Chapter 4
FOUR
We raced back to the ladder and scampered down. The moment our feet hit the ground, my father and uncle darted for the nearest shelter. We crept under the branches of a cluster of small trees, keeping as low to the ground as we dared, given the venomous ants that swarmed beneath the brush.
Suddenly my father stopped and held out a hand. The rest of us stilled too, holding our breath and listening for the telltale humming of the drone.
All I could make out were the sounds of the jungle—bees buzzing, birds chirping, monkeys squabbling. An inconvenient cacophony of noise. The sound of the drone had been soft even up above the treetops. It felt like we had no chance of detecting it down here.
“Stay there,” my father whispered, then crept away from the copse of trees until he reached an opening. He carefully peered upward toward the high jungle ceiling. His eyes darted around, squinting, for what felt like an eternity, before he crept back to us.
“I can’t see it. I don’t think it’s followed us down here,” he whispered.
“Why would it follow us down here?!” Jessie asked, alarmed.
My father shrugged, running his tongue over his lower lip.
But I understood. I might not know anything about drones, but I had gotten the distinct impression that the thing had sensed us.
After all, it had flown in our direction and then stopped right in front of us.
When we ran, I had just assumed that it would follow.
“Let’s get out of here,” my uncle said, loosening his collar and taking a deep breath.
We crept back out into the open, where my eyes immediately shot upward, scanning the canopy and confirming the absence of the drone. Perhaps it had no interest in us after all, and we had fallen prey to paranoia again, in assuming it might—
“Wait,” Robert whispered suddenly.
We all whirled to look at him. My eyes followed his gaze to a tree about twenty feet away, and I gasped.
Sitting atop one of the branches was the dark, cylindrical object.
I quickly realized how my father had missed it.
The drone was perfectly still, perched like a sitting bird.
Strange metallic feet had sprouted beneath it and curled around the branch, keeping it in place.
Its lights were no longer glowing, and if it weren’t for the subtle trickle of sunlight glancing off its sleek surface, I was pretty sure nobody would have spotted it.
“What is it doing?” my aunt whispered.
“I don’t know, but I’m taking that bastard out!” my uncle hissed, his eyes filled with a sudden anger.
Before any of us could even consider whether that was a good idea, he dipped down for a heavy stone, whipped out his slingshot, and fired.
His aim was true. The projectile hit the drone square in the face, and to my surprise the machine swayed instantly, its clawed metal feet losing hold as it toppled backward, then plummeted to the ground.
A loud splash followed a split second later, and we rushed toward the sound to find that it had landed in a deep pond.
We leaned over the edge, peering into the murky depths. Two blue lights blinked slowly at the bottom, casting an eerie glow up through the waters—once, twice, thrice—and then disappeared.
Broken, I assumed.
I took a step forward and crouched down, wanting to get a better look, but my father held me back. “Don’t touch the water,” he said. “The electricity might give you a shock.”
I actually hadn’t been intending to touch the pond—for fear of predatory turtles—but this sounded like a much stronger reason to avoid it.
“Thanks for the warning,” I murmured.
“Come on,” my uncle said gruffly. “Let’s go now.”
He turned and led us back toward the river. We traveled as quickly as we could manage, given the obstacles, while my mind raced over the implications of what had just happened.
Drones were man-made. Which meant that humans, from the outside, had sent the drone here. For what? It seemed only logical to conclude that it had something to do with the green fog—but in what way?
And why, exactly, had it seemed interested in following us?
I shook my head, realizing I was doing what I had told myself not to do right now: speculate. We were still in the middle of the jungle, and I needed my wits about me. I couldn’t afford to get distracted.
The one mercy was that journeys back usually went faster than journeys out, and that held true in this case. I’d lost track of the time, but the river came into view as a pleasant surprise, sooner than I’d expected.
When we passed through the last of the trees and walked out into the open, my head automatically turned upward, along with the rest of the group.
I guessed we were all still feeling jittery and wanted to be sure no more drones followed us.
Thankfully, none were. Except for the birds, the sky was clear.
We boarded the boat again, and I found myself much less nervous as we set out, having just endured two far more nerve-racking experiences.
When we reached the other side, we quickly tied up the boat and then trudged through the remaining distance by foot, until we reached the ladder leading back up to the zip lines.
I sighed when we arrived at the top, leaning against a wooden post as I clutched my side—I had developed a painful stitch from the pace.
After we’d taken a brief rest, we attached ourselves to the zip lines one last time and zoomed off.
The closer we got to home, the better I felt, and though I was wrought with tension as to what on earth had happened to my cousin and her community, being back in our own safe place would do a lot to comfort me.
There was a reason scouts traversed the jungle as infrequently as possible, and I hadn’t expected a smooth journey, but what we had just been through… That, I could never have expected.
I had just reached the second to last zip line before the lookout came into view, when my father shouted out unexpectedly, “When we hit the next platform, stop, okay, Tani?”
I frowned, but yelled back, “Okay!” I didn’t have the energy to engage in a discussion while whooshing through the air.
As the person at the front of the line, I did as requested when I reached the next post, landing and then quickly stepping out of the way for the rest of my group to touch down.
We stood around expectantly, looking at my father.
Every wrinkle on his face was pronounced, and his lips were cracked and parched. Honestly, I had never seen him so anxious.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked, anxiety gripping me. Had he spotted another drone in the sky?
He exhaled, glancing tentatively at the zip line ahead of us.
“It’s just… That’s the final line, leading directly to our home.
And I… I’ve got a bad feeling in my gut about traveling so visibly like this, that I can’t seem to shake.
” He looked down at the trunk of the tree, his eyes settling on the connecting ladder there.
“I know this is the last thing any of you want to hear, when we’re one line away from home, but I honestly think we should travel more discretely for the last leg.
I’ve had a feeling the whole way that we’re being followed, though I haven’t spotted anything.
We just wouldn’t want to…” He trailed off, swallowing, and I knew we all understood what he meant.
Whatever strange things were going on here, we didn’t want to run the risk of leading anyone, or anything, back to our base.
My uncle sighed, looking up at the sky and squinting. “Make ourselves such easy targets,” he finished. “You’re right. Taking a detour down to the ground might be a bit smarter, if there is anything up there…”
I swallowed, frankly hating the idea of going back down to the ground but trusting my father’s instinct. Nobody else objected, though Jessie’s face paled.
So, we dutifully descended one final time, our boots squelching in a particularly large puddle as we landed.
“We’ll go via the paddy fields,” my father said softly, taking the lead. “That path is the most sheltered, and it’ll lead us directly to the lookout anyway.”
I nodded, figuring that route made the most sense.
We grew a good bulk of our food up in the trees, in wide, soil-filled platforms, but some crops took up too much space or were simply impossible to grow in the tree-top enclosures, and for those, we had carved out designated areas on the ground, surrounding them with fencing to keep as many animals out as possible.
We’d placed the paddy fields in an area by the river that ran near our base, which was also close to the spring that supplied our fresh water.
As we made our way toward the fields, I realized it had been a while since I’d visited them.
Harvesting crops on ground level wasn’t a job I volunteered for often, mostly because my mother was so uncomfortable with the dangers involved.
She preferred me to develop my green thumb on the produce we grew up in the trees.
Whatever happened after today, though, I knew I wanted to get more experience on the ground. It was a place I was still uncomfortably unfamiliar with.
But first things first. We need to get help.
After what felt like another three hours of walking, but was probably only one, my father pointed across a familiar stretch of trees and announced, “There’s our ladder.”
“Oh, joy,” Jessie wheezed. She’d been sucking down everyone’s remaining water faster than a dry plant, and I had given her my own canister to finish.
“Let’s go, go, go,” I murmured, leaving the sheltered riverbank and sprinting toward the ladder.
I was the first to reach it, and I grabbed onto the rungs and quickly hauled myself up to make room for the others.
I should’ve been keeping a more careful watch for insect nests as I climbed, as this ladder wasn’t used very often, but with the sight of the platform looming above me, I couldn’t help but speed up.
When I reached the final rung, I gripped the base of the deck and pulled myself up, then kneeled on the familiar floorboards, drawing in deep breaths. Robert and Jessie joined me on the floor, while my aunt, uncle, and father remained standing, their eyes already fixed on the zip line.
“Right,” my father said, casting a grim look at his brother. “Let’s get this meeting together.”
They zipped off toward the tree houses with barely a second’s pause to recover from the climb, which made me feel guilty for not doing the same myself.
Robert and Jessie gathered themselves back up in front of me and headed off after the other members of my family, while I was delayed a few seconds more.
To my annoyance, one of the loops in my harness had come loose.
I fixed it quickly and was on the verge of surrendering my weight to the line when a soft scratching noise behind me made me stall.
I looked over my shoulder and realized it came from beneath the platform. It sounded like something grating against the bark of the tree. Stepping back, I moved to the edge. I looked down.
My blood turned to ice.
Scuttling up the trunk toward me was a giant metallic spider. At least, that was what it looked like on first glance, until I realized how familiar its body was.
Its sleek, cylindrical surface had a slight dent in the center, where it looked like it had been struck by a hard, sharp object. Two small, brown lights blinked intermittently on either side of its head.
The drone hadn’t died. It had followed us all the way back.
Judging by the sharp, flexible legs it had sprouted, which gripped at the bark like knives and propelled it upward with ease, this machine was a lot more than met the eye. I knew nothing about the tech, but if it could fly, crawl, and climb, it could probably swim too.
Which would explain how it had fooled us all. It had a number of tricks at its disposal for navigating various types of terrain. We had almost missed spotting it in the jungle before, when it had been right in front of us. It was smart, stealthy, and tough.
And five feet away from reaching me.
I broke out of my stupor of shock and screamed. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins as I staggered back, jerking my backpack off my shoulders. I thrust my hands into it and whipped out my slingshot and pouch of projectiles, but the drone clambered onto the deck before I could release my first shot.
Its eyes switched to a fiery red and it took to the air, sucking its spidery legs up into its body.
The blood pounded in my ears as the machine rose higher, and a primal anger filled me.
My heart burned with the need to defend.
To retaliate. It felt like it had stolen something from me by coming here—something precious.
It had invaded our privacy, our sacred space.
It had no right to follow us. It had no right to be here!
I didn’t know how, but I had to kill the thing. Get it out of the sky, stop it from soaring any higher, where it would have a full, unhampered view of our settlement. Of our home.
The anger added fire to my heels as I shot toward the ladder that connected to the upper level of the lookout. I heard my friends shouting from the other end of the zip line, but I ignored them, unable to waste a precious second to explain.
I reached the lookout’s highest platform, and turned, my gaze locking on to the ascending drone.
I instinctively fired for the eyes, releasing projectile after projectile, but while the small, sharpened stones dented the metal, they did not hamper its flight.
A few seconds later, it was all but out of my range as it continued its rise into the sky.
What is it doing?
Why is it here?
I screamed out in frustration, before it let out a noise of its own—a sudden shrill sound, so loud it hurt my ears, though I was a dozen feet away.
And then came a third noise, from some distant place behind me. It was a low, rumbling sound, so deep and penetrating that I felt its vibrations in my stomach. It sounded like the bellow of a monster—a creature that didn’t exist in real life, but in the throes of a nightmare.
And when I whirled on my heels to look in its direction, that was exactly what I saw. A nightmare.
A hulking shadow loomed in the distance, marring the clear blue sky. It hovered over the treetops, and, like the drone, its frame looked like black, glinting metal. Only it was more than two hundred times the drone’s size.
It sped in our direction, and my instincts told me I was staring death in the eyes.