They jumped raggedly and wound up spinning around one another in the air. Their angle was too high, and as they were coming down a breeze caught them.
Not a breeze—the intake of the spinning turbine.
The three of them began to drift toward the burning engine.
“Make us heavy!” Oliver cried.
Molly stared at the ground, thirty feet below. “Too high!”
Javi swung his pillowcase and shouted, “Third law!”
He flung the sack hard, straight up into the air, and Molly felt its gentle push downward. As they neared the burning engine, the heat grew. Javi threw his flashlight skyward, pushing them still lower …
At ten feet up, she switched the device off, and they all went crashing down.
A thud went through Molly when she hit the ground, and her arm exploded with pain. A fresh wave of dizziness struck her.
She blinked it away. The scorching wind was still building, dragging her toward the fire. The engine whined and sputtered, its spinning turbine pulling air into the engine, which burned fuel, which powered the turbine—the cycle wouldn’t stop on its own.
In fact, it was getting stronger! Molly saw Akiko, the smallest of them, skidding across the ground toward the engine.
“Abunai!” Akiko called.
Oliver grabbed her, but then he was being pulled in as well.
Behind them, the pillowcase full of Tabasco fell from the sky and was sucked into the engine. It was vaporized in a flash.
Molly reached through the blistering heat for the device, a few feet away. She stabbed at the buttons—
Double gravity hit, flattening her to the ground. Akiko and Oliver dropped as well, not skidding anymore, but the fire blossomed …
The air that fueled it was growing heavier, Molly realized. Denser and more oxygen rich!
Ignoring the crushing weight that made her injured shoulder scream, Molly managed to stab the buttons again, setting the device to low tech.
The weight lifted, and at once the spinning turbine began to sputter. The shriek of metal against metal dropped in pitch as the engine ground to a noisy, ragged halt.
Jet fuel still burned, but it was no longer fed by a roaring wind. She and the others beat a hasty retreat toward the jungle, until the blistering heat finally faded.
They collapsed in the undergrowth, Molly panting, her lungs scorched. The kerosene smell of jet fuel clung to her, and her face and arms still carried the fire’s heat.
Her shoulder pulsed with pain.
“Okay,” she said when she could talk again. “Playing with settings: bad idea.”
“Told you,” Oliver said.
Molly stared back at the plane. A skyscraper of smoke now towered above it, disappearing into the mists above. The fire’s roar was a gentle rumble almost lost in the buzz of glowflies around them.
“We only had one dinner in first class,” Javi moaned. “And all my Tabasco’s gone!”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Molly said. “But it saved us from a fiery death.”
“Yeah,” Javi said. “But we don’t have an anti-bird fortress anymore.”
Molly glanced at her wounded shoulder—the bandage had been knocked askew. Out here in the darkness, the wound’s green tinge was actually glowing, casting a green pall on the skin around it.
She looked up to find Javi staring at it, too, and tried to smile.
“It doesn’t hurt. Much. I’m more worried about that bird.”
“At least we’ve got a fire to scare it away,” Oliver said, pointing at the plane.
But a moment later the flames sent a final whuff of heat across Molly’s skin, and the fire began to sputter and die, its fuel expended.
They were silent then, and Molly felt the jungle’s darkness swallow them.
There’s something happening out there,” Anna said.
Yoshi’s eyes sprang open, and he took a sharp breath. Leaning against the warmth of the cave wall, he’d almost dozed off.
But when he saw it, he came fully awake—a flare of light had appeared on the dark horizon.
“Interesting,” Kira said, her fingers playing with the new purple streak in her hair.
As Yoshi stared, the light grew brighter. Only a thin layer of mist clung to the jungle now, and the billowing flames tore through it. A tower of smoke rose into the darkness, slicing away a column of stars.
The night wind had cleared the sky an hour ago, revealing that Caleb had been right. The moons were too low in the sky to be real. They looked more like illuminated balloons floating a little higher than the level of the cave.
Whether this was Earth or not, someone was messing with them.
From up here, the rolling contours of the jungle were visible. Way off in the distance—another wall of stone stretched across the horizon, covered with streaming waterfalls. Yoshi hoped the morning would show more.
The radio was still beeping, the patterns always changing, but no one had answered his calls.
“Wait a second,” Anna said. “Isn’t that fire close to—”
The firelight blossomed brighter, tearing away the last veil of mist. For a moment, Yoshi saw a line of scars in the jungle canopy.
The crash site, with the fire at one end of it.
All that jet fuel Molly had worried about, always making them build their bonfires far away from the wings. But the engineers wouldn’t have been so careless, would they?
Kira gave Yoshi a questioning look.
“Anna thinks the plane’s burning,” he said in Japanese. “She might be right.”
Kira turned to stare at the distant fire, and her breathing halted for a moment.
“My sister,” she said raggedly, and for a second Yoshi thought she was about to have a panic attack. But then Kira reached for her drawing pad, and a moment later her trembling hands had steadied, her pencil a soft whisper in the darkness.
The light flared again, sending another dark billow into the sky. The column of smoke grew taller every moment.
“We have to go back,” Anna said.
“No,” Yoshi said. “It would take us all night to get back. We have to keep looking for help.”
“But they could be hurt,” Anna said. She’d always seemed so calm to Yoshi, so strong, but now her voice was breaking.
“Jumping in the darkness is what killed Caleb.” Yoshi felt awful for saying it, but it was true.
“You think they’re okay?” Kira asked. Her voice suddenly sounded more like Akiko’s, gentle and uncertain.
Yoshi needed to be certain for all of them.
“They can take care of themselves,” he said in English. “It’s our job to explore this cave and see if we can find help. Not in the morning. Now.”
Anna took a halting breath, then nodded, her old self again.
Kira closed her drawing pad and started to pack, not needing any translation.
When the scuttling sound came again, Yoshi froze in the darkness.
Something was moving back there in the depths of the cave. He’d heard it almost since the first moment they’d entered the passages that led deeper into the wall of stone.
He reached for his sword and drew a few inches of bright steel.
“Light,” he whispered in Japanese.
Kira switched on her flashlight, and a beam shot into the depths of the cave.
Some kind of machine stood there.
It was about the size of a brick and had eight legs, four on each side. Two metal whiskers stuck out of it, waving like antennae in the breeze from the cave mouth.
As if it was tasting the air.
They all froze as it scuttled closer to them, moving in a darting burst of speed, like a metal insect.
Yoshi eased his katana back into its sheath. Striking the metal robot would only nick the blade, and the thing looked small enough to toss against the wall if it came to that. But it didn’t look dangerous.
“What is it?” he asked in English.
“How should I know?”
Anna asked.
“You’re the robot expert.”
“Soccer-playing robot expert. No idea what that thing is for.” Emotion flooded her usually calm voice. “Except it means there are people around somewhere. Maybe we can find help.”
The machine moved again, scurrying closer to Kira. She drew back against the cave wall but kept her flashlight steady on the robot. Its metal whiskers extended …
Then coiled around the flashlight and snatched it from her hand!
Kira yelped, scooting backward. She picked up a rock the size of her hand and readied to attack.
“No!” Anna whispered. “We need to follow it back to whoever made it.”
Yoshi started to translate, but Kira waved him silent, the rock still ready.
The robot hefted the flashlight, turning it around—as if investigating. More whiskers emerged, waving like stalks of grass.
Then the machine crawled toward Anna. She tensed but didn’t move.
It seemed to ignore her, but another of its metal whiskers reached for her backpack … and drew out the gravity device. More whiskers extended to wrap around it, touching each of the symbols.
Then the robot began to drag the gravity device away.
Kira looked at Yoshi. “Um, what do we—”
With a crash, Anna brought her foot down hard, sending metal parts skittering in all directions across the cave floor.
The robot was still moving, but only barely. A few of its legs scrabbled against stone, pushing it in little circles.
“What happened to following it?” Yoshi asked.
“It was stealing the device. We can’t climb back down in normal G.” Anna pulled the flashlight from the motionless whiskers and shined it at the smashed robot’s remains. “Besides, there’s some interesting stuff in here.”
She pried one of the pieces loose—a black rectangle about the size of a pack of cards. “This is really warm. It could be a battery.”
“Fascinating.” Yoshi sighed. “But I wish you hadn’t—”
“Shh!” Kira hissed, and pointed her flashlight into the depths of the cave.
Two more machines were scuttling forward from the shadows, their whiskers waving furiously.
“Do they look angry to you?” Yoshi asked.
“Not at all. My guess is they’re programmed to ignore us.” Anna dropped the battery into her backpack. “Think about it. This whole place is a giant biology experiment. So these robots must be designed not to mess with animals.”
Yoshi wasn’t sure he liked being called an animal, but Anna’s theory seemed to hold—the robots ignored the three of them, scuttling forward to check on their damaged fellow machine. Their whiskers wrapped around it, and they began to drag it laboriously back into the darkness.
Anna pulled a bungee cord from her backpack and crept after them. She clipped one end of the cord to the wounded robot.
“Okay,” Anna said. “Now we follow them.”
Yoshi slipped his scabbard over his shoulder and readied his flashlight. Who knew what they were going to find back there?
Just then a cool breeze drifted across the back of his neck, and Yoshi smelled something oily and sharp.
He turned back toward the cave entrance. The night wind must have carried the huge pillar of smoke toward them, along with the scent of burning aircraft. He recognized the jet-fuel smell, and another like burned plastic.
What if the others were already dead?
Anna was jealous of the robots.
Their eight legs were separately articulated, designed perfectly for scuttling across uneven rock. And they were small enough to stroll down claustrophobic tunnels where Anna and the others had to take off their backpacks to squeeze through.
The machines would’ve lost her within minutes, except for the bungee cord. She used it like a leash, pulling back the broken robot every time it got too far ahead. When she gave it a tug the other robots would lose their grip, then come back and investigate. Sometimes they would detach the bungee cord, but Anna simply clipped it on again.
They weren’t very smart robots. But their behavior made perfect sense if this jungle really was artificial. They were programmed to ignore anything living, to interact only with other machines. In other words, they were maintenance robots, which was why they’d tried to steal Kira’s flashlight and the gravity device.
Whatever they were, following them had to lead to whoever had designed all this. Someone who could create this kind of technology could definitely help Molly.
“You guys okay back there?” Anna asked.
Yoshi answered with an exhausted grunt.
Anna couldn’t blame him. Crawling through these tunnels was tiring, especially after a day of jumping and that endless climb. Her muscles were rubbery, her jacket drenched in sweat. The rocks around them seemed to grow hotter as they went deeper into the mountain.
But none of that discomfort was enough to drown out the numbness in Anna’s heart.
The airplane had burned up so suddenly, like a giant firebomb, so fast that if anyone had been asleep inside, they wouldn’t have escaped—
Jet fuel burned at about a thousand degrees. Hot enough to reduce a human body to ashes and shards of bone.
Anna shook off the thought and kept crawling. The only way to help her friends was to find whoever had made these robots.
There was something ahead, a shift in the color of the rocks.
“Turn off the flashlights,” she whispered.
Yoshi repeated the command in Japanese, and a moment later Anna was in darkness. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, then she saw it clearly—an orange glow just ahead.
Maybe it was bioluminescence, just a colony of glowworms. Of course, if the glowworms in this place were like everything else, there would be no “just” about it.
Kira said something, and Yoshi translated, “Do you hear that?”
Anna listened, and a soft fluttering sound filled the air. Like the wings of a flock of pigeons, or cards being shuffled in some large, echoey space.
The bungee cord went slack.
A she crawled ahead, the passage widened and the orange glow grew brighter. Anna saw more machines gathered around the broken robot. It was being dismantled, the pieces carried away.
Yep. Maintenance robots, scavenging for spare parts.
She reeled the bungee cord back in and shoved it in her pocket.
“I think we’re here,” she said. “Wherever here is.”
The tunnel opened up into a huge cavern, the size of the gymnasium back at Brooklyn Science and Tech. Inset into the stone walls were countless orange lights, all of them dancing on and off. It was hot, like a Laundromat in midsummer, but cool drafts spilled from another dozen passages leading away into the rock.
Across the floor scuttled dozens of the eight-legged machines. They carried pieces of metal and clusters of fiber, and navigated around Anna’s feet without hesitation or interest.
“Hello?” she called. Her voice echoed, but no answer came except the fluttering sound of the blinking lights.
“Omoshiroi ne,” Kira said, crossing to the center of the cavern.
Floating there was some kind of display, a hologram or a model. One end of it seemed to represent the jungle, familiar from the view they’d seen out of the mouth of the cave.
As Anna went closer, she saw that the rest of the model represented a long, ragged valley, a rift carved into the earth. The rift was bordered by high stone walls on either side, and tiny waterfalls poured from the rocks—the model was moving.
Near the center of the jungle was a glowing fire, the crashed airplane rendered in perfect resolution, not even an inch long. The two artificial moons hovered a foot above the trees, glowing red and green.
“Whoa,” she said.
Kira stood on the other side of the display, already drawing.
“It’s a machine,” Yoshi said.
Anna nodded. “Some kind of hologram, maybe.”
“No, I mean it’
s all one big machine.” He pointed at the display. “The jungle is held in by these walls. The waterfalls and mists pour down to keep it wet. Every bit of it is artificial.”
“Sure.” Anna narrowed her eyes. “But if this is all a machine, what’s its purpose?”
“To maintain the jungle?”
“Um, jungles maintain themselves. It takes a lot of effort to kill them.”
Yoshi shrugged. “That depends on what’s behind this wall.”
Anna peered closer at the model. It only extended to the walls of rock and didn’t show what was on the other side. Farther down its length, the red and green of trees faded into other colors—beige, ochre, a few bands of glimmering silver. They weren’t as high resolution as the jungle, but each looked like it was some different kind of terrain.
Anna reached out and touched the display. It wasn’t a hologram at all—it was really there, but it felt as soft as cotton candy.
Some kind of aerogel? That moved?
The display also pulsed and shivered with data—swirls of color hovered over the crashed airplane, flashing angrily.
Kira said something, and Yoshi translated. “She says this place was built for dozens of people to work in.”
Anna nodded. The smooth expanse of rock overhead was at least twelve feet high, but the little robots only needed a few inches of clearance. She imagined people standing around the display, reading the mysterious graphics, drawing their plans for the jungle below.
But where were they now?
The cavern suddenly felt empty and haunted. Like the crashed airplane after the passengers had disappeared. Nothing left but mindless machines.
No one to help with Molly’s sickness.
“Is anybody here?” she yelled out.
No answer.
“Maybe it’s all automatic,” Yoshi said tiredly.
“Then who’s this display for?” Anna demanded. “The robots don’t need it. I’m not even sure they have eyes!”
One of the little machines was nuzzling her foot, and Anna felt a rush of anger at its mindless skittering, at all these signs of civilization that had promised help for Molly but now offered nothing.
The robot extended a whisker, reaching up for her backpack. Anna gave it a swift kick, and it clattered away across the stone.
Horizon Page 15
