Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  Molly wondered if they should spend the night out here, protected by the bonfire. Or was it safer back at the plane?

  Caleb hefted his spear. “Just stand back and give me space, guys. I can’t miss!”

  “You already missed four times,” Oliver said tiredly.

  “Yeah, but I’m nailing the next one!”

  “You can’t catch them without Akiko,” Yoshi called.

  Everyone looked up at him and the two girls. They were up the hill, next to the bonfire. Kira looked amused by their efforts, but Akiko was watching with an unhappy expression, her flute silent by her side.

  Molly led the others back up. “You said she didn’t want to help.”

  Yoshi shrugged. “Another day of berries and pretzels might change her mind.”

  “Just what we need: a pied piper with a conscience.” Molly realized that she was hungrier now than before she’d eaten her one bite of bird. One successful hunt didn’t solve all their food problems.

  She looked at the gravity device in Anna’s hand. “You don’t suppose one of those symbols is for bird-zapping, do you?”

  Anna’s eyes lit up. “You want to experiment?”

  It was tempting, but Molly shook her head. Between taste-testing alien berries and cooking a bird for the first time, she’d had enough trial and error for one day.

  Besides, the sun had set. She had to stay watchful.

  “It’s too dark to mess with the laws of physics.”

  “Right, and the bonfire’s starting to burn down.” Caleb stuck his spear into the ground and looked up into the misty sky. “We’ve got to build it back up. This is the best time for a rescue plane to spot us.”

  Molly rolled her eyes at Anna.

  Caleb saw it. “I know. You still think this is another planet. One of those alien worlds that has breathable air and plenty of stuff to eat!”

  “As opposed to some hidden island full of alien wildlife?” Molly asked. “Where radios and compasses don’t work, and there’s antigravity technology lying around?”

  Caleb didn’t answer, just gave the device in Anna’s hands a dirty look.

  Then Oliver spoke up. “What’s the difference?”

  Everyone stared at him. He stared back, his jaw set.

  “What do you mean?” Javi asked gently.

  “You all act like that’s the big question,” Oliver said. “Is this a planet? A spaceship? A hidden island? But wherever it is, we’re here and five hundred other people aren’t! So where are they?”

  Nobody said anything, and the night noises of the jungle rushed in to fill the silence.

  Molly felt her hunger joined by another emptiness. An absence she had tried to crowd out of her mind with theories and conjectures.

  “We don’t—” she began.

  But Anna interrupted, her voice emotionless. “When the electricity came into the plane, it was analyzing us. Testing us. It chose us eight, and no one else.”

  “Okay,” Oliver said. “So someone brought us here. What did they do with everybody else? Isn’t that the real question? The one you’re all afraid to ask?”

  He paused, his fists balled in defiance. The fire crackled in the cooling night air.

  “Because they’re all dead,” he finally said.

  Molly shook her head, trying to ward off the words. “We don’t really know what—”

  “You do know. You’re just afraid to say it! You think I’ll start crying and freaking out.” Tears ran down Oliver’s face, but his fists stayed clenched. “And that just makes it worse!”

  Molly stepped back from him. “What does?”

  “Not talking about it!” Oliver took a deep, shuddering breath. “We should say something about Mr. Keating at least. I mean, he was our friend. Without him we wouldn’t even know each other. But you guys are too chicken to admit he’s dead, and you’re pretending it’s my fault!”

  The members of Team Killbot all looked at one another, and when Molly saw Javi’s guilty expression, she knew exactly what Oliver meant.

  As usual, it was Anna who said the uncomfortable truth out loud.

  “You’re right. We didn’t want to face it, and we used you as an excuse. Sorry, Oliver.”

  He stared at her a moment, then nodded. “Don’t apologize. Just say it.”

  “It’s true,” Javi said, looking like he’d just woken up. “They’re all dead. And we should say something about Mr. Keating.”

  Molly tried to swallow the stone in her throat—this was all her fault. It had worked on the plane, distracting Javi from his fears. But when five hundred people were dead, you didn’t hide it with trivia questions.

  Of anyone, she should have known better. After Molly’s father had died, her mother never talked about him, until she’d gotten so good at silence that now she never talked at all.

  And Molly had tried to do the same thing to Oliver.

  “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath. “And I’m sorry I talked your mother into letting you come, Oliver.”

  He managed a smile. “You didn’t know the plane was going to crash.”

  Molly shrugged. Sure, it was a one-in-ten-million chance. But it was her responsibility to make it right if she could. That’s what being the leader meant.

  “Okay,” she said. “Mr. Keating … He was a really cool guy. He taught us how to be engineers, and how to think for ourselves. And he might be gone, but he’s why Team Killbot is going to make it through this.”

  She looked at Javi, who cleared his throat.

  “I didn’t really have friends at school before you guys,” he said. “I used to feel sick every Sunday night, because Monday morning came next, and it always felt so lonely. But now I look forward to school. I have Mr. Keating to thank for that.”

  Oliver spoke up next. His voice was at the edge of breaking, and it sounded like he’d said the lines already a hundred times in his head. “He showed me that math can make robots. Before that, I thought I was totally uncool. Now I’m not so sure.”

  Oliver looked like he wanted to say more, but his tears were running freely now.

  Molly glanced at Anna, hoping she didn’t feel forced to speak. Sharing really wasn’t her strong point, especially at moments like this, when it was easy to say the wrong thing.

  But Anna took a breath. “He let me be the way I am. He made it a puzzle to be solved, instead of something wrong with me.”

  Molly swallowed, letting the noises of the jungle fill the clearing for a while. Finally, she knuckled away the tear rolling down her own cheek and faced Caleb. He was turned toward the airplane, looking embarrassed and bored.

  But this had to be hard for him, with no friends in this strange place. Maybe it was time to let him contribute. Part of Molly hoped he was right and she was wrong, so maybe they could all still get home.

  “Do you really think this is Earth?” she asked.

  “Of course it’s Earth,” Caleb said, still not looking at the rest of them. “We aren’t freezing to death or boiling away. And no one’s ever discovered an exoplanet the right distance from its sun to support human life.”

  Molly blinked. “An exoplanet?”

  “That’s a planet in another solar system.”

  “I know what it means, but since when did you get all Mr. Science?”

  Caleb snorted. “Since I got my first telescope, when I was ten. Playing with toy robots doesn’t make you the only people who know stuff.”

  A few rejoinders went through Molly’s head—that the Killbots weren’t toys, any more than the robots that defused bombs or built cars or rescued people after earthquakes were. But she found herself with a smidgen of newfound respect for Caleb.

  She looked at the others. They were all listening, happy to replace grief with something else to think about. Anything else.

  “So you know astronomy,” she said. “If you saw the stars, could you figure out if we’re on Earth or not?”

  “That’s easy. I even could tell you where on Earth we are—or at l
east the latitude.” He looked up. “But the mist makes it impossible.”

  “What if we got you above the mist?” Molly asked with a smile.

  Caleb’s eyes widened. “You mean, with that gravity thing?”

  “Flying is the bomb,” Anna said.

  Caleb didn’t answer for a moment.

  “You can help us figure out where we are,” she said.

  He finally let out a sigh. “Okay. I’ll fly up and check out the stars, but only if you help me build the fire back up first. Just in case we aren’t on an alien planet and there are people looking for us.”

  “It keeps the bugs away,” Molly said with a shrug.

  Then she realized that she was doing it again. Keeping the truth from the others, when they needed to know what was going on if they were going to survive.

  “It probably keeps the monsters away, too,” she added softly. “Let’s stoke the fire.”

  Bonfires were easy when you could turn the gravity down.

  Javi had to admit, Caleb had picked a good spot for his signal fire. It was a half mile back along the debris trail, far away from any leaking jet fuel. Here, the belly of the descending aircraft had clipped a small hill, knocking a dozen trees out of the ground to create a clearing. The trees were too big to carry in normal gravity, but in low G each weighed no more than a box of schoolbooks.

  Javi, Caleb, and Molly found a knocked-over tree in the darkness, then Anna turned down the gravity. While they carried the fresh log back, the timbers in the fire eased up into the air, carried by the updraft of their own flames.

  “Get ready for heavy!” Anna called when the log was in position.

  Full gravity returned, and the timbers went crashing down, spitting sparks as oxygen rushed into the fresh spaces created.

  A wave of heat billowed out across the hill, and Javi smiled. It was like having a giant poker that stirred the signal fire at the push of a button.

  If only there were someone to signal.

  It hit him hard, there in the darkness—if they were on an alien planet, all alone, the monsters out there in the dark would always be there. But if Caleb was right and this was Earth, maybe there was hope.

  Javi looked up at the sky. No rescue planes rumbled above the roar of the fire and the buzz of insects.

  He sighed and bent down to pick up the water bottle full of glowflies—his best name so far. He’d been collecting them all afternoon. One day, their flashlights were going to run out of juice.

  “Okay, Astronomy Boy,” Molly said. “It’s time to go up there and tell us what constellations you see.”

  Caleb only nodded. Javi wondered if his bossy attitude was fading because he saw how well Team Killbot functioned as a group.

  “So I’m just supposed to jump?” he asked.

  Molly nodded. “We’re already on this hill. With a boost from us, you’ll go a few hundred feet up. That’ll clear the mist easy.”

  “Sounds like a long way to fall back down.”

  “It doesn’t matter how far you fall,” Oliver spoke up, his eyes still red but his voice steady. “You weigh so little, your terminal velocity is almost nothing.”

  Caleb crossed his arms. “My what?”

  “He doesn’t mean terminal in a bad way,” Javi said, grinning.

  “Everything has a maximum falling speed,” Oliver explained. He picked up a feather left behind from the bird roasting, and let it spiral to the ground. “With the gravity turned way down, your terminal velocity is like this feather’s—too slow to hurt you.”

  “But you can’t drop the device.” Anna held it up. “And don’t touch any of these buttons. Unless you want normal gravity coming back when you’re three hundred feet up.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Caleb said. He looked ready to go, confident.

  Too confident, Javi thought.

  “And if you hear a sort of growling?” Javi said. “Those are shredder birds. That’s bad.”

  Caleb stared, like he thought Javi was kidding.

  Molly handed him a flare. “If you get into any trouble, light this.”

  Javi, Yoshi, Anna, and Molly did the honors, gathering around Caleb and interlocking their palms. He was finally looking the right amount of scared, Javi thought, for someone about to be launched hundreds of feet into the air for the first time.

  “Get ready for weightless,” Anna said.

  She switched on the device and handed it to Caleb, and the wafty feeling of low G filled Javi’s body. Kira and Akiko took each other’s hands.

  “Three, two, one, launch,” Molly cried, and with a grunt they sent Caleb skyward. As he and the device disappeared into the dark mists above, normal gravity settled over them all again.

  “I wonder if that thing’s battery will ever run out,” Javi said, picking up his jar of glowflies. “I mean, does it even have a battery?”

  “I’m more worried about him landing in the bonfire,” Oliver said. “Or would the rising hot air push him back up?”

  Molly stared at them. “Did you guys worry about this stuff when it was me going up?”

  “We trust you to improvise.” Javi looked up. “Caleb, not so much.”

  “We should build some kind of portable engine,” Anna said. “We could us those little fans on the—”

  “Wait,” Molly whispered. “Listen.”

  A sound was building around them—an ominous rushing sound that made the small hairs on Javi’s arms tingle. It seemed to come from the sky, the trees, everywhere.

  “Is it getting colder?” Anna asked.

  Javi nodded. A chill had wrapped itself around him, and the trees began to stir.

  “This is one we didn’t think about,” he said. “A storm!”

  They all looked into the sky again. Caleb was up there somewhere, a kite without a string.

  Molly knelt and grabbed some fronds, tore them up, and threw them high into the air. They caught the wind and drifted back along the wreckage trail, away from the crashed plane.

  “He’s getting blown that way,” she called, pointing.

  After a moment of silence, Javi flung out an arm. “There!”

  “Clever boy,” Anna said. “He lit the flare.”

  In the distance, a tiny red dot was descending. It brightened as it dropped down out of the mists, blazing in the darkness. But a moment later it had disappeared, fallen softly into the thick and unforgiving jungle.

  At that moment, another sound rose up in the distance. It was a huge and mournful cry, as deep as a foghorn.

  “That didn’t sound like a storm,” Javi said.

  “Omoshiroi,” Kira said.

  Brilliant,” Caleb muttered to himself. “Why did I listen to those kids?”

  The cold wind stirred the branches around him, pushing him down a few feet toward the jungle floor. He was about halfway between the ground and the canopy, tangled in vines, a flare sputtering in one hand, the gravity device in the other.

  Caleb sighed. Weighing nothing had a disadvantage they hadn’t mentioned—one sudden wind and he was miles away from where he’d started!

  He didn’t even know how to turn the device off.

  Not that he wanted to at the moment. The jungle below was lit only by the pale blue of the glowflies. The others had warned him about a carnivorous vine down there. That didn’t seem likely, but neither did anything else that had happened over the last two days.

  Also, when he’d been up there above the mist, Caleb had thought he’d heard some kind of animal cry down below.

  Maybe staying up here in the trees was better for now.

  First things first—he needed a free hand to grab branches, but he couldn’t drop the hissing flare. It was his only source of light, and hadn’t Molly said that the shredder birds were afraid of fire? Maybe whatever had let out that cry was, too.

  Clutching the gravity device between his knees, Caleb managed to pull his belt loose. Working carefully, he used it to strap the device to one shoulder.

  Okay. Falling to
his death was no longer a possibility. One less thing to worry about. Of course, his pants might fall down at any moment, but that seemed like a fair trade.

  With his free hand, Caleb pulled himself weightlessly upward through the flare-lit darkness, until finally the misty sky appeared above.

  He pushed off from the treetops, drifting up into the cool wind.

  There was the bonfire in the distance. He could just make out a smaller flame off to the side, waving back and forth.

  They’d made a torch to signal him with!

  Caleb had to admit—those kids weren’t completely useless.

  He waved the flare back at them, wishing he could send some kind of signal. Something that would tell them what he’d seen in the sky—

  Those two moons that couldn’t be moons. Sure, their light was steady, not twinkling like a star’s, and Caleb’s sharp eyes had made out craters on their surfaces. But the red moon was almost full while the green one was only a slim crescent—and they were right next to each other.

  Even on an alien planet, two moons in the same part of the sky would have to be in the same phase, right? Unless the solar system had two suns.

  But that didn’t make sense, either. Why would each moon only reflect one sun? And then he’d seen something that had removed all doubt …

  Treetops brushed his feet. He was drifting back down into the canopy, and the wind had pushed him even farther away from the bonfire.

  Caleb gave a last wave with his flare, then grabbed for a passing branch. He had to get organized and start making his way back toward the bonfire. This flare wouldn’t burn forever, and he definitely didn’t want to bounce around this jungle in pitch-blackness.

  He got his feet under him. If those kids could jump across the treetops, so could he.

  With a grunt, Caleb pushed off as hard as he could. A moment later he was in the air, the jungle passing beneath him.

  But he’d angled himself too high. The cool wind caught him head-on, stalling his momentum and making the flare sputter in his hand. By the time he drifted back down into the trees, his forward flight had slowed to nothing.