Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(21)

Bishop turns his head, speaks just loud enough for everyone to hear him.



“Farrar, stay on my right. Coyotl, on my left. Em and Spingate, stay close behind, but far enough back so you can run if something attacks.”

We are new to this planet, to this city, but it seems we have neighbors. In a moment, we will find out if they are friend…or foe.

Bishop silently leads us into the jungle ruins.





We find the fire. Whoever made it is gone.

Glowing coals cast tendrils of smoke into the darkening night. Someone built a fire pit in the middle of this six-sided ruin. With no roof and one wall collapsed, the fire-builders had protection from five sides. Maybe they cooked bread—I faintly smell burned toast.

The sun finally slides behind the city wall. The sky burns a molten-sunset red. Jungle shadows thicken. Strange, new noises rise—animal screeches, echoing hoots, beastly bellows, all completely alien to anything hiding in Matilda’s memories.

Bishop, Farrar and Coyotl move silently through the ruin, weapons at the ready. Bishop kneels by the fire pit. He pokes at the mostly black coals, careful not to touch those that still shimmer with soft waves of orange. From the pit’s edge, he pulls out a fist-sized chunk of half-burned wood. He tosses it to Coyotl, throws another to Farrar, then pulls out a third for himself.

The boys set down their weapons. They rub the charcoal on arms, legs, faces. Farrar uses his shovel to cut free several long vines, which the boys wrap around themselves, coiling them over shoulders, across chests, around waists, tying them off here and there. Finally, the circle-stars scoop up mud and grind it into their hair.



Just like that, they are transformed. For a few hours, they were boys again—clean and beautiful. Now they are the jungle.

Coyotl moves to the inside walls, checking them carefully, his thighbone held in front of him. Farrar takes the outside.

Bishop remains at the fire pit, fingers drumming an absent pattern on the head of his axe.

I kneel next to him. “Could they have heard us coming?”

“No, we were very quiet. Even you and Spingate.”

He sounds surprised by that. I take it as a compliment.

I am both afraid and excited. We couldn’t have missed the fire-makers by much. They could be close. They might come back.

Spingate joins us. She pokes at the ground next to the pit, pinches her fingers around something small and black—it’s a bone.

“There’s a little bit of flesh on here,” she says. “This animal was cooked.”

She waves her bracelet over the tiny bone. I wait for the jewels to give off the orange warning color, but they do not. Instead, they flash with a mixture of blues, greens, purples.

Spingate smiles.

“Edible,” she says. “No sign of the red mold’s toxin.”

That food in the warehouse—if all we need to do is cook it, we’ll be fine.

“Did the fire burn it off?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she says. “Fire kills the mold, but won’t neutralize the toxin secreted by the mold.”

Dammit.



Spingate turns the bone, looks at it from a different angle.

“Maybe the mold can’t grow on live animals,” she says. “Or maybe this particular animal is resistant to it. We need to catch one to find out.”

She doesn’t have answers, but at least there’s hope. We have to find the people who built this fire, befriend them if we can, learn their secrets.

“Em, Bishop,” Farrar calls out softly. “Come see.”

We join him at the collapsed wall. He taps the tip of his shovel against the rubble.

“The broken edges are clean,” he says. “No moss or dirt on them. Something knocked this wall in, and very recently.”

In the fading light, a spot on the ground just past the collapsed wall catches my eye. A patch of blackness. I walk to it, careful not to trip on the loose rubble. The spot is a neat hole, from something long and pointed punching into the dirt.

Long and pointed…like the feet of the creature that chased us out of the city.

“I think a spider knocked down this wall,” I say. “Maybe to get at the people who were inside.”

Is that why the fire was abandoned? Whoever the fire-makers are, I hope they got away.

We are all suddenly aware that danger could be close by. Our eyes flick to every growing shadow, to every dark spot in this tangled mass of yellow, green and brown.

Those colors…the spider’s shell matches them. Exactly.

I glance at Bishop, Farrar, Coyotl. Their charcoal and vines and mud…camouflage that lets them blend in to the jungle.

“We have to get out of here,” I say.

Bishop nods, his mud-smeared face turning this way, then that, white eyes wide and darting.

“Back to the city wall,” he says. “And move quietly.”

—



Darkness falls. For only the second time in my short life, I see stars.

We walk along the city wall, quiet as can be. We don’t use the flashlights for fear they might draw attention from the animals screaming in the night, or from the dreaded spider.

Bishop leads us; Farrar and Coyotl stay a few paces behind. I can’t help but look up through the thick jungle canopy. Countless pinpricks of bright light, like sparkling jewels, impossibly distant and immensely beautiful. There are two big circles up there as well: one bluish, the other maroon. Spingate says the circles are moons—small planets that orbit Omeyocan. That sounds impossible to me, but if Spingate says it, I believe her.