The Lost Rainforest #2

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Ta-da!” Rumi says.

  Gogi swivels. They’re in the middle of a swampy patch of mud, a few pathetic-looking ferns sticking up out of frothy black muck. “This is the ‘cozy little home’?” Gogi says, keeping his tone as even as he can manage.

  “Yes, isn’t it wonderful? There’s mud to keep cool in, lots of bugs to eat, some slime to run your fingers through whenever you feel the urge.”

  “Wow, thanks, Rumi,” Gogi manages to say. “This all looks, um, super.”

  “So, what do you know about ellipses?” Rumi asks, plopping his little yellow body down into the mud and peering up at Gogi with his wide, inky eyes.

  “Don’t you mean eclipses?”

  “No. I definitely mean ellipses.”

  Gogi scratches his butt. “Oh, in that case, I have to tell you, my knowledge of . . . what did you call them? Ellipses. It’s, um, I guess you could call it basic?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll explain it all to you in detail, starting from the very foundations of mathematics!”

  “Oh great! That’s just wonderful,” Gogi says, suddenly feeling frantic. He climbs onto a narrow log so his feet don’t get dirtied by the gray swamp water. He looks around, whistling tunelessly, trying to keep an impressed expression on his face. A movement startles him, and he sees the red tail feathers of a bird as it flees from a ficus tree overhanging the clearing.

  “Do you want a snack or anything?” Rumi prattles on. “I’m being so rude, launching right into my discoveries when you must want something to eat first. I think I hid some fish eggs around here somewhere. The good kind, too, not the inferior eggs I serve to other guests.”

  “Other guests? You have friends around here?”

  Rumi doesn’t respond, instead whistling away as he rummages under a banana leaf. Gogi wonders if a frog would find something rude about his question. He always tries to be hyperaware of the differences among his friends. “Anyway,” Gogi continues, “fish eggs. Wow. That would be awesome. But I brought some dried fruit, and I think I’m in the mood to eat some of that.” Gogi pulls a wrinkled guava from his woven satchel and chews it showily, as if to explain how very much capuchin monkeys enjoy wrinkled guava, and that’s the only reason he’s not eating Rumi’s fish eggs.

  “I’ll explain as we go, come on,” Rumi says, bounding out of the “cozy little home,” chattering all the way. “A circle is the set of all points a fixed distance to a given point, but an ellipse is the set of all points the sum of whose distances to two given points is constant.”

  “Hmm?” Gogi says, scratching his navel.

  “I know what you’re thinking: Doesn’t that just make an ellipse basically an eccentric circle?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An oval, Gogi. An ellipse is an oval.”

  “So, Rumi, as I was saying, explaining all this to me might not be the best use of your time,” Gogi says, his head already spinning.

  “No, no, it doesn’t get too much more complicated than this.”

  “Goody.”

  “So anyway, the eclipse that made us all shadowwalkers was formed by the moon passing in front of the sun, combining the magic of night and the magic of day. Everyone knows that. But because the moon is in an elliptical orbit, I was able to use the two-legs’ charts to locate where we are in their calendar.”

  “Wait. It was an ellipse eclipse?” Gogi asks, chewing on a bit of lichen he found in his belly button.

  “Yes! That’s it! And their approximation function is carved into one of the stones, so I’m able to use it—after teaching myself analytical geometry, of course—to predict the next lunar eclipse. That’s when the Earth passes between the sun and moon.”

  Gogi’s ears perk. “That sounds useful. When is that?”

  “You won’t have to ask me,” Rumi says proudly. “Just look. You can do the calculations yourself!”

  There in front of them is a broad block of stone, etched throughout in carvings that are themselves covered in moss and muck. There are still symbols on it to be made out, though: little handprints are visible in the moss where Rumi has painstakingly removed sections of the debris. It must have taken the frog days and days to clear it all.

  Gogi can’t make any sense of what he’s seeing. There are arrows circling spheres and ovals, crosses and dashes.

  Rumi follows Gogi’s focus and points to the symbols. “Numbers—those are called ‘numbers,’” he says gently.

  “I suppose this isn’t just a guide to when each fruit nearby is in season?” Gogi asks.

  “Nope,” Rumi says, shaking his head. “It’s a calculation of when the next eclipse will happen, provided that the trajectory of the celestial bodies is precise and predictable. Of course, we have no reason to believe otherwise.”

  “So—when will it happen again?” Gogi asks, tilting his head and smacking one ear, as if to pour out the nonsense clogging his brain.

  “Eight-hundred-eleven-point-seven days after the first time.”

  Gogi stares at him blankly.

  “In other words, when the Veil drops twenty-three nights from now,” Rumi says proudly.

  “Oh! That’s not very far away,” Gogi says.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “And it will come with another burst of magical energy?”

  “That’s right, potentially just as strong as the one that gave us our magical powers,” Rumi replies.

  “So . . . what does that all mean?”

  Before Rumi can answer, there’s a screech from the surrounding trees, and a burst of motion. At the sight of shaking branches, Gogi ducks for cover, monkey reflexes ready to dodge an ocelot or an eagle or a python. When he peers out from the security of a stand of ferns, though, he sees that Rumi didn’t scatter. He’s looking into the treetops, where Gogi glimpsed the red bird flying away.

  “What was that noise?” Gogi asks.

  Rumi, a faraway look on his face, snaps his attention back to Gogi. “Nothing.”

  “Riiiiight,” Gogi says.

  A calculation passes behind Rumi’s eyes. “It was a parrot, I think. Parrots aren’t generally risks to tree frogs. That’s why I didn’t run for cover like you did.”

  Gogi nods, eyes not leaving Rumi. “Sure. Makes sense.”

  An awkward silence falls. Awkward silences aren’t all that uncommon around Rumi, but this one is especially dense. Gogi knows his friend is hiding something from him, but he figures Rumi will fill him in once he’s ready.

  “So!” Gogi finally says, poking his way out of the fern and looking around, running his hands up and down his arms, even though there’s no chill in the air. He steps back to take in the pile of rubble that is all that remains of the Ziggurat of the Sun and Moon. At their highest, the ruins crest the tops of the surrounding trees. Monkey wisdom would say to move as high as possible, to get a good vantage point. Gogi climbs up the stones, looking back toward Rumi. “Come on! Let’s see if we can spot Mez and Lima!”

  Rumi leaps, but even with his powerful back legs, he’s too tiny to clear the first stone, and he tumbles back to the ground. “Excuse me, do you mind giving me a hand?” he calls up to Gogi.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Gogi says, making his way back down and holding out an open palm. “I’ve been around nothing but other monkeys for too long.”

  Rumi hops onto Gogi’s hand and then makes his way to his preferred position on top of Gogi’s head, holding on to his eyebrows, one tuft in each hand. “Okay, ready!”

  Gogi starts clambering up, enjoying the feel of moving upward to where things are safer, using all five limbs (capuchins call their grippy tail a limb, causing a bit of controversy in the monkey world, since it makes the howlers feel insecure about their limp tails). He’s up to the top of the ruins in no time.

  It’s only been a year, but the rainforest has been merciless in taking back the land. Where once was the stone-gray ziggurat, an otherworldly reminder of the bizarre two-leg civilization that used to inhabit Caldera, now are mostly shades of green a
nd brown. Vines are swarming the surfaces, already working their way into cracks in the stone so that water can get in, and fungus and roots. In another year’s time, there might be no more sign of the ziggurat at all.

  By then, the lunar eclipse—and whatever changes it will bring—will be long past.

  Twenty-Three Nights Until the Eclipse

  THE SUN DESCENDS and rain begins to fall while Gogi and Rumi hunker down on top of the rubble. It’s a misty, light rain, not enough to penetrate Gogi’s thick fur and soak his skin—but still, no monkey likes getting wet. He brushes water from his eyebrows whenever the droplets of rain get dense enough to drip in front of his eyes.

  Rumi, on the other hand, is in amphibian bliss. He lies out in a puddle that’s formed in the depression of one of the carvings, arms thrust over the side, eyes closed as he smiles up at the rain clouds. “They’ll be here soon, I’m sure,” he says. “It’s hard to coordinate a journey from far off in the rainforest. I’ve waited a whole year for this day; we can give them some extra time.”

  Gogi lets himself gingerly sit on the edge of a rock. His butt is instantly wet. He sighs as he swings his legs over the edge, giving in to the fact that he’s going to wind up soaked. He kicks his heels at the stones. “Sure, of course we’ll wait, but I really miss them, I don’t know how much—oh wait, oh no, oh no!”

  The vine bridge, just barely in view, has started shaking. If it weren’t a full moon, he wouldn’t have been able to make out any movement at all. “Is that the Ant Queen, coming to hunt us down?” Gogi cries, leaping to all fours.

  “Of course it’s not,” Rumi says. “Unless she’s figured out how to morph into two cats and a bat.”

  “Oh,” Gogi says, sitting back down. “I guess I’m a little jumpy these days.”

  There, just in view, cautiously picking their way off the vine bridge, are Mez and Chumba, with Lima swooping over them, back and forth, making a torrent of conversation that Gogi can’t hear from his distance. “They’re here!” the capuchin says, bounding to his feet and waving his hands to draw their attention. “Rumi, you’re right, they’re really here!”

  As Gogi yells, the panthers pause, then look up to the top of the ruins. While the panthers leap about gleefully, Lima leaves them, zooming through the air toward Gogi and Rumi, gesticulating wildly with her wings once she gets within shouting distance. She needs those wings for flying, of course, so waving them around makes her bob every which way in the air. “Gogi, Rumi, oh holy bat fingernails, you’re okay!”

  Lima soars right into Gogi, her wings wrapping around his rib cage. She’s so light that the impact barely budges him, but for her sake he pretends to fall backward, splashing into a puddle on the stone. “Lima, hey there! You’ve gotten so fierce!”

  Rumi bounces all over them, here, there, and everywhere. Frog kisses. Not the worst.

  By the time the three have finished greeting one another, the two panthers have arrived. Mez and Chumba scramble up the stone, claws digging into rock, until they’re beside the others. Chumba’s missing one of her front paws, but you’d never know it—she easily keeps pace with her sister. They nuzzle in close as greeting. Never have cold, wet panther noses felt so good.

  “So, how are you guys?” Gogi asks.

  Mez and Chumba look at each other and then press in close. “We’re okay,” Mez answers. “The panthers are okay. Aunt Usha is home with the triplets, training them to hunt. They’re nearly as big as we were last year—”

  “—until we got bigger,” Chumba adds proudly.

  Gogi cocks his head. Maybe the sisters have put a little weight on, but they’ll always be small for panthers. They look practically like ocelots, to tell the truth, but Gogi would never say that out loud—cats are ridiculously competitive. “You two have gotten so impressive!” he says.

  “Aunt Usha almost didn’t let us go,” Chumba says. “She wanted us to stay near to give the cubs extra protection. Very unlike Usha to ask for help.”

  “Well, she wanted you to stay around,” Mez says. “You’re second-in-command now, with Mist missing. She was perfectly willing to let me go.”

  “In any case,” Chumba says shyly, “the rainforest around the den is tense. We haven’t seen the ant armies in our territory, but we have seen the refugees—capybaras passing through where there never were capybaras, even an arrau turtle. All with stories of devastation.”

  “I saw the queen’s ants on the attack, not far from my home,” Gogi says. “They’ve uprooted all the vegetation, cleared out the animals. The marmosets that used to live there are just . . . gone. It’s only ants.”

  “Yuck,” Lima says.

  “My homeland is next,” Gogi says. “I tried my best to get the capuchins mobilized, but they’re not very willing to hear much of anything from a number twelve.”

  “I’m sorry, Gogi,” Mez says. “We’ll try to stop the Ant Queen before the ants overrun your home.”

  “Wait, twelve?” Lima asks, holding out a wing for a high five. Or a high wing. “Gogi, that’s five ranks better than last year!”

  Gogi gives her wing a light tap, so he doesn’t bowl her over. “I know! Thanks!”

  “How about you, Lima?” Rumi asks as he rubs rainwater into his arms. It reminds Gogi of a capuchin saying: Happy as a tree frog in a rainstorm. “How are the bats in the colony doing?”

  Lima looks to Mez and Chumba and then back at Rumi. “I didn’t actually go back. I stayed with the panthers.”

  Mez smiles. “It was great having her with us.”

  “I guess I’m sort of a panther now!” Lima says, baring her slender teeth. “Bat colonies are different from the families you monkeys and panthers have. We don’t get all snuggy and cozy. If I’d gone back to the bat cave, I’d have been waiting by myself all day for night to fall so we could go feed. Spending the year as an honorary panther was much more fun.”

  “Usha agreed to that?” Gogi asks. It’s hard to picture Mez’s severe aunt letting a chatty bat come live with her family of sleek hunters.

  “We had the whole journey home to warm her up to the idea,” Chumba says. “She seemed a little shell-shocked by the disappearance of Mist, truth be told. We probably could have gotten her to say yes to just about anything.”

  “I was very useful,” Lima sniffs. “Every panther family should have a resident bat. Like, tell these guys how many mosquito bites you got all year.”

  “Only one, and that was while Lima was asleep,” Mez says.

  “See? Call me Lima, Slayer of Mosquitoes!”

  “Careful,” Rumi says. “My last name is Mosquitoswallow, after all. People might think we’re from the same family.”

  “No, they won’t. Because you’re a frog,” Lima says.

  Rumi sighs. “That was me joking. I’ll study up on how senses of humor work one of these days.”

  “I thought it was a very funny joke,” Gogi says, patting Rumi on the head. Then he yanks his hand back. “Oh wait—were you upset enough to . . . ?”

  Rumi smiles. “No, no poison came out. You can tell by the sheen. I’ll warn you guys if that ever happens.”

  Mez blinks up toward the sky. “So, have you two been hanging out in the rain this whole time? Boo. Let’s go get somewhere cozy. That makeshift den Usha put us and the triplets in is still around here someplace. Chumba’s got the better nose—she can pick up the scent, even a year later.”

  Chumba nods and starts slinking down the ruin stones.

  “Wait, stop,” Rumi calls after her. “I already made us a camp!”

  “You know how panthers are about getting their way,” Gogi whispers diplomatically to Rumi. “Let them bring us to the old den for now, and you can show them the camp you chose later.”

  Rumi sighs as he leaps up onto Gogi’s forehead. “Yes, I suppose that will be fine.”

  Gogi falls in beside Mez and they pick their way down the slick stones of the ruin. “So, really no sign of Mist?”

  Mez shakes her head, her eyes on the s
urrounding trees. “Not all year. Right around here is the last place we saw him.”

  “So strange,” Gogi says, his own eyes scanning the forest line for any hint of Mist’s white fur, “for your cousin to leave his whole family. I mean, we capuchins will get in a big fight and not groom for days, poop in one another’s nests, that sort of thing—but leaving the only family you’ve ever known forever? It’s surprising.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been thinking about that all year,” Mez says. “But Mist was so proud of his favored position as Usha’s son, and his famous white fur, and then when Chumba and I took the lead in stopping Auriel, and he was accidentally attacked—”

  “—I saw the damage,” Gogi says, shuddering, remembering the young panther’s face, half intact and half full of scars and twisted sinew.

  “He fell hard on his pride,” Mez says, shrugging, “and I guess it was too much to recover from.” They’ve reached the bottom of the ruins. Mez looks out at the greenery as she elegantly picks her way over a thicket of vines, a wistful expression on her face. “I hope he’s okay, wherever he is.”

  “Panthers are meant to be solitary hunters after a certain age, right?” Gogi says. “I guess you could say he sort of jumped right into adulthood.”

  Relief softens Mez’s face. “That’s a nice way to think about it. Maybe he’s fine.”

  “Just telling it like I see it,” Gogi adds.

  “We’re here!” Chumba says as she parts a patch of reddish fronds and heads in. It looks like any other stand of ferns to Gogi, but he knows he should leave the den-finding to the panthers. If he had his way, they’d all be nesting up in the trees.

  The nondescript patch of ferns hides a passageway, and at the end of the passageway is a den, tight and cozy, a little stuffy for Gogi’s tastes but completely dry. “Thanks, Chumba,” Gogi says as he clambers in. Since he’s the last to enter, he draws the fronds closed over the entrance so they’re hidden from view, then draws his knees to his chest and settles in.

  “. . . feeling we’re overly day-biased last time we were together,” Rumi is saying. “I mean, look at us, we are all eclipse-born, so obviously we can be awake day and night if we want to, but we keep doing stuff during the day! And if we do the numbers, we have Mez and Chumba, nightwalkers. Lima, nightwalker.”