by Heidi Lang
A giant milky-white sac hung dripping from the low ceiling. And wrapped inside it, only the head and one leg sticking out, was the goat.
23. RAE
Rae couldn’t believe the goat was still alive. She watched its eyes roll, the whites gleaming in the darkness as it bleated softly. Hopelessly. It hung right at face level, the sac tangled around it and then smeared all across the ceiling. Almost more of a dripping web than a sac, really.
Rae turned, her headlamp pointed up so she wouldn’t blind the others as they piled through. Incredibly Vivienne had managed to shove her backpack in front of her. She held one of its straps loosely as she stared up at the goat. “I guess we found our bug’s hidden nest,” she said.
“Looks that way.” Rae heard her own voice, even and detached. She felt oddly calm right now. She should be screaming, but she wasn’t.
“Where’s the bug?” Nate asked nervously.
“That is a very good question,” Caden said.
“Also a good question: Is there more than one?” Vivienne asked.
“Ugh, that is a terrible question.” Nate shuddered. “Let’s hurry up, okay?”
“Vivi,” Rae said, “do you have a knife, or something sharp?”
Vivienne unzipped the front pocket of her backpack and fished around for a few moments, then tossed something small and shiny to Rae.
Rae caught it. “A nail file?”
“Give me a break. I have to take this bag with me to school.”
Rae supposed it was better than nothing. “Nate, Caden, grab a sharp rock and help me get that goat down.”
“I have a pair of scissors, too,” Vivienne said, still rummaging in her pack. “I’ll help you cut.”
“Baa,” the goat bleated.
“We won’t let you fall,” Rae promised it. She thought of the dead goat they had found earlier in the collapsed tunnel behind the Town Square. Did these tunnels connect? Were they littered with other dead goats, other dead animals? Even if they were, she couldn’t do anything for them now. But she could save this goat here. She got a firm grip on the small nail file and dug its sharp tip into the egg sac where it met the ceiling.
There was a hardened membrane on the outside, almost like taffy candy, and she had to work to get her tiny blade through it. But as soon as she’d made it past that layer, her hand slipped forward like she were stabbing into a raw egg yolk. The liquid inside oozed out, thick and warm like snot, sliding down her hand, dripping onto her face, puddling around her legs. And with it, an awful smell, sharp and acrid. It reminded her of a skunk, with the same chemical burning effect.
Rae wrinkled her nose and tried not to breathe as she sawed away at more of the stuff.
Nate squeaked and dropped his rock, batting at his hand, his shirt, running fingers over his head.
And now Rae noticed the bugs.
They were everywhere, pouring out of that sac. Small and wriggly and bone-pale, with hundreds of little legs. They wriggled down Rae’s arms, crawled along her shirt, slid through her hair. She could feel their tiny pinchers biting into her flesh.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Nate made a retching noise as he staggered away.
Rae gritted her teeth. She knew if she stopped now, she would never be able to make herself do this again. She kept sawing at the edges of the egg sac while Vivienne cut across from the other side and Caden scraped at it with his rock.
They got a little over half of it sliced, and then the weight of the goat tore the rest as it fell. Caden and Vivienne caught the animal together, staggering under the weight. They set it gently down to the ground, where it stood, trembling, its fur matted and damp with egg fluid. Caden brushed tiny hungry bugs off it. “It’s okay, girl,” he cooed. “We’re going to get you home now.”
Rae hurriedly slapped all the bugs out of her hair and flicked them out of her clothes, stomping on them. Then she helped Caden brush the bugs off the goat. She could still feel phantom bug feet all over her. It was awful, the worst sensation.
“It’s okay, Priceless Art,” Caden cooed.
“What?” Vivienne said, confused.
“The goat. I think that’s her name.”
“Weird name for a goat.”
“Gary the Goatman names them after their favorite foods. I’m guessing there’s a pretty good story behind this one’s best meal.”
“How do you know she’s Priceless Art, and not some other goat?” Rae asked.
“I don’t. But we need to call her something, so…” Caden shrugged.
Rae hoped this really was Priceless Art, and they could eventually reunite her with her owner. And she appreciated the way Caden sounded so calm and matter-of-fact. Like it was totally normal to be covered in the remnants of weird bugs and disgusting egg sac fluid while rescuing a goat inside a deep, dark tunnel.
Click. Click. Click.
Vivienne jerked back and stared across the cavern. “Not to alarm anyone, but there’s something back there.”
Click-click.
“Something big.”
Rae turned. It looked like another tunnel extended out that way, and she caught a glimpse of more milky-white webbing dripping from the ceiling farther down before her light flickered like a candle flame in the wind.
Rae froze, not even breathing until it evened out again.
“Maybe I should have charged that headlamp too,” Vivienne said.
“This is the stuff of nightmares,” Nate moaned.
“Let’s move,” Rae said. “Nate, you go first. Then you, Vivi. Lead the goat, would you? Caden, help push it along from behind. And I’ll go last.” She could hear the clicking from behind her growing louder. It sounded like someone flicking a nail against their teeth.
Or like hundreds of large insect legs connecting with rock.
“Can we go any faster?” Rae asked.
“I’m… trying,” Vivienne grunted. “Come on, goat. Move your Priceless butt already!”
They moved, and Rae crammed herself in after them, taking tiny, impossibly slow steps, trying not to imagine a giant centipede crawling after her, dragging her away, and stuffing her inside an egg sac.
“I’m out!” Nate yelled.
A second later, and Vivienne called, “I’m out too. And so is the goat.”
Then Rae felt Caden move out of the way, and her headlamp illuminated the wide-open tunnel beyond him. She burst out into it, breathing hard.
Vivienne stared past her, her dark eyes narrowed as she gazed into the crevice. “I think it’s noticed,” she whispered.
“Noticed what?” Rae asked.
“That we destroyed its nest.” Vivienne swallowed. “I think… I think it’s angry.” She looked at Rae.
Just as Rae’s headlamp went out.
24. CADEN
There was a moment of complete, suffocating darkness filled with a heavy silence, as if they were buried beneath an avalanche of snow instead of mounds of dirt. And then Vivienne screamed “Run!” and Caden was sprinting, his body reacting before his mind had a chance to register, stumbling off tunnel walls he couldn’t see, tripping over rocks lying unseen beneath his feet.
“This way!” Vivienne yelled. “Nate, you idiot, follow my voice!”
Caden had a sudden terrible fear: the goat. They’d left the goat! A picture flashed through his mind of the poor creature standing alone in the dark, shivering and vulnerable. Ready to be cocooned once more. He stopped, turned back.
“Caden, what are you doing?” Vivienne shrieked.
He wondered how she could see him in the pitch black of the tunnel. “Priceless Art?” he called, thrusting his hands out, searching.
“I have the goat,” Vivienne said. “She’s with me. Now run!”
Caden heard rocks breaking behind him, as if something very large were trying to squeeze its way through a crack in the tunnel wall.
He ran, feeling a strange wrongness behind him, like a cold spot in an otherwise heated pool of water. Rae and her little group were correct
: this bug, whatever it was, did not belong on their world. But he could tell it wasn’t from the Other Place, either.
Rae must be right. There was a spaceship buried below them. An actual alien spaceship.
Caden didn’t have time to ponder what that meant. He could feel the thing behind him getting closer and picked up his speed.
There was something terrible about running in pure darkness. It felt like a nightmare, and he wondered if he was covering any distance at all. He could hear heavy breathing just ahead of him, the sound of footsteps, and from far back, the rapid click-click of insect feet scuttling along the stone.
Someone swore loudly from a few feet ahead. It sounded like Rae. “Bottleneck,” she said. “Duck your heads.”
Caden put his free hand out and slowed his steps a little, feeling for that overhang of rock. When his fingers connected, he stopped and reached both arms forward to trace the opening.
Click-click-click-click!
It sounded like it was right behind him! Caden threw himself into the small space, scurrying forward on hands and knees faster than he would have thought possible. He kept picturing that egg sac, the bugs pouring out of it, the giant centipede carcass at Gary’s yurt. And the way it would feel to have those legs scuttling over him, to be pinned beneath its segmented insect body, the serrated mandibles opening wide…
The air in the tunnel shifted and Caden lurched to his feet, out of the bottleneck and into the last stretch of tunnel. He raced down it, the darkness slowly lightening until he could make out the silhouettes of the others ahead. Beyond them late-afternoon sunlight trickled sluggishly through the hole, illuminating the rope.
Rae reached the rope first. “Nate, up,” she ordered, cupping her hands and bracing her feet as Nate staggered to a stop next to her. She was wearing Vivienne’s giant backpack, and a second later Caden saw why: Vivienne had Priceless Art slung across the top of her own shoulders. The goat looked bigger than she was, but she stood there easily, waiting as Nate grabbed the rope and put his foot in Rae’s hands, then hauled himself up.
Caden jogged the last few steps until he was standing with them. “Your turn,” he told Rae, holding out his hands.
She hesitated, but just for a second. Then she grabbed the rope and let Caden boost her up.
Then it was just Caden, Vivienne, and Priceless Art.
“You next,” Vivienne told him.
“What about the goat?”
“I’m going to tie the rope around her, and then you guys are going to haul her up,” Vivienne said.
“Then what about you? How will you get up without ropes?”
She gave him a smile, small and knowing. It was the kind of smile that clearly said she had a secret, and she knew he knew she had a secret. But all she said was, “Don’t worry about me.”
“Vivi…”
“Later, Caden.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “It’s almost through the bottleneck.”
Caden turned and leaped at the rope.
25. RAE
Rae hunched her shoulders, trying to make herself seem smaller. She was wedged in between Caden and Vivienne in the back seat of Ava’s car, Priceless Art crammed in the back behind them, her head pressed up right behind Rae’s. Nate had called shotgun, and the rest of them were too scared of Ava’s furious glare to want to sit that close to her. Even dealing with goat breath was better than being up front.
“I just can’t believe you,” Ava said again. “We had a deal, Rae.”
Rae had promised Ava she would keep her in the loop when she was investigating anything dangerous, and in exchange, Ava had promised to share her own research with her. “I did call you,” Rae mumbled.
“Yeah, you did. After you spent all afternoon tromping around some random tunnel!”
“Cell phones don’t work in the Watchful Woods, so I couldn’t call you sooner.” Rae glanced around, but none of the others backed her up. Nate looked like he’d gone to sleep, his head against the window. Caden was staring off into space, and Vivienne was purposefully not looking at her, as if afraid that any accidental eye contact would drag her into this fight.
“Yes, well, you could have called me before you went into the woods.” Ava smacked the steering wheel with one hand. Never a good sign. She only did that when she was really trying to make a point. “Why did you need to go into that tunnel again?”
Rae swallowed. She hadn’t told Ava the whole truth. Or even most of it. Her sister was mad enough without knowing about giant alien bugs and mysterious spaceships. Once she calmed down, Rae promised herself, she would tell her. For now, she decided to keep it simple. “Um, a goat had gotten lost down there.”
“So you put your life and the lives of your friends in danger for a goat?”
Priceless Art bleated pitifully.
Ava sighed. “Yes, yes, I’m glad they saved you. Still.”
“It wasn’t all my idea, you know.” Rae elbowed Vivienne in the side. “Right, Vivi?”
“Hmm, well, look at that,” Vivienne said. “We’re at the lab.”
Just ahead loomed the chain-link fence that surrounded the perimeter of Green On!’s lab. Ava slowed as she approached the gate. A guard glanced at her from the small guardhouse next to it.
“Here to see Patrick Smith,” Ava said. “He’s expecting us.” Vivienne had texted Patrick as soon as they got in the car, and he promised to have the lab open and waiting for them.
The guard nodded and pressed a button, and the gate swung open for them to drive in.
“We’ll talk more about this later,” Ava said.
“I can’t wait,” Rae muttered. She glanced at Caden. He’d been super quiet this whole drive. Not that he was ever that loud, but he seemed even more drawn inward than usual. “You okay?” she asked him.
Caden blinked as if he’d been staring at something invisible and was just now noticing the world around him. She remembered the way he had looked when he’d opened the rift between their world and the Other Place that night the Unseeing had almost killed her. Maybe he really was watching something she couldn’t see. It was a little freaky.
“Sorry,” Caden said. “Just tired.”
“Tired?” Vivienne asked. “Or sulking?”
Caden scowled. “I don’t sulk.”
“Oh yeah?” Vivienne said. “We all know how you feel about Green On!. But we need to talk to Patrick ASAP.”
“I know, okay? I didn’t argue with that, did I?”
“Why do you need to talk to Patrick so badly anyhow?” Ava pulled into the closest available parking spot. “Shouldn’t we be going to, I don’t know, a vet?”
Her sister had a point. A vet made more sense for a potentially injured goat. Unless that goat had been attacked by giant alien bugs. In that case, a science lab was probably the best place to be. “Patrick needs to examine Priceless Art first,” Rae said.
“Why?”
Rae could feel Ava’s gaze lasering on her through the rearview mirror, and she squirmed. Rae had never been good at lying. Especially to her sister. “The goat is, um, part of our internship.”
“Really.” Ava drew the word out, making it as skeptical as possible.
“Oh yes,” Rae said, and it wasn’t technically a lie. “We’d better hurry. Don’t want to keep him waiting.” She nudged Vivienne, who opened her door and got out. Rae scrambled out after. She closed the door, then noticed that Ava had gotten out too.
“I’m coming with you,” Ava said.
Rae and Vivienne exchanged glances. “You’ll probably be bored.”
Ava shrugged. “I can survive boredom.” She bared her teeth in a smile that had as much warmth as the deepest tunnels below.
Rae’s shoulders slumped. Her sister was one of the most stubborn people she knew. There would be no talking her out of this.
“Mind carrying my bag?” Vivienne held out her humongous backpack. “I’m going to carry Priceless Art.”
“Um, sure.” Rae reluctantly took it and slung it onto h
er back. There was something about Vivienne’s bag that made Rae very uncomfortable.
When Rae was little and didn’t want to go to bed, she used to throw herself on the floor so her dad would have to scoop her up and carry her to her room. She’d learned that if she went completely limp, her dad would really struggle to lift her, so sometimes instead of going through all that, he’d give her five more minutes of playtime as long as she promised to go to her room on her own afterward.
Vivienne’s backpack felt like that. Like it was purposefully making itself heavier because it didn’t want Rae carrying it anywhere.
Rae shivered. She was being silly. A backpack couldn’t have intent. She tried to ignore its presence—not that a backpack could have a presence, either—as she walked slowly up to the front doors of Green On!
Vivienne paused. “Do you hear something?”
“What?” Caden looked sharply at her.
“Someone yelling?”
And now Rae heard it too. She turned.
Nate was sprinting after them, his face red. “You jerks!” he yelled. “You didn’t wake me up!”
“Oh, sorry,” Rae said.
“Sorry? Sorry? As I keep reminding you, we’re supposed to be a team!”
“Really sorry,” Rae said.
“Really, really sorry,” Vivienne added.
“We didn’t realize you were still asleep,” Rae said.
“Honestly, we kind of forgot you were even in the car.”
“Vivi,” Rae hissed.
“What?” Vivienne said. “It’s the truth. No malice, just oversight.”
Nate glared at both of them. “I see how it is.” He marched past them and into the lobby, letting the door swing shut in Rae’s face.
“I’m guessing he’s still a little mad,” Vivienne said.
Rae rubbed her nose. “You think?”
“Baa,” said Priceless Art.
“I agree.” Vivienne ran a hand down the goat’s nose. “I never really saw the appeal of goats before this, but I’m kind of getting attached to this one.”
