Bishop nods. “It scared me, too.”
His admission of fear seems to relax Coyotl. If even Bishop is afraid, then running away from the spider couldn’t be such a bad thing.
I put my shoulder to the door again, give it a little push to make sure it’s really closed. It is. At my feet, I see mashed vines, blue-smeared curving lines on the stone where the door scraped against it.
No way I can relax, not even a bit, but with the door shut I have a moment to think.
I turn and rest my back against the door. In front of me, trees, more than I could ever count.
Before us lies a dense jungle, growing up and through and around blackened, burned, crumbling, vine-choked six-sided buildings. Trees also grow out of giant, plant-covered holes in the ground. There are long, open spaces that were maybe once roads, but it’s hard to tell with all the holes and trees and the endless yellow vines that cover everything.
When we first landed, I thought the sprawling city was a ruin, taken by the hands of time. What I see now shows me I was wrong. The city we landed in isn’t ruined, it is merely abandoned and overgrown: most of those four-sided buildings are still standing.
What I look at now is something else altogether.
These six-sided buildings weren’t abandoned.
They were destroyed.
We walk through the jungle.
The curving wall is on our right, tall and constant, covered with layers of thick vines. Following it takes us mostly south and a little east. We hope to run across another gate soon, but we have no way of knowing if we will, or if it will be open. I’m very worried—we’ve eaten what little food we brought with us, and we’re already out of water.
Keeping the wall on our right means the thick jungle is on our left. Tall trees with dark-yellow leaves, green or brown trunks. Plenty of vines there, too, dangling from branches and covering the collapsed buildings. Blurds—some as big as I am—dart in and out of the trees, or fly full speed into the deep canopy where they vanish from sight.
The heat is worse here than it is in the city. It’s so humid. It seems that every other step squishes into mud, which hides jagged old sticks and a brown plant that has sharp thorns. Each time we step on one, we have to stop so someone can carefully pull thorns from the soles of our feet. That slows us down, makes me hate the Grownups anew—they dressed us up like dolls, so couldn’t they have given us shoes?
The sun is descending on the far side of the city. The wall casts a growing shadow upon us. I don’t want to be outside when night falls, but it looks like we can’t avoid that. Animal noises reach out to us from deep in the jungle, the cries and howls of creatures that might be waking up from a day’s sleep to hunt when darkness fully sets in.
So many questions. These six-sided buildings, scored and gutted, covered by the undying jungle—how far do they reach? Does this massive wall go all the way around our ziggurat city?
Spingate gestures to the sprawling ruins on our left.
“Maybe a big fire burned them all,” she says. “Or it could have been a meteor shower, rocks hitting so hard they made craters, caused explosions that started fires.”
Bishop laughs at this. “Spingate, are you joking?”
“Not at all,” she says, bristling that he would doubt her. “Rocks can come from space at high speeds, partially burning up as they hit the atmosphere, and—”
He holds up a fist, which means we’re supposed to stop. We do. He faces her.
“You really don’t know what caused all of this?”
She seems defensive. “No. Do you?”
Bishop nods. “War.”
One word. So simple. And from looking at the devastation around us, so horrible.
We start walking again. It seems so obvious now—how could I have thought so much damage came from anything but war? Destruction, killing…just like on the Xolotl, but at a scale that is hard to conceive. How many people died? Thousands? Millions?
On one side of this wall lie endless ruins and carnage. On the other, untouched buildings damaged only by plants, only by time and neglect. It doesn’t take a genius like Spingate or Gaston to figure out what happened. My kind destroyed a city so they could build their own in the same place. Even down here, we can’t escape the Grownups’ violent touch.
Bishop raises a fist. We stop.
He crouches down, stares off into the darkening ruins.
“Em, come here,” he whispers.
I squat beside him. He points to a ruined building. Three of its six vine-choked walls have collapsed. There is no roof to stop the young trees growing tall from within.
Bishop leans close to me. “Do you see it?”
I look, but see nothing that should cause concern. “It’s a ruined building. We’ve passed hundreds of them.”
His eyes narrow, like he’s disappointed. My heart plummets—I can’t stand the idea that he thinks poorly of me.