Rumi's Riddle by Eliot Schrefer

Author:Eliot Schrefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN RUMI LURCHES back into his own body, he sees that he’s still where he was when he opened the link to the panthers: nestled into the assortment of logs that the group has collected. Over the course of the day, the three muscular tapirs have hauled the lumber toward the beach, carrying Rumi right along with the mass. Right now, though, the tapirs are in nightcoma, the logs motionless until the Veil next lifts.

As Rumi removes his finger from Sky’s scarlet feather, he sees a lot more feathers. These aren’t directives, though—they’re still attached to the bird himself. Sky’s right beside Rumi, squawking at him.

There are words inside Sky’s squawks, but Rumi is too disoriented from his sudden reentry to his own body to understand them. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “Wait, what? Slow down.”

“The explosion!” Sky says. “We thought we had more time than this, but look!”

It’s still nighttime, but even so, dawn has somehow started to light up the horizon. It looks normal ahead, in the direction of the ocean, but as Rumi continues to pivot he sees . . . oh, that’s definitely not good. Where the volcano is, the black plumes have increased to cover a good third of the sky, the swirling smoke laced in ribbons of red that fade to grays as the airborne embers wink out. The “dawn” isn’t from the sun—it’s from the flames.

“You said that we’d have two more rises of the Veil before the volcano went out,” Sky says.

Rumi wrings his frog hands. “My calculations would indicate that, yes, based on the two-legs’ carvings. But I suppose . . . I suppose they weren’t predicting this exact scenario, with the ants speeding up the explosion. That’s a whole new variable thrown into the equations. I could try to extrapolate new predicted timings from my previous algorithms—”

“Your words get bigger the more nervous you get, have you ever noticed that?” Sky asks, the slightest wink of humor in his voice.

Rumi blinks. “No, I haven’t.”

Sky tilts his head. “I notice too much sometimes. It’s a bit of a curse. Anyway, you don’t need to bother recalculating, since it won’t change the reality. We have less time than we thought. I scouted the ocean not far from here—we’ll be at the beach soon after we get the tapirs up and moving, then we’ll need to get this ark together far sooner than we thought.”

“And we’ll need to gather as many animals as we can.”

“We’re already a big group. Given the volume of this wood, and the amount of water we must displace to give us enough buoyancy, we can take some more small animals, but I’m afraid that’s about it.”

“And Mez and Chumba and Lima, once they’re back,” Sky says.

“And Mez and Chumba and Lima, of course.” Suddenly what Rumi learned through the directive comes rushing back to him. “Mez, Chumba, and Lima! Sky, we have to save them! Mist has cultists, and he’s used the volcano rumblings to manipulate their fear and gain power, and he’s used it to capture the panther sisters.

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