The Lost Rainforest by Eliot Schrefer

Author:Eliot Schrefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

“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.

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