopped drawing. “What do you mean?”

  “I heard a sound on my radio out there. Just beeps, but it had a pattern.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember. “And I felt something, too—a trembling in the ground, in the air. Some giant process at work. This place isn’t still. It’s moving, changing around us.”

  When he opened his eyes, Kira was still staring at him.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  Apparently, that was her favorite word. She had worked more of the interesting-berries into the bleached lock of her hair, and now it shone a luminous red.

  “I’m going to go back to the waterfall,” Yoshi said. “And past it, to see what’s out there. We can’t sit around waiting for this place to eat us!”

  Kira frowned. “But if you get lost, we won’t have a translator.”

  “How inconvenient for you.”

  “I’m only saying, your Japanese is very good.”

  Yoshi felt his spine stiffen. “I was born in Tokyo.”

  “But you’re a half, aren’t you?”

  “My mother is American,” he mumbled.

  Kira nodded, as if all her suspicions had been confirmed.

  Yoshi resumed his pose, mastering his expression as he turned back to the crashed plane. He was used to this—being a curiosity, an oddity, a threat to logic and good sense. He would always be the foreigner who spoke Japanese too well, who wasn’t quite foreign enough. It made people nervous, the way he didn’t fit in one box or the other.

  He wondered if Kira was drawing his face differently, now that she was certain.

  “Do you miss them?” she asked.

  “My parents?” He shrugged. “My mother and I had a fight just before I left. And my father and I were about to have one when I arrived in Japan.”

  Kira shook her head. “Poor Yoshi-chan. Is that why you’re so broody?”

  He ignored her. The strange thing was, he hadn’t thought much at all about home. On the plane, he’d already missed his life back in New York, but that seemed a hundred years ago now.

  Why would he want to sit around talking about manga when he was living in one?

  “What about your parents?” he asked.

  “We haven’t seen them in a month,” Akiko stopped playing to say. “We were in a Swiss finishing school, learning how to behave properly.”

  Kira rolled her eyes. “A punishment for me. A reward for her.”

  “I loved it!” Akiko said. “We learned all about air kisses and protocol, and we spoke French the whole time!”

  “We learned about table settings,” Kira grumbled. “So many forks.”

  Akiko was about to say more, but a bird fluttered into view and settled above them on the wing of the plane. It opened up its mouth and sang, a rising note with a little trill at the end. It was one of the slide-whistle birds, as Anna called them—the only ones here that sounded like they belonged on Earth.

  Akiko played her own trill on the flute, a little higher in pitch than the bird’s song. It cocked its head, listening.

  “Almost,” Yoshi said.

  Akiko played the trill once more. This time she matched the bird’s song perfectly.

  Yoshi smiled encouragement. Maybe that flute would be useful. Didn’t duck hunters use calls to lure their prey closer?

  His fingers shifted on his sword hilt.

  Kira was watching him, and spoke softly. “The others will be too afraid to explore with you.”

  “They’ve already been out to the waterfall.”

  “Only to look for you.”

  Yoshi kept his eyes on the bird. “They’re engineers. They’re curious.”

  “Engineers aren’t curious,” she said. “They’re cautious. That’s why bridges don’t fall down. Mostly.”

  Yoshi had to smile at that. It was true that Molly always demanded a long discussion before any decision was made. She wanted theories and conjectures. What would it take to convince her that they needed to go out into the jungle again, where unknown monsters lurked? To search beyond the waterfall for whatever was sending out radio transmissions? To investigate the perfectly circular stands of trees, even if there were shredder birds in the way?

  Yelling drifted in from the jungle. The others were helping with Caleb’s signal fire, which no one would ever see. Yoshi sighed—more time wasted.

  Unless that foghorn creature was afraid of fire. That was probably why Molly was helping him.

  The slide-whistle bird fluttered down from the wing and alighted on the sheared-off trunk. It stared at Akiko curiously.

  “You’ll need the gravity machine to explore,” Kira said. “They won’t let you borrow it. Because you ran off alone and had to be rescued.”

  “They didn’t rescue me—I rescued them from tanglevine. And I was the one who found the source of our water.”

  “They don’t see it that way.”

  “How do you know? You can’t even understand what they’re saying.”

  Kira shrugged. “I don’t have to know English to understand them. They think they’re smarter than everyone else. That’s why they talk everything to death.”

  Yoshi couldn’t argue with that.

  The bird fluttered closer, and Akiko paused to giggle at it.

  “Keep playing,” Kira whispered. She glanced at Yoshi’s sword hand and gave him a half smile.

  Akiko played the trill again, and this time the bird answered. It hopped along the trunk toward the pukeberries. Almost within reach.

  The smell of smoke wafted in from the jungle, along with some cheers. Caleb’s signal fire was burning at last.

  Of course, a fire could be useful … for cooking.

  Yoshi eased the katana halfway out of its scabbard. The freshly oiled metal made no sound, and the bird was interested in the pukeberries now. Akiko’s eyes were closed as she listened to its song.

  The felled tree was old wood, hard as iron. But if he swept across it, a horizontal suihei cut just like in practice, he could strike without damaging his blade.

  The bird hopped closer to the berries—it bent down to peck at them.

  In one motion, Yoshi drew his sword and struck. The katana flashed sideways through the air. Feathers flew as the bird shrieked and fluttered for a moment toward the sky. But a second later it tumbled down and hit the ground, where it bounced and jittered like oil in a hot pan, blood spraying. Akiko dropped the flute, her scream mixing with slide-whistle cries.

  Yoshi stepped forward, caught the fluttering tail under one foot, and drove the point of his katana through the bird and into soft dirt.

  An endless moment later, it stopped moving.

  Akiko started crying, and Kira jumped up and held her tight.

  “Sorry,” Yoshi said. He hadn’t meant to scare Akiko. But this bird was food.

  It was survival.

  Kira kept her arms wrapped around Akiko’s shoulders, but smiled up at him.

  Yoshi sighed and pulled his sword free. The blood on the metal and the ground was red, just like an Earth creature’s blood. Maybe Anna was right, and these creatures weren’t too alien to eat.

  Smoke was drifting from the jungle now, and the smell made Yoshi even hungrier. He picked up the bird by one limp wing and headed for the building crackle of the fire.

  This was how you survived. Not with theories and conjectures. You caught your dinner by swinging a blade, not arguing. And you cooked it o
n the same fire that protected you from monsters.

  Yoshi was going to find out what was behind the waterfall, whether the others wanted to come or not. Even if it meant stealing the gravity device.

  “Yoshi-chan!” Kira called, and he spun around.

  Kira still had a protective arm around her sister, but with her free hand she held out a few pukeberries.

  “Just in case the meat’s poisonous?” she said gently.

  The bird gave a last flutter in his hand, and Yoshi almost dropped it. How was it still alive?

  He walked back to take the berries.

  Missed again.” Molly wafted back to earth, her improvised net fluttering in the breeze.

  “It’s weird.” Anna settled into the undergrowth a few yards away. “It’s like those birds know how to fly in low G.”

  “Nets are pointless,” Caleb said for the dozenth time. “We should just throw stuff at them.”

  Molly frowned, watching the latest slide-whistle bird flutter away uncaught. When it reached the edge of the device’s range, its wingbeats shifted into normal-gravity flight without the slightest hitch.

  How did a bird know how to deal with a gravity distortion field?

  “Get ready for heavy,” Anna said, and switched off the device.

  Molly’s stomach lurched, her feet sinking into the soft ground. She was tired, her muscles sore, and her clothes smelled like smoke. Maybe it was time to give up.

  But Yoshi’s slide-whistle bird had tasted so heavenly. The smell of it roasting by the bonfire had made everyone—except Akiko—volunteer to try it first. In the end they’d all risked eating it together, because no one wanted to wait.

  Molly had only allowed herself a small piece, which had burnt pieces of feather stuck to it. But after two days of pretzels and food bars, the taste of fresh meat was amazing.

  “Hunger makes the best sauce,” Javi had proclaimed. “Though I have to say, omoshiroi-berries also make a pretty good sauce.”

  It was true. Kira’s red berries were tangy and crisp, like tiny bitter oranges. The perfect complement to slide-whistle meat.

  But they’d spent the rest of the daylight trying to catch another bird and failing, and darkness had snuck up on them. The jungle around the clearing was full of mysterious noises and shadows now. Anything could be out there, watching them flail at birds.