The Lost Rainforest

by Eliot Schrefer

  “I think we should keep looking,” Gogi says, worrying his hands. “No way am I going down there.”

  “Yes, maybe that’s wise,” Mez says, eyeing the dark and narrow passage.

  “I’ll investigate. I’m sure I’ll be fine!” Lima chirps. Before they can stop her, she’s flown into the narrow pitch-black passage and disappeared.

  “It’s lovely in here!” she calls. “As long as you don’t mind the constant ants. Plenty of room. Well, plenty of room for a bat. I think you guys will be okay, though. Probably.”

  “What a rousing endorsement,” Mez says dryly.

  “I’ll go next,” Gogi says. “If one of us gets eaten right away, better a seventeen like me than someone important.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mez says. “Stop talking like that.”

  “Look at it this way, then: I’m slightly smaller, Mez. I can test it out—if it’s tight for me, then it’ll be too tight for you.”

  Mez starts to realize that Gogi’s apparent insecurity might be more of a way to put everyone else at ease. “That, I can go along with. Thanks, Gogi. Be careful,” she says.

  Gogi steps up onto his two legs, arms high in the air, and wades into the stream, making nervous little grunts as he goes, his tan face scrunched up. He switches to all fours as the passage pitches down, and soon he’s stepped into the underground stream and disappeared from view. Mez hears traces of words. “Whoa, it’s dark in here. . . . Lima, help a monkey out. . . . I’m just a daywalker, please help! . . . Okay, up and then over? . . . Yes, I’m sure it’s very beautiful, if you can see in the dark, I’m sure you’re loving it, and I’m happy for you, don’t get me wrong. . . . Mez, can you hear me back there? I think you’re good to go!”

  “Coming!” Mez calls as she slinks into the water and heads through the opening. Soon she’s craning her neck upward to keep her nose above the surface, and then she’s swimming.

  The gourd floats beside her. “We’re doing fine in here,” Rumi reports.

  Mez’s eyes take some time to adjust to the darkness, and for a while she’s swimming blind. Drowning ants pepper the water. Strange, unknowable things slip past her paws.

  Then her eyes pull in more scraps of light, and she snorts in astonishment.

  The ceiling is glowing like the night sky. Swirls of stars and constellations—only these are underground, and right above her head! If Mez didn’t have to swim, she’d be able to reach up and stroke the nearest ones with her paw. As it is, she sees Lima’s black form cutting out bat-shaped swathes of the cavern’s stars as she flits among them, making admiring sounds.

  Then Mez hears scrambling up ahead, and a monkey grunt. “The ground rises up here, Mez!” Gogi calls. “We can climb out. Sheesh. And none too soon!”

  “These are glowworms,” Rumi says from Mez’s side. She hears a suckering sound as Rumi’s tongue lashes out, and one of the stars disappears. “Ugh,” Rumi reports. “They look better than they taste!”

  “You ate one of those?” Lima asks from above. “I wasn’t going to, but then I figured it would make my belly glow. Actually, I wonder how they look when they come out the other—”

  “Okay, let’s keep moving,” Mez says. “Remember—we’re looking for the carvings, and then we’re getting out of here. Keep alert.” She swims toward where she last heard Gogi, and sure enough, she feels the ground rise beneath her so she can stand. The cavern floor goes up at a steep pitch, so she has to scramble, digging her claws deep in, scraping painfully against shards of stone within the mud.

  Once she’s fully out of the water, Mez shakes off her fur. She forgot about Niko at her side, and hears a splash and the fish’s voice clear out of the water before he splooshes back in: “Hey, careful with the waves!”

  “Sorry! Tell him I didn’t mean to scare him!” Mez says to Rumi.

  The tree frog splashes into the gourd and then returns. “Niko has decided that he will accept your apology.”

  “Some catfish are way too sensitive,” Mez grumbles as she edges forward. She calls out to Lima. “Do you want to take lead? Your echolocation works better than my darkvision.”

  “And definitely better than my dayvision,” Gogi adds. “It’s feeling pretty useless to even have eyes at this point.”

  “All right, guys,” Lima says, flitting ahead. “The passageway continues until . . .” She pauses. “Until . . . well, darn.”

  “What is it?” Mez calls.

  “We’re going to need Niko’s help. It’s a wall of hardened mud up here. I was hoping it was a ziggurat stone, but it’s not.”

  “Rumi, you hear that?” Mez asks. Suddenly she’s deeply aware of the tons of earth around her, above her, earth that in any moment could fall and entomb them. “Make sure Niko thinks it’s safe before he goes using his power, though.”

  “And that there is no Ant Queen nearby!” Gogi adds.

  “On it,” Rumi says, making only the hint of a splash as he disappears into the gourd’s water.

  With a great rumbling sound, the hardened mud ahead shifts and falls. Gogi yelps in surprise, and Mez feels loosened mud swirl around her paws, panic filling her as the cold slurry rises up to her belly. Then the sound stops, and the mud stills.

  For a while she and Gogi and Rumi hold motionless, waiting for the worst, the only sound their own breathing and the dripping of cave water. Gogi shivers. “I wish Auriel were here with us.”

  “Way’s clear up here!” Lima finally calls.

  “Remind me why we agreed to this mission again?” Gogi grumbles as he creeps forward, a hand on Mez’s head so she can help the nightblind monkey find his way.

  “You’re the one who said ‘me, me, me,’ the moment Rumi and I asked,” Mez reminds him.

  “Yes, but when you asked me to come along we were out in the open air, sunbathing on a tree branch. It was easy to be brave up there.”

  Niko might have opened a passage, but it’s a narrow one, dripping cold globs of mud along its length. Mez squishes her way forward with her friends, the walls narrowing so that one shoulder or the other is always grazing stone. Once she nearly wedges fast, and her breathing goes rapid, fear making her head light. But then the passage widens again, finally opening out into a cavern. Mez’s darkvision only goes so far, and she can’t see the roof, or the far edge. But she can hear the ants teeming along.

  The Ant Queen is somewhere down here. Sealed away, of course, but not for long. Mez can’t get out of these caverns soon enough. “Any sign of carvings?”

  “It’s big,” Lima reports, her voice sounding far away indeed. “The echoes I’m getting from above are dulled by something very dense. I think we must be underneath the ziggurat now. It’s hard to imagine all that stone is above us. Yikes.”

  “I’d rather not have that particular mental image in my mind, please!” Gogi says.

  “Okay, sorry,” Lima calls down. “Maybe you’d like to imagine a giant and all-powerful Ant Queen entombed somewhere nearby instead?”

  “Everyone’s a comedian,” Gogi grumbles.

  “Hold!” Rumi says, adding a few sharp croaks. “Everyone hold perfectly still.”

  Mez doesn’t dare even risk the noise of asking Rumi why. She goes as motionless as if she’s spied quarry while hunting. She thought Rumi was communicating with Niko, but realizes he must have left the gourd when his voice comes again, from a ways in front of her.

  “That voice . . .” he says. “So beautiful. I wish I could make the words out better.’”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Gogi says. “But maybe that’s because I don’t clean out my ears often enough.”

  “A singing ant?” Mez says. “Do you think it could be the queen?”

  “I don’t know,” Rumi says. “The sound is muffled and far away. But so beautiful.” He clears his throat. “Hello! Are there any singing ants down here?!” he croak-yells.

  “Rumi!” Mez says curtly. “Keep your voice down!”

  They all go silent again, the only sound th
e hushed lapping of water and the skittering of ant legs. Mez watches a nearby stretch of water, glimmering with the reflected light of the glowworms. The waves finally stop and it goes still.

  Then it vibrates.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” Lima cries.

  “What is it?” Mez calls.

  “I’m picking up tremors with my echolocation,” Lima says. “They’re getting stronger. Oh no. It’s here!”

  “WHAT’S HERE?” MEZ screeches. But it’s too late for discussion. She crouches as if to spring, eyes wide and staring. She curls her body around the gourd slung at her side, to prevent the water—and Niko—from sloshing out. With a splash, Rumi leaps back inside.

  The ground rumbles, great vibrations passing up from beneath their feet. As it does, Mez feels mud pressing against her mouth and nose, and she’s worried that a cave-in has started, that the end has come, but then the pressing mud cries out in fear, and she realizes it’s Gogi, plastered in mud, wrapping himself around her head.

  “Gogi,” Mez says as best she can around the quivering monkeyflesh covering her nose and mouth. “Get off me. . . . Can’t breathe . . .”

  Another tremor comes, making Gogi wrap himself even tighter. Mez’s got monkey hands in her ears, monkey feet pressing into her throat. Then the ground beneath her slides, and mud splatters her vision. She shuts her eyes as soon as she can, but even so bits of gravel press painfully into her eyelids. “Lima,” she calls. “I can’t see—which way can we go?”

  The bat chirps from ahead and to the right. “This way, this way, hurry!”

  Mez desperately slams her way through the shifting mud. There’s a thud in front of her, and before she can change direction she’s bashed into a falling rock, nearly rolling under it as it plummets. She staggers, the pain bringing stars to the insides of her eyelids. The gourd pitches in her struggle, and as Mez thrashes free she can feel the vines that bind it tearing and pulling.

  Is all this tumult caused by the Ant Queen? Four sigils on the ziggurat above are still lit—but have the eclipse-born been foolish to assume that meant Caldera’s ancient enemy couldn’t yet escape her bonds?

  Lima trills her voice constantly, and Mez uses the staccato chirps to guide herself. Gogi’s hand is no longer on her, and she can only hope that the nightblind monkey is also following the sound of the bat, that they’ll all find one another on the other side of the cave-in.

  Mez is beyond thought, has become a creature of only reflexes, slaloming down twisting dark canyons of shifting rock. She tumbles into a pit of swirling mud, and is dragged under. It closes over her head, sealing her in, and her world becomes even darker than before, impossibly dark, mud filling her nose, her mouth, her ears. In desperation, she leaps as hard as she can with her back legs, flailing through the thick muck until she strikes a surface solid enough for her to gain purchase and spring, up and out of the mire.

  As she scrambles onto a rocky ledge, Mez’s reflexes are about to bring her exhausted body leaping forward again when she realizes two things: the awful grinding sound of the cave-in has stopped, and she’s in another glowworm cavern, the bugs’ light too weak this time to give her more than the feeblest outline of her surroundings.

  There is no more danger, at least not for the moment. For a long while, Mez lies there panting, waiting for her breath to return to normal. Any time she breathes deeply, her body is consumed by racking coughs, the last one producing a large glob of mud. She instantly feels better, and breathes in deep, clean breaths. She’s filthy, and her instincts tell her to lick herself clean, but there’s too much muck. Mez shakes as much off as she can, then sits upright and listens.

  Nothing but drips and distant creaking. No sound of her companions.

  “Lima?” she calls. Of all of them, the bat has the best chance of having survived a mudfall in these dark caverns.

  No answer.

  “Rumi?

  “Gogi?”

  She checks the gourd at her side. But it hangs upside down, its contents long since turned out. “Niko?” she calls.

  Nothing.

  For the first time since she left her den, Mez is fully alone. There are fewer glowworms here than in the previous cavern, and their light is too scant to outline much more than the occasional mossy stone covered in ants, the flat surface of dank cave water. Mez has no idea where to go, and the wrong decision could mean the end of her. She shivers in the chill currents of air.

  One thought overrides all others: I want Chumba. She imagines her sister beside her, the warmth, the unending cheer. Maybe she wishes for Chumba for the same reason she called for Lima first when she was in trouble. Chumba or Lima wouldn’t know what to do any more than Mez, but they would do something to stop this despair that’s threatening to creep over her and make Mez do nothing in the face of her helplessness.

  So. What would Chumba do? Mez sits up as tall as possible, tenses her muscles, ready to act the moment opportunity arises. But there is only darkness, unwinking glowworms, lapping waves. She steps one way, nearly slips on a cold, slick surface, then steps in the opposite direction, stopping short with a gasp when her paw enters chill water strewn with drowned ants.

  This is hopeless. Mez’s future unspools in front of her: she’s completely blocked in, and she’ll wander farther and farther until she runs out of energy, curls up, and perishes.

  Mez lies down, places her head between her front paws, and closes her eyes. Why didn’t she stay near Chumba, even if it meant risking death by disobeying Usha? Why did she believe the word of a snake and leave her home to come to a strange ziggurat, then travel underground blindly, disregarding her own safety all the while? Maybe her instincts are duds. Maybe she is a faulty panther.

  She imagines Chumba roaming around this dark cavern, sniffing every corner. She’d be disappointed that her sister had given up.

  Of course. That’s what Chumba would do. She’d explore, in case there’s an exit that she’d overlooked.

  When Mez opens her eyes again, they’ve adjusted enough to the dim lighting that she can make out more of her surroundings. There’s a jagged wall of rock on three sides of her, and a smooth wall behind.

  Smooth.

  Mez backs toward it to investigate. The wall is perfectly flat, with shallow markings up and down it.

  Carvings.

  She runs her paws over them, but her rough pads aren’t as sensitive as monkey or frog fingers. Touch won’t be enough to figure out what the image is. She’ll need her vision, but the glowworm light in the cavern is too diffuse.

  Unless she brings a lot of them together. Mez bounds across to a rough wall and scoops up as much glowing silk as she can with her paw. Soon it’s covered with the gooey bright filaments, enough to light whatever’s directly in front of it in a chilly glow.

  When she returns to the flat rock, her breath catches in her throat.

  Six notches in the corner. It’s the next panel!

  Mez cranes her neck to study it. The ziggurat is front and center. The land around it, though, looks raw—all the nearby trees have been cut down to stumps. The two-legged animals are on top of the structure, only a handful of them left, the ants swarming up the sides. At the front of their teeming mass is one ant far larger than the others, larger even than the two-legged animals. The Ant Queen.

  Mez shudders. The Ant Queen has the head of one of the two-legs in her powerful mandibles. Its face is one of tortured agony as the queen’s sharp jaws dig in.

  That’s it. No real answers. She’ll need to find the next panel.

  Mez continues searching. She swims the length of the cavern, then back, replenishing the supply of glowworms on her paw when the first batch washes off. She gets more and more tired with each stroke, her muscles burning even in the chill water. At the far end of the cavern, she finds an outcropping. She plops onto it to rest, pressing her back against smooth stone. Smooth!

  It’s the panel with seven notches. Partially submerged, the image is hard to discern in the dim glow, but M
ez is just able to make it out. The two-legs are on top of the ziggurat, holding aloft two pieces of carved stone. One is an icon of the sun, stone tendrils of rays streaming from it, and the other is of a crescent moon. On the ziggurat below are two empty spaces, one of the sun and one of the moon.

  Two of the ziggurat’s carvings can be removed.

  The panel with eight notches is right nearby. It shows the two-legs raising the carvings high in the air, the real sun on one horizon and the moon on the other. Strange, curving magics have emanated from the carvings, surrounding the Ant Queen. The rest of the ants have begun to retreat.

  The carvings are the key. Raising them at the moment the Veil lifts or descends appears to activate the ziggurat’s magic.

  There’s hope! Hope that they can do the same thing and renew the Ant Queen’s bonds. Hope that they’ll be able to return home as heroes. Hope that Mez will be reunited with Chumba. It could all come together.

  If she ever makes it out of this cave alive.

  Splash.

  Mez pricks her ears, keeping the rest of her body still in case she’s in danger.

  Splash.

  Mez holds motionless. Could it be the Ant Queen?

  Splash. Then high-pitched croaking and a voice she recognizes: “Hello? Any of you guys there?”

  Rumi.

  “Yes!” Mez cries. “I’m over here! Come see!”

  “Where are you?” the frog says, his voice muffled. “Oh. Now I get it. We’re in separate caves.”

  “Oh,” Mez says, voice falling.

  “I’m in a tight space here, and the only passage goes in the other direction,” Rumi says.

  “The last panel is here, Rumi!” Mez says. “I think I know how we can renew the Ant Queen’s bonds. But not if we’re trapped down here.”

  “That’s great news, Mez,” Rumi says. “And terrible news, too, I guess.”

  Mez sits in the darkness, staring up at the glowworms while she shivers. The cave is still scary, but not nearly as terrifying as it once was, now that there’s Rumi to talk to. But the swimming has tired her out; her body can’t seem to get itself warm.