“No . . .” Mez says. Her voice trails off. It’s true: she doesn’t think any of them would. But all the same, it doesn’t feel that way.
“For what it’s worth, I’d like to share something I’ve learned talking to the other eclipse-born,” Sky says. Despite herself, Mez can’t help but open her eyes and perk her ears. “Each of you has come to me hoping to become powerful despite your weaknesses. But the very place I find the root of power, each and every time, is at the very source of that weakness.”
Mez shakes her head in confusion. What does that even mean? Maybe macaws are smarter than panthers.
Sky opens his mouth wide and cocks his head, as if Mez’s words were a food to devour. “You know, Sky,” Mez says. “That look in your eyes? It doesn’t really make me want to get all vulnerable with you.”
Sky snaps his beak shut. Then he tries again. “So we could say that the same thing that gave you your magic also led to your mother’s death, and your sister’s missing paw.”
“Oh, come on, Sky.”
“It just seems to me that you felt outside of your ‘family’ from the start,” Sky continues. “I could see why you wouldn’t want to make it any worse by uncovering something different about yourself.”
“That’s not true! I had Chumba,” Mez says.
“She’s still back home at your den?” Sky asks.
Keeping her eyes scrunched shut, Mez nods, only one thought in her mind: I left her behind. “Did you leave someone back home, too?” she asks Sky.
“This isn’t about me.”
“Why isn’t it?”
Mez’s questions seem to surprise Sky. He seizes up, then shifts from one foot to another. “Fine. As you may have noticed, macaws are very . . . noisy. All of us try to talk over everyone else, and as a result the loudest macaws are the most powerful. For a long time I tried to keep up with the rest of my flock, but I couldn’t. I shrank farther and farther away, and was always at the back, last to get to the fruit tree or the clay lick. I stopped trying to fight the way I was, and instead started to do what comes most naturally to me: I watched. I listened.”
“And now your power is to see,” Mez says.
Sky’s feathers ruffle. “I am a seer, yes, but maybe I will be able to do more than that. Already I suspect my visions might someday work in both directions, that I will be able to send them as well as receive them. My power is in its infancy, too.” Sky shifts from claw to claw.
Then Mez understands it: Sky sounds self-assured, but he’s a young animal taken from his home, like the rest of them. His seeming confidence has been put on deliberately, like any other armor. “You were ready for Auriel when he came. You couldn’t wait to leave your family.”
Sky startles, his neck feathers ruffling so they stick straight out. He preens them back down. “It’s different. My family was worth leaving.”
“What does that mean?” Mez asks, bloodlust rising when she sees the cocky macaw on the defensive.
Sky stands his ground, looking at Mez shrewdly. “Fine. Let the truth set me free. Macaws lay up to four eggs. Only the first two are fed, and the rest are left to die. I was the third to hatch. It’s simple math, and I was on the wrong side of it. My parents didn’t feed me once, not once. I watched my siblings grow stronger, while I was left with scraps. If Auriel hadn’t heard about my nightflying from the ants, if he hadn’t come to take me away, I would be dead right now. So don’t look at me like I’m Auriel’s toady. I owe him everything.”
“I’m sorry, Sky,” Mez says. “I had no idea.”
“I was the one of my brood who happened to be born at the moment of the eclipse. So my powers have saved me,” Sky continues.
“Do you ever think about—”
“We won’t talk about this anymore.”
Sky nods, again shifting from claw to claw. His eyes are wet. Mez wishes she could ease the pain she sees in him, but she also understands why he doesn’t want to talk about it. “I get it,” Mez says softly. “Maybe later. Whenever you want to talk. Do you think you’d be willing to keep helping me for now?”
Sky sniffs, clacks his beak shut, then turns so that one of his eyes is directly in front of Mez’s face. “Let us begin.”
“What do I do?” Mez asks, eyes darting around.
“Nothing. You’ve already started,” Sky says, edging ever closer, the hint of a smile back into his voice.
Mez is about to answer, but the words die in her throat. Sky’s eye has begun to swirl with black and gray, the grays twisting in and the blacks twisting out, fast enough that it’s impossible to follow any one of the currents. The eye expands until it fills Mez’s vision, becomes the only thing she can see.
In the center of his pupil the black and gray open up into stars, then the stars become glowworms. She’s back in the cavern below the ziggurat, where she’d been alone and no one had been able to see her. The glowworms pulse at her, as if trying to communicate something in their glowwormy language, then Mez is soaring toward them, as if she’s a bat like Lima, then she’s through and out the other side, where the points of light become the spaces between leaves in her den, where she once stared out at the beautiful blue sky and wondered about the daywalker world, where she snuggled next to Chumba while Usha’s newest litter frolicked together.
I’ve made a huge mistake. I should have insisted on staying, whatever the risk. I should be with my sister.
Mez is on the hunt now, a tiny cub among muscular cats, a ghost that can thread through vines that never move at her touch, scamper over nests of branches that never creak. She quickly dispatches the eagle that had taken Chumba, the eagle that didn’t even seem to know where to find her while she was attacking. Then the ground squirms with delicious animals, each one the size of a bite, each one furry and each one plump. They scatter on the approach of the other panthers, but they don’t even sense Mez near them, and she can hunt freely, eating until her belly is full. Mez simply can’t be seen, and on this hunt she’s able to catch more animals than all the rest of the panthers combined.
There’s a scream, a horrible, rending scream, loud enough to split the bones of the creature that makes it, and Mez whirls to see Chumba flailing on the ground, calico limbs uncoordinated as she struggles against her attacker, and the eagle is already dead so it’s Mist that’s attacking her, Mist with his jaws locked around Chumba’s neck and pressing her against the ground, Mist crushing Chumba until she’s still, Mez paralyzed and unable to help, no sound coming out of her open mouth, as much as she tries to scream. What good is being tiny and weightless now, when it means she’s powerless to help her sister?
Then the squirming prey are gone, Chumba and Mist are gone, the den with its points of light is gone, the glowworms are gone, the stars are gone, and the macaw pupil is back, the whole eye is back, the red feathers are back, Sky’s head is back, Sky’s wide-open beak is back. He’s yelling at her. “Wake up, Mez, wake up!”
Mez startles and leaps in the air, whirling, looking for enemies. But she’s still on the shadowed step of the ziggurat, still alone with Sky, only he’s looking at her like she’s the monster from below. “What? What is it?” Mez manages to sputter.
Sky cocks his head. Like that, the distress melts from him, and he’s back in full control of himself. “You. You were yelling a name.”
Mez looks away from him, eyes downcast.
“It was ‘Chumba,’” he says.
Mez stares at him, chest heaving. Do not dare say my sister’s name.
“Do you have any better sense of what your power is now?” Sky asks.
Mez looks at him, feelings at war within her: relief that the terrible vision is over, embarrassment at what she might have said aloud during it.
Her mind races over what she’s seen: feeling invisible in the den; the eagle, unable to see or find her; Auriel, startled by her sudden appearance, even though Mez had been there the whole time; the Ant Queen’s strange words: Mez, you finally appear.
“I think I know w
hat my power is,” Mez says softly.
Sky nods. “I just saw it happen. Mez, while you were in your trance—”
The macaw is interrupted by a clamor coming from the top of the ziggurat, animals yelling and screeching. Mez can hear Lima’s high-pitched voice above it all, yelling, “And Mez, where’s Mez?”
She leaps into action, bounding up the steps of the ziggurat, pace unfaltering until she’s reached the top. Mez hears buffeting wings as Sky flies over. “Invisible, Sky,” she cries up to him. “I can turn invisible!”
And then Mez is up on the moonlit roof of the ziggurat. Into chaos.
SORELLA’S VOICE IS the loudest. The uakari shrieks and jumps, ripping up moss and hurling it directionlessly, deafening sounds coming from her bright red mouth. The sloth makes gasping, squeaky grunts, his broad nostrils wide with fear. The rest of the animals are in the center of the ziggurat’s top level, clustering around something Mez cannot yet see.
From high up in the sky, Lima calls out, “She’s here, Mez is okay!” and then she’s arrowing through the night, landing gracefully on the nape of Mez’s neck and wrapping wings around her even as the panther bounds forward. “Thank goodness,” Lima says, her voice barely audible, muffled by fur and wind as Mez presses forward. “We thought that we lost you, too.”
“Too?” Mez asks, dread slowing her as she approaches the group.
Gogi must have heard Lima. He bounds to Mez as she nears, hugging her tightly. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Mez is close enough now to see what’s in the center of the circle. There’s a body there—no, two bodies. The caiman and the kinkajou. The corpses are emptied out. Husks, like a cicada’s molt casing. Only these are animals that do not molt. Their withered flesh dimples over crushed bones.
“What happened to them?” Mez breathes.
“No one knows,” Rumi says. He’s at the far side of the group, next to the trogon and sloth. The small animals are sticking together, away from the larger eclipse-born.
The sloth cocks his head. “Uh, it was me who found them. I was off foraging leaves in the swamplands down below. There was this, uh, this large frond in the way, so I pushed it to one side, and there down below I saw, like—these! All hidden away, sorta.”
“You don’t know the bodies were intentionally hidden away,” Sky says.
“You’re trying to claim these two animals happened to die in the same place?” Rumi asks. “And in this same weird way?”
“The truth is clear! We’re being hunted! Caow!” says the trogon, his voice sharpening into a tinny squeak at the end.
“The evidence would point to that,” Rumi says. “We allowed these two to go off on their own, and now they’re dead.”
“What we all should do is leave,” Sorella says. “Auriel didn’t say anything this bad might happen when he took us from everything we knew to bring us here. We should all go home and pretend none of this ever happened.”
Chumba, Mez thinks. Maybe then I could be with Chumba again.
“Auriel never promised we would be safe,” Sky protests.
“Just because you’re so deep under his spell doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be,” Sorella says. “We don’t owe him anything.”
“You’re suggesting we fight through the owls and howler monkeys patrolling the forest around here?” Gogi asks, shuddering. “Maybe you haven’t met them yet.”
“Where is Auriel?” Mez asks.
“He wouldn’t be away this long without good reason,” Sky says. “I know that.”
“Do you guys think he’ll be back before dawn?” Lima asks, head tilted up. “I mean, we won’t have to do the ceremony without him, right?”
“If he’s not back in time we’ll do the ceremony ourselves, don’t worry,” Mez says softly, giving the bat a reassuring lick.
“It’s the Ant Queen who killed these two,” Sorella spits. She considers her own words for a moment, nudging the kinkajou’s body with a toe. “At least I think so.”
“The Ant Queen was sealed in by the rockfall,” Mez says, “and though she’s certainly powerful enough to kill any one of us, it’s hard to believe something as big as she is could escape without any of us noticing. And the last sigils are still lit on the ziggurat.”
Sorella bares her teeth. “You have a better theory, panther?”
“Maybe the Ant Queen found some other, quieter way out,” Rumi proposes.
“She could be watching us right now,” snuffles the sloth.
They all go still, looking worriedly at the treetops sighing in the jungle breezes, branches waving at them in the deep night.
“We’ve been brought here and then ignored,” Sorella says, her voice rising. “Doesn’t that seem odd to any of the rest of you? Even before two of us were found dead?”
The chill inside Mez deepens. The answer to all this is in front of her. She needs quiet time to put all the threads together.
The trogon gives a tittering cry. “It’s like we’ve been herded up here, caow! And now we’re being picked off one by one, caow! Like we’re being, like we’re being . . .”
“. . . penned up and then slaughtered?” Gogi supplies helpfully.
They all fall quiet again. Though the stones beneath them are still warm, as the night progresses the heat of the day seeps away, and their moonlit silhouettes are lengthening over the ziggurat’s mossy surface. The dread of something great and terrible and unnameable comes over Mez, the feeling that she is at the summit of an immense wrongness that she does not yet understand. That she’s here because she’s been so dutiful, and that maybe dutiful has not been the right way to be.
She needs space to think! But the night is winding down, and with the lifting of the Veil will come the imprisoning ceremony—if the Ant Queen hasn’t already escaped by then. Mez can’t get her thoughts to settle under the pressure of it all.
“We need Auriel to return. He’ll know what to do,” Lima says, hopping into the air and coming back down, opening and closing her leathery wings as she presses tight to Mez’s fur for comfort.
“What we need to do is leave. Right now,” comes a purring voice. It’s the ocelot. Mez has been avoiding him, but sees that he’s looking directly at her for the first time. As if he’s appealing to her because she’s a panther, that being a cat should automatically make Mez the best option to listen to reason. Not that he’s paid her any attention before.
“We’re hemmed in by the enemy. Or haven’t you noticed?” Mez says. It makes her hackles raise, that the ocelot always acts so superior because he’s a feline. It’s the thing she’s come to like least about her own kind.
“We’ve all been obeying orders, trusting to how things should be, and now look what’s happening!” Sorella says. “Two of us are dead!”
“Three of us, caow,” the trogon chirps.
“Three?” Mez asks.
In response, the ocelot noses the body of the dwarf caiman onto its side. Underneath is the husk of a fish.
It’s Niko.
“Now how did he get up here?” Rumi asks, surprised.
“I don’t understand,” Mez says, shaking her head. “Niko was eaten by the Ant Queen. And even if his body still existed, it should be sealed under the earth. Not hidden away in the swamp.”
“Are you sure?” Rumi asks. “Did you witness the Ant Queen eat him?”
Niko’s last words come back to her. Is it possible that it wasn’t the Ant Queen but someone else who produced that horrible sound of his crunching bones?
“The simplest explanation,” Sorella says sourly, “is that the Ant Queen has gotten free. That she killed Niko down below, then picked off these other two once they were separated from the group and vulnerable.”
“Two sigils are still lit,” Rumi offers. “So it seems like the Ant Queen’s imprisonment still holds. That’s a hole in your argument, if I may say so.”
“We know too little to assume we know anything for certain,” Mez says. “Since leaving isn’t an option,
we’ll set watches and stay close together. No one leaves sight of the rest of the group until Auriel returns or morning comes, and we can figure out our next steps.”
“We won’t have to wait long,” Sky says. “I’m sure Auriel will be back before we know it.” He doesn’t sound too convinced by his own words. From the weary looks of the group, no one else is, either. Everyone slinks back to their favored positions on the ziggurat, casting wary eyes on the outside world—and one another.
I figured out my power. I can turn invisible, Mez reminds herself. But that news has been so quickly overshadowed. She turns a slow circle, looking for someone to tell, but all the animals look shell-shocked by the deaths of the kinkajou and caiman. Mez hangs her head. Being invisible seems all too appropriate at the moment.
Then there’s a flutter of wings, and a bat lands in front of her. “Mez, I forgot in all this—how did your time with Sky go?” Lima asks.
A patter on the stone as a tree frog hops over. “Yes, I’m very curious!” Rumi says.
The creak of a branch as Gogi drops to the stone from an overhanging tree. “Let’s see it!”
Gratitude flattens Mez’s whiskers. “Here it is: I can turn invisible.”
“Wow!” Lima says.
“That’s a great one,” Gogi says.
“Can you show us now?” Rumi says.
“I don’t know how,” Mez says. “I guess I’ve been doing it for a while! But I’m not sure how to turn it on.”
“Don’t worry. A smart panther like you? You’ll figure it out,” Gogi says, stroking her between the ears. There was a time Mez would never have allowed a monkey near her, much less to pet her, but tonight it feels nice.
“Yeah, you’ll have the hang of it soon,” Lima says.
“In the meantime,” Gogi says, “take a look at these!” Hand still on Mez’s head, he leads her to a corner of the ziggurat, where there are two stone discs. One is decorated with a crescent moon, the other with a blazing sun. Each has a pinprick hole in the center.
“We tried to hold them up already, but nothing doing,” Rumi says. “The moon one hums a bit, but not the sun one. My working theory is that beams of moonlight and sunlight will have to mingle at dawn to renew the eclipse magic.”
The Lost Rainforest Page 15
