“Shit!” Anne flinched away from the corkscrew proboscis of an enormous coatl. It was probably only about her mass, but with its fronds flared out, it looked the size of a polar bear. She hadn’t heard its threat call over all the other noise.
Daisuke pulled her back from its zipper-teeth. “This isn’t safe!” he shouted. “We have to go to the caravan!”
“Never.” Anne threw all the doubloons she was carrying at the coatl, which dove like a porpoise after them. “No. We stay. We fix this.”
There had to be a way. Pay the coatls to stand still and do nothing? Pay them to flee? Pay them to rebuild? But if you pay a coatl to build a tree, you lose doubloons both as currency and as building material. If you pay a coatl to destroy a tree, you free up cash to pay more coatls to destroy more trees.
Anne was fighting a runaway feedback loop. The disaster catalyzed further disaster, like a forest fire. So then what was the Dorado biome equivalent of dropping water from helicopters? A gas that knocked out coatls? Some sort of glue that stopped them from popping doubloons off of trees? You’d think the trees themselves would evolve a response like that.
Daisuke grabbed her arm.
“Stop fucking pulling on me,” Anne said, twisting free again. She almost had it. Something to do with the trees. Like eucalyptus exfoliating their bark, filling their leaves with volatile oils, building up a layer of tinder for the fire that would open their seeds and fertilize the new shoots.
Spreading seeds. Shuffling doubloons. And from the ashes would sprout the new, red flowers.
Except here, in the Dorado biome, red wasn’t an attention-getting color. Here, the trees used blue.
Anne darted forward.
“Anne!” called Daisuke.
“A stump!” she called. “I need to find a stump!”
There. Behind the caravan. The remains of a mature Dorado tree as wide around as Anne. It did almost look burned. As with charcoal, the disassembled stump had separated into chunks. In this case, it was a sheaf of closely packed hexagons, crumbling around the edges. Below the soil, the doubloon elements had fused together, and the coatls hadn’t been able to pull them apart.
A coatl the size of a German shepherd bounded out of the forest and past Anne, almost knocking her over. Daisuke was still calling after her. He’d run to the caravan and opened its rear door. Now he slammed it closed and rushed toward her, eyes aflame with the mad need to rescue.
There was no time. Anne turned away from him and bent to inspect the stump.
“Yes!” she hissed through gritted teeth. There. Exactly what she expected to see.
The top of the stump was turning blue.
What were doubloons, after all, but the promise of nectar? That’s how this whole crazy eco-economy had evolved in the first place. A doubloon, when plugged into the proper part of a growing tree, would produce nectar for the enjoyment of the animal that had put it there. ‘Proper’ in this case meaning ‘blue’. By changing color, a tree could control where doubloons were placed.
All Anne needed to do was speed the process.
She turned and straightened just as Daisuke dashed up to her. “Daisuke!”
He grabbed her arm. “Miro!” he said. Look! Anne looked.
The coatl was the size of a rhinoceros. Its lower fronds were twisted together into temporary limbs that formed, stepped, and dissolved in waves down its body. It shook with each step, quivering with the weight, Anne realized, of what must be thousands of stored doubloons. It was a walking bank. A living moneybag. A forest kingpin.
The kingpin lashed a tail of braided tentacles and reared. Zipper-teeth strained to hold in the weight of cash inside its body as it stretched its twisted snout toward Anne and Daisuke. A spiral of eyes unwound, and orange fronds spread like a mane, antlers, grasping hands. Its church-organ call shook the diaphragm in Anne’s chest.
“I can fix this,” Anne promised, either to Daisuke or to the animal.
Daisuke only held on tighter, breathing hard. His face was like nothing Anne had seen on him. Not since the last time a Junction animal had threatened her life.
The forest kingpin understood her better. The giant coatl convulsed and vomited a stream of doubloons onto Anne’s feet.
It was a big enough pile to tempt a crowd, even in the midst of a market crash. Little coatls flocked to the kingpin, flashing blue mouths as the animal, now as sleek as an elephant seal, twisted around and started plugging doubloons into the blue-blushing stump.
Anne felt like crying with relief. There was a way to rebuild.
Daisuke nearly pulled her off her feet. Anne shouted at him, but he kept pulling toward the caravan. The caravan?
“Oh! Yes!” Anne turned and ran with him. “Daisuke,” she panted. “We need paint. Blue paint. Draw in more kingpins.”
“What?” screamed Daisuke over the roar of the crashing forest.
“Kingpins! Investors! Bosses! Blue paint in the caravan. We need blue paint!”
Daisuke hit the caravan with his open palms, stopped himself, pushed, and spun around. His face communicated no understanding at all. “Go inside!”
“Come help me find that paint,” Anne said.
He looked at her, face blank again. He took a deep breath. Smoothed his hair. “Yes. Yes, Anne. I will help you find blue paint.”
He picked her up and threw her through the door and flung himself in after. He shut the door soon enough to stop all but a few of the kingpin’s little helpers, which he stomped on.
Unnecessary. And watching the frustrated giant prowl back and forth on the other side of the door was also pointless. Anne could reverse the damage! She could save the forest!
It took her about fifteen minutes to figure out that Daisuke had tricked her. By then it was too late.
***
Animals swarmed across the devastation, flying, climbing, burrowing, side-winding across the rutted ground cover. Some fled, some struck out at each other or ripped new holes in the weakened landscape. Others simply lay where they had dragged themselves and wailed. Begging calls ululated like air-raid sirens.
Moon plugged his ears and slitted his eyes against the distractions. Relying on Turtle and Aimi to protect him, he looked up at the growth that Anne called ‘the wormhole grove’.
A glance confirmed his expectations. There was the portal, a blue-and-orange sphere hovering over the nexus of five horizontal branches. Branch might not be the right word. They looked more like bridges, complete with support columns growing down into the ground under them. And traffic. Animals dashed back and forth through the portal, commuting between Junction and their home world like cars on the Zakim Bridge.
Interesting. What was important, however, was that like the Boston landmark, this bridge was multilevel. There were more branches under the portal. Between the portal and the ground, another five limbs came together. Nothing rested on top of them, but Moon bet there was something inside. His first task would be to get it out.
“Come on!” he shouted, and ran toward the grove.
Moon had to hand it to Farhad. His way was much easier than Moon’s plan. Bringing down the forest had saved an entire day, and the wave of destruction neatly cleared the area of Anne’s followers.
Now, though, the destruction was spreading to the grove itself. The five limbs slewed to the side, all set to drop Moon’s prize into his waiting hands.
“Ready the net!” Moon kept his eyes on that nexus under the portal. The animals were disassembling those branches where they joined the main trunk, which should allow the whole thing to just fall into his net. Perfect.
A portal in a tree. Moon still couldn’t believe his luck. A portal sitting normally atop a pedestal or at the bottom of a pit would have been no disaster, of course, but this way he could complete his next experiment in a moment. Which was good, because moments were all they had.
&nb
sp; Turtle and Aimi kicked aside some tentacular bushes and spread a tarp to catch falling branches. Above, feathered serpents gnawed at modular wood. The portal was still in position overhead.
Moon watched it. He still had no grasp on the physics of the portals, but he had come to understand something of what might be called their ‘design philosophy’. Whoever had made them – and he was sure it was a who – played things safe. Portals didn’t explode, cut through things, or even allow bad air to pass through them. Moon was willing to bet that they didn’t allow dangerous microorganisms, either, which bespoke a level of intelligence that was more frightening than any alien plague.
And when something unusual happened to a portal, it simply vanished.
He almost missed it. Blink and the portal was gone. Animals hooted in a chaotic ball, piling up on the suddenly empty branch nexus. Moon didn’t care. A chunk of hollow branch hit the tarp, bounced.
“Close the net!” he screamed.
More animals bounded out of the way as Moon helped Turtle and Aimi close the net and tie it off. They had a bag now, weighing maybe eighty kilograms.
Turtle turned to him, “Do we—”
“Shh!” hissed Moon, watching the air above the bag. Waiting.
Pop. Like a bubble in reverse. The portal reappeared.
A giggle escaped Moon’s mouth before he slapped his hand over his face. No time to celebrate. No time. The whole forest was coming down, and one of Anne’s cronies might see that Moon knew how to do more than destroy a portal.
He knew how to move them.
“Take it back to the caravan,” he ordered. “My laboratory. Now.”
* * *
“Let me through, Daisuke.” Even as she said the words, Anne realized they were pointless.
Daisuke had no interest in finding blue paint onboard the caravan, or letting Anne go back outside.
He shook his head, his face a pale mask. They were in the breakfast nook, standing before the door. Outside, the stumps slid past as the caravan picked up speed.
Anne should have predicted this. She would never have let herself be fooled, but she’d been in a panic. She’d grasped at anything that might save the Dorado biome, including the belief that Daisuke would help her.
Oh, he had pretended dutifully enough. Daisuke had followed her through the storeroom, her lab, the kitchen. It was just that he had no expectation of saving the biome. All he cared about was keeping Anne safe in the caravan.
“I said let me the fuck through!” A crumbling concussion shook the walls and floor. “They’re dying out there!”
“You’ll die,” said Daisuke.
“I don’t care!”
“I care!”
Talking was a waste of time. Anne took in his stance, arms and legs spread across the door. He had ushered her through this same door on their disastrous attempt at a date on the glasslands. Now she considered kicking him in the nuts. That would get her past him.
Moon elbowed her in the back.
Anne’s foot kicked out, carrying her brain’s last instruction, hitting empty air. She must have looked like a cancan dancer. Idiot!
“Watch it!” she shouted, as her brain caught up with her adrenaline-drunk body. “Where the hell did you come from?”
Moon didn’t bother to answer, or even glance back at her. He was halfway to the bridge by now, but it was obvious where he’d come from. The rear of the caravan, with its door.
That door was blocked too. Turtle and Aimi were discussing something, casting glances toward the closed door to Moon’s laboratory. They looked guiltily at Anne as she stormed toward them.
She hadn’t heard the three come in, she’d been so focused on Daisuke. Stupid! She should have just dodged sideways and left the caravan through the rear door.
“Out of my way,” she ordered Farhad’s flunkies.
“Don’t let her go!” shouted Daisuke. “It isn’t safe.”
Turtle opened his mouth, saw Anne’s expression, closed it, and stepped aside.
“Please don’t, Anne,” Daisuke begged as Anne put her hand on the door handle. She gritted her teeth, kept her eyes forward.
She looked through the window set into the door.
The caravan had been moving all this time, heading west. Anne noticed the ugly ruts that the weight of the vehicle had smashed in the sierpinski. Then she raised her eyes and saw the wormhole grove. What had been the wormhole grove.
The trees had been reduced to blue-tipped stumps in a heaving sea of coatls. Doubloons lay in drifts ten centimeters deep on the ground, but frenzied animals tore each other apart for yet more. The scene was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, but that wasn’t what stopped Anne from opening the door.
The wormhole was gone. The stumps of the trees might grow again, but now the air between them was empty. Moon had destroyed this one too. The heart had been stolen from the Dorado biome.
The floor swayed under Anne. Her stomach heaved and the edges of her vision darkened. She clamped down on herself. She would not faint. She would not vomit. She would stand there, hand uselessly on the door handle, forehead pressed to the glass. She would watch.
She did watch, ignoring Turtle and Aimi, ignoring Daisuke. Later, she would have to talk to him. She would have to lie to him, manipulate him, to get the help she needed. She had been about to risk her life to save this part of Junction, why not risk Daisuke’s as well?
But not now. For now, Anne would stand here by the door, and look out the window at the horror of her failure.
Chapter Sixteen
Join the Feast
The ruined wall ran across the northern border of the Dorado biome. The week before, it had probably been splendid: a row of inward-leaning Dorado trees. These had been braced by flying buttresses, supporting a sheet of interwoven strands of doubloons. Perhaps the wall had once been intended to grow into a dome, if one could think of an ecosystem as possessing intention.
Not that it mattered now. Panicking forest life had torn the walls down, removed the buttresses, let the trees topple. In the piles of now-worthless doubloons, little half-dome huts had sprung up in the shadows of the blue-crowned stumps. Coatls huddled in the shadows, noses quivering as if they couldn’t understand why all the smells had changed.
Anne squinted against the diamond-sharp light and pulled up the collar of her jacket. Without the Dorado trees, this place was a tundra. A snowy graveyard.
“Well, I guess this is it,” she said wretchedly. “We give up. We go back to civilization.” She felt like she’d swallowed a quart of wet wool. “Remove ourselves from the equation and I guess starve to death on the way back, but I just can’t do this anymore.”
Daisuke rubbed his hand over her back. “All right,” he said. “It’s all right. I think we won’t starve.”
He looked so certain, but how could Anne trust him? Daisuke the actor, the liar, the manipulator. Tell people whatever they want to hear, pour oil over those troubled waters until we’re all coated with black sludge, dying on the beach. Anne shuddered.
Daisuke said, “Look.”
She braced herself for the follow-up. Look, Anne, you know you’re being a bitch, right? Look, this relationship isn’t working. Look.
Anne coughed. “Look what?”
Daisuke turned. “Look. It’s the mountain.”
He was right. High feathery clouds frosted the lilac sky, matching the color of the snow on the boulders at the foot of the Howling Mountain.
It was maybe an hour’s walk away, a blobby, rounded cone capped in mist. Its lower skirts, tiger-striped with different colors of vegetation, rose and fell like a quilt, folded into deep horizontal and vertical crevasses. From this close up, the landform looked like no act of geology that Anne had seen before. Not architecture either. The mountain was alive, and horribly vulnerable.
If she left
, Farhad would devour it. If she stayed, it would make no difference.
“No, we can’t protect it,” she said. “I can’t, Daisuke.”
He nodded sadly.
What? Wasn’t he supposed to tell her it would be all right? But what good would that do? If he told her that, he’d be lying. If Anne said she believed him, she’d be lying too.
She pulled Daisuke’s arm off her and turned away from the mountain.
The Nun squatted around a cluster of kerosene stoves, on which steamed pots. Other men were cleaning empty toymaker shells. Others were stacking them like hollow logs, well out of sight of the living toymakers.
“Good morning!” Daisuke called out. The Nun mostly ignored him, but one parkaed figure raised a hand and growled back.
“Daisuke! Anne!” called Misha. “Come to join the journey? Heh. Or just join the feast?”
Anne didn’t answer. She was looking at the activities going on in the Nun camp. Yes, it did seem the Nun were preparing to go home. But what was with all the toymaker shells?
At first, Anne thought the Nun were honoring the creatures that had been killed fleeing the forest. But there were far too many empty shells. None seemed to be damaged. In fact, each shell was handled very carefully, with reverence and sorrow.
Anne shrugged off Daisuke’s arms and kicked across the snow toward Misha. “What the hell is going on?”
Misha looked up sulkily from his stove. “Don’t freak out now. I’ve had a hard week.”
“You’ve had a hard week? What are you doing to the toymakers?”
But Anne could see what the Nun were doing, couldn’t she? They were popping open the toymakers and decanting their innards like chunks of salmon from a tin.
The Nun had a whole assembly line going. One man tended a small clutch of land-galleys, to which he murmured and clicked like they were nervous hens. Another would pick up a toymaker in wood-and-plastic gauntlets and pry off its forward window. A third reached into the shell with a scoop and – schlup!
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