The Lost Rainforest

by Eliot Schrefer

  What do you plan to do? Mez asks. Her mind is spinning. Does the Ant Queen consider her an ally?

  It is simple, the Ant Queen says. We ants have always surrounded you. But we have been living in separate colonies, fighting one another as often as we fight others. What the ants have needed is a strong leader, and now I am free. I herald the return of the era of ants. You cannot change that.

  We will stop you, Mez thinks.

  But why should you want to? the Ant Queen asks. If you help me extend the rule of the ants, you will have all their power at your back.

  Mez shakes her head. I saw the panels. The two-legs were in agony as the ant horde ripped them apart. I’m sure all of us would get the same fate, sooner or later.

  Ah, the two-legs, the Ant Queen says. If only I could have allowed them to live. Do you know what makes the ants and the two-legs similar? Communication. The ability to coordinate the movements of hundreds and thousands, for one individual to control a horde. As their world got less habitable, the two-legs would not cede it to its rightful inheritor: the ants. And so they had to perish.

  Auriel betrayed us, Mez thinks. There is no way we would work alongside him. She extends and retracts her claws as she takes in more of the Ant Queen’s fearsome body, suspended in space. The pulsing eggs in her abdomen, the claws along her legs, the efficient blades of her mouth.

  The emerald boa was useful to me. He diligently brought all of the eclipse-born here. But Mez—the same combination of night and day magic that made you all shadowwalkers is what animates the ants as well. It used to be all under the ants’ control, but when your generation of shadowwalkers was born, some of that magic came to reside in you. When you join me, the eclipse magic that dissipated will be brought back together. Auriel double-crossed me by taking your powers for himself. He will not be allowed to survive such insolence.

  He might already be dead. My aunt Usha has been fighting him on the surface. Instinctively, Mez looks up, but there is only this strange black void all around her.

  Then he will die one way or another, by your aunt’s doing or mine. Mez, we must act quickly. Your friends, those animals that Auriel trapped in the stone—convince them to join me. I will launch my army, and we will all rule Caldera together.

  If you free them, I can try. But how do I know we can trust you?

  You are not in a position to ask for trust, the Ant Queen says. But think of this: You are crawling in ants. I let them bite your sniveling white cousin, but I have kept you safe. If I wished to kill you, I would merely need to release the right pheromone and they would all have bitten you at once. You would be instantly paralyzed, and no fragile little mammal can live with a heart that has stopped.

  Mez looks down at her body floating in the open space, at the mess of calico patches and ribbons that is her mother’s legacy. I don’t have any ants on me.

  Yes, you do.

  The cavern swoops back in, the chamber swoops back in, the ziggurat stones above Mez’s head swoop back in.

  Chumba’s paws are batting her face. “Mez, Mez, Mez!”

  Mez’s sensitive whiskers set her snorting and sneezing, and she recovers to see Chumba’s wide, tearstruck eyes staring back at her. “Mez, I thought you were gone. I thought I was all alone down here.”

  “No,” the Ant Queen says coolly. “You both have me. And you have my army.”

  Chumba gasps.

  Mez looks down. She’s swarming in ants. Soldiers with fat heads and mandibles as long as her own claws. Workers streaming along, tapping their antennae against Mez’s fur and skin. They’re covering Chumba, too, on her whiskers and in her ears. Mez shivers in fear, and when she does, the ants on her stall, waving their forelegs in the air before continuing on their way.

  “Mez. The time has come for you to decide,” the Ant Queen says. “Will you serve? Or will you die?”

  “What’s she talking about?” Chumba asks.

  Mez’s mind races. If the Ant Queen can speak directly like this, why take her into that weird void? There’s only one answer: to isolate her. Just like Auriel kept her isolated from her family when he asked her to leave with him, all those nights ago.

  Mez takes a deep breath. “I’d rather be on the side that wins than the side that dies. I’ll convince my friends. Release them and I’ll speak to them. We will serve you and the ants.”

  “You’ve made the right choice,” the Ant Queen says.

  THE ANT HORDE drains off Chumba and Mez, flooding to the walls instead. The insects swarm up the ziggurat, covering the thin walls that imprison the surviving eclipse-born. The chamber fills with the crackling, tinkling sound of ant mandibles on stone. Most of their flailing efforts don’t find any purchase on the rock, but a few are able to work their jaws under outcroppings. Dust of pulverized stone fills the air.

  “Mez,” Chumba whispers, “what have you agreed to?”

  “It’s the only way to survive,” Mez yells. “The ants are the way of the future. They’ll keep us safe.”

  “But Mez—”

  Mez flicks her right ear, their secret sister sign, as she stares up at the progress of the ants. Chumba goes quiet.

  Openings are broadening in each of the stone prisons, more and more of the trapped eclipse-born coming into view. Lima is the first to emerge, flitting out into midair. When she sees Mez, she zooms over and lands on her head. “Oh Mez, hooray. It was terrible in there, my echoes just rebounded right back to me so I couldn’t even tell where I was but now we’re free so that’s good, let’s get out of here—oh, hi, panther, you must be Chumba, Mez has such nice things to say about you—there are so many ants here, GAH! WAIT, WHAT IS THAT?”

  Lima has seen the Ant Queen. She darts into the air. “Shoo, shoo, get away,” she says, waving her wings in the Ant Queen’s direction. Busy overseeing her minions’ work, the Ant Queen doesn’t notice the little bat.

  The small animals must be the easiest for the ants to free. Rumi is next to emerge, then the trogon, tumbling onto the ziggurat floor and looking around groggily. Mez points at the ground in front of her, and they come to join her, taking the long way to avoid going too near the Ant Queen. Rumi looks up at the opening, and the stars above. “How do we get out?” he whispers to Mez, before his eyes return to the giant ant.

  “Auriel and our aunt Usha were battling up there, but there’s no sound from them anymore,” Mez says softly, aware that anything she says can be overheard by the Ant Queen. She imagines Mist and Usha triumphant over the corpse of Auriel, or Auriel wrapping his coils around the lifeless bodies of her cousin and aunt.

  Finally Gogi and Sorella are out. Mez’s heart swells at the sight of them, but she forces her face to remain impassive. There’s too much to pull off here—she can’t go revealing herself early.

  The Ant Queen turns toward Mez. “Tell them what you have agreed to.”

  Terrified, the eclipse-born stare at Mez, waiting for her to reveal what’s going to happen next. They have so little fight in their eyes. The surprise attack by Auriel must have exhausted them. Even Sorella looks overwhelmed.

  The Ant Queen is watching. Calculating.

  Mez takes a deep breath.

  Then she begins to yell. “Rumi, make your wind. Gogi, add your fire!”

  The Ant Queen catches on to Mez’s betrayal before the eclipse-born do: Mez’s friends stare at her in confusion while the Ant Queen begins to hiss and whirl, the ant hordes descending the walls to come to her aid. Sorella is the first one to realize what Mez is proposing. “You heard her! Everyone next to the frog, unless you want to be crisped up.”

  The eclipse-born throng around Rumi, who groggily peers around, startled. Then the plan clicks. “Oh, Mez,” he says. “Finally having our powers combine. This is a most admirable strategy!”

  “Just start!” Mez says, watching as, like a flash tide, gnashing ants surge toward them.

  “Gogi, are you ready?” Rumi asks.

  “Am I?!”

  “Yes, are you?”

&
nbsp; “It’s a figure of speech! Rumi, you go first!”

  With a loud croak, Rumi emits a sudden wind. He’s got more control over it now than ever before, and is able to curl it into a column of air around the eclipse-born. Mez gasps in amazement, the sound soon lost in the rising roar. Ants are caught up in the wind currents, darkening the air. Some tumble through to the inside of the tornado, and the trogon goes about pecking at them, eating as many as he can. The rest of the eclipse-born crush themselves against one another, trying to smash the stinging insects between their bodies.

  Except Sorella. She’s grooming Gogi, shockingly enough, because Gogi has the more important work of making fire. He holds out both hands, palms open and wrists linked. A jet of fire starts in the center of each hand. The two streams join, forming a flame stronger than any Gogi has produced until now. It enters the cylinder of air and lights it up, fire dispersing up the tornado, suffusing it with a hot orange glow.

  It’s gorgeous—and deadly. There’s a sizzling and popping sound as the ants in the stream light and crisp, then the sound becomes a roar of steam as more and more of the insects incinerate.

  Mez can’t see the Ant Queen through the wall of fire, can only imagine the ancient monster’s fury as her minions go up in ash and smoke while Rumi expands the tornado farther and farther out. The little tree frog begins to lift off the ground with the effort, and Mez places a paw over him to keep him from flying away with the blast, hoping he hasn’t released his skin poison by accident.

  The tornado’s radius has extended enough now that it edges up against the stones of the ziggurat. “Oh no, oh no,” Chumba says, seeing what’s happening the same moment that Mez does.

  The ziggurat is coming apart.

  It’s lifting. The heavy stones that make up the structure are sighing into the air, the flaming ants are whirling up, the vines are loosening and whipping free into the night. It’s like gravity is reversing, like everything now wants to tumble up into the sky instead of away from it.

  But soon those giant stone blocks will start to fall.

  “Rumi, it’s too much, stop!” Mez cries, lifting up her paw and yelling in the frog’s ear. But the wind prevents him from hearing any of her voice. He seems lost in his power, unaware of what’s happening around him. Mez watches an extra sheen emerge on his skin. She removed her paw just in time to prevent getting poisoned.

  Gogi has seen what’s happening, and stops adding his streams of flame to the tornado. The red firelight of the chamber returns to the grays of moonlight. Until Mez’s eyes adjust, she’ll be nearly blind. A great stone beneath her—one of the stones that made up the floor of the ziggurat—soars upward in a blast of wind, sending out a spray of soil and mud and charred ant bits.

  Mez’s eyes are still dazzled when she spies a big shape plummeting toward her. She can’t get her body to move in time, but there’s a calico blur from the side and then Chumba has barreled into her, rolling with her to one side while the stone thuds into the ground. “See?!” Chumba says. “Sometimes you’re the one who needs rescu—”

  They’ve rolled just far enough to enter Rumi’s wind tunnel, and the panthers are whisked into the air, separated by the currents and hurled up into the dark.

  Mez can only hope Chumba and the other eclipse-born are safe as she swims through the air, barely clearing another giant flagstone hurtling toward her.

  Either Rumi has realized what he was doing, or he’s been crushed by flying stone. Either way, the wind calms. Now Mez is gently floating back toward the ziggurat floor, gaining speed until she lands on freshly upturned soil. She looks in time to see a sharp stone falling right toward her, and barrel rolls to the side, barely clearing the spot where the stone crashes in a spray of dirt and ants.

  More stones are plummeting all around, and for a few long moments Mez is pure instinct, leaping and dashing and leaping again. Light flashes in the corner of her eye, and she sees that Gogi is clinging to a flagstone a short ways to her side, nervous fire sparking from his palms as he peers into the chaos around him.

  “Gogi!” Mez cries. “I’m right here! Have you seen Chumba?”

  Gogi races toward her, his expression turning from fear to joy. “Mez!” He turns to one side. “Rumi, Rumi, Mez survived!”

  More rocks shatter and tumble, and Mez weaves to dodge them, shards of stone cutting her face and cheek. She leaps to avoid a dagger of rock, and falls into a hole, the soil churning beneath her. A black-and-red body appears on the edge of the widening pit, and she realizes it’s Sorella. The uakari monkey grips the stone with one hand and reaches toward Mez with the other. “Up we go, panther!” she cries.

  Then Mez’s paw is firmly in Sorella’s hand, and then she’s vaulting through the air.

  In that hurtling moment, Mez gets a better sense of her surroundings. The floor of the ziggurat is in chaos. The sloth lopes in front of Mez, searching for a way out, the nightblind animal miraculously avoiding piece after piece of falling shrapnel. Mez can still see the rectangle of starry sky above, but its edges have become ragged. The great doors have already tumbled down.

  “Holler if you see the Ant Queen anywhere with your darkvision,” Sorella says, then peels away, grunting in anger. “What I wouldn’t give to have those two brittle antennae under my hands right now.”

  But there is no sign of the Ant Queen. The floor warps under Mez’s paws, the stones raking and pointing upward like fins. The trogon flits up and away into the night sky, and Mez can only hope Lima has already escaped. The landbound animals are left cowering, scrambling about in fear as the ziggurat continues to crumble.

  As soon as she’s yanked Mez to safety, Sorella releases the panther and hops away, narrowly escaping a stabbing spike of stone. Mez staggers up to four paws and casts her eyes about, hoping to find Chumba. There’s no sign of her sister. What Mez does find is Rumi.

  The little yellow frog is trying to pick his way out of a pile of fang-sharp shards, shuddering in exhaustion as he falls back yet again. “Rumi!” Mez calls out.

  It takes him a few moments to realize he’s seeing Mez, then his mouth widens into a big grin. When he speaks, his voice is almost gone. “Mez!”

  Rumi’s expression changes when a giant rumble comes from the shifting stone around them. It’s in all directions this time, like all its stones are about to fall at once. “Don’t touch me!” he warns. “I accidentally envenomated while I was using my power. By the way, this whole place is going to implode, have you noticed?”

  “Yes, I definitely have noticed,” Mez says. She gently grips a flat piece of stone between her teeth and uses it to spade Rumi out of the pile of shards.

  “Perhaps we should escape now,” Rumi says, hopping away.

  “Very good idea. If you have any thoughts on how we can do that, let me know!” Mez shouts.

  Rumi starts to rise into the air, wind gusting out of his mouth. He immediately goes off at a tilt, careening into a wall. “Okay, okay,” he mumbles as he gets back to his feet, “I think I’m too tired to try that trick again.”

  Even though Rumi’s powers might have been what got them into this situation, they won’t be much help getting them out of it. Invisibility won’t do much good, either.

  Mez’s eyes go up to the world outside the ziggurat, where Mist, Usha, and Auriel still are, if they’re alive. Usha, help me and Chumba and my friends out of this. But Aunt Usha isn’t here. It’s up to Mez.

  The roof stones have tumbled together, forming a rough arch. They quiver, and any moment the formation could fall, but for now the roar of falling rock has quieted.

  Mez can now hear the panicked calls of the trogon, the grunts of Sorella . . . and a skittering sound. She trains her ears, trying to figure out where it is that she’s hearing giant ant legs tapping against rock.

  Lima’s voice comes through the dark, right nearby. “Mez. The Ant Queen—she’s straight ahead!”

  “Lima, you should have flown to safety by now!” Mez says.

  “No
t without you guys,” Lima says. “Who would have just echolocated the Ant Queen if you didn’t have me around, huh?”

  “Have you seen Chumba?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Lima says. “This way to the Ant Queen.”

  Mez pads in the direction Lima indicated, tail straight and ears perked. The ceiling above starts to grind again, and Mez knows they’ll soon be buried. But in front of her she sees the pulsing, throbbing abdomen of the Ant Queen, she and her thousands of eggs disappearing from view as she forces two stones aside and slips through the space between.

  Through that space is starry sky—not above, but straight ahead. Of course; as the ultimate underground creature, an ant would be the one to find a way out.

  “This way, everyone!” Mez cries before taking off at a sprint, her claws skittering against the shifting stones. “Chumba, if you can hear me, come!”

  As she dashes, there are more grinding sounds from all around, almost like a giant animal’s roar, then the stones above give way. Mez hears moans and shrieks following each crash, but tries to keep her focus on the shifting passageway before her.

  “Right behind you!” Rumi calls, and though Mez can hear movements of other animals following, she has no idea which ones.

  Debris rains from the sky, clods of dirt and twisting bodies of ants filling the air. Even with her darkvision, Mez stumbles as she goes, and can only imagine how the daywalkers are doing—assuming any of them have survived this far.

  Chumba, please tell me you’ve already found a way out.

  Mez’s sensitive nose detects sweeter air, not clogged with dust and ants, and her heart lifts. “Rumi, are you still back there?” she calls as she races.