Borjigin says nothing, just stands there, shivering.
Bishop glares at Borjigin, then at Coyotl, then turns and heads down the trail.
—
We walk through the jungle. Tiny bugs are starting to land on me, but they don’t bite. It’s more annoying than anything else.
That big predator scared the hell out of me. An hour later and I’m still not feeling right. It was like a bear or a giant wolf, with an elephant’s trunk that ended in ant pincers. What do we even call it? Snake-wolf? Bear-bug? Hard to think of a name, because there are no easy comparisons to Matilda’s memories.
The buzzing of the blurds. The hoots of unseen animals echoing through the canopy. The heat. The humidity. The red sun blazing off yellow leaves. We are in so much trouble right now, yet my love for Omeyocan overwhelms me. This is my home. It was my home before I ever set foot here. I don’t want to be anyplace else. Not ever.
Up ahead, Visca stops. He holds up a fist.
Bishop jogs back to us. The leaves seem to part for him, he seems to slide through them as if he has no substance at all.
He puts one arm around Kalle, the other around me, nods toward a tree trunk on the right side of the path. He wants us to hide.
The three of us kneel behind the tree trunk. I look around: Visca has vanished. Borjigin is on the other side of the trail, hiding behind a fallen log. Coyotl is with him, vine-wrapped and nearly invisible.
The wind changes slightly—I catch a faint wisp of burned toast.
Then I hear it. A noise, soft, regular…branches sliding off something…a faint crackle of twigs snapping underfoot…
This is it—we’ve found the fire-builders. My breathing sounds so loud. My heart hammers.
Will they accept us? Teach us how to hunt and prepare food? Can our two cultures live side by side? Or will this go the other way—will we have to force them to tell us how to survive?
I see movement down the path. Through the yellow leaves, I glimpse a flash of red and green.
Will they be young, like us, or old, like the Grownups?
The fire-builder comes around a thick tree trunk, into view.
My stomach drops.
The fire-builders, who lurked in the Observatory’s shadows, who smell like burned toast…
They aren’t like us.
They aren’t Grownups.
They aren’t people at all.
Borjigin’s hiss of fear slices through the jungle.
The fire-builder stops.
Underbrush and dangling vines partially obscure it. It’s not an animal—animals don’t carry tools. Is that a club it’s holding?
I feel numb. Not the “blanked-out” sensation I’ve grown used to, this is something else…a feeling of nothingness.
It wears rags for clothing, frayed strips of yellow, green and blue—the colors of the jungle—tied around long, thin, strong arms. Between the strips of cloth, I see wrinkled, dark-blue skin.
It is almost my height. Head wider and longer than mine. Eyes, three of them, middle one set slightly above the bottom two, a shallow triangle of eyes that flick about, searching. Even from a distance, their color jumps out: bright blue, like O’Malley’s. Below the eyes, a wide mouth: purple lips curve downward in an exaggerated frown.
Matilda’s memories struggle to define what I see. A flashfire of images: toad-mouth frog-mouth fish-mouth.
That head swivels suddenly, looks left. The creature comes closer, pushing past encroaching branches. Something strange about the way it moves.
I see its legs now: rag-tied, thick and powerful, bent like it’s sitting on an invisible chair. The creature is leaning forward, so much so I don’t understand why it doesn’t fall flat on its strange face.
Both legs push down at the same time, softly springing the creature forward. Not a step, a hop, both long feet coming off the trail. It lands silently.
The three blue eyes flick down the trail, side to side. I think it heard Borjigin and is searching for the source of the sound.
The fire-builder turns, looks back the way it came, and I see why it doesn’t fall—a tail, long and thick, balances out the forward lean.
It turns our way again, still searching, still wary. Strange, long hands adjust their grip on the club. Two fingers, not four, thicker than ours, as is the long thumb. Arms are wiry, corded with muscle.
That club bothers me, but I don’t know why. Long and thin, like the handle of Farrar’s shovel, but half wood, half metal. Nothing dangerous on the tip—no axe head, no spear blade. The club widens and flattens at the other end, the end held close to its body; maybe that part is for smashing things, just like Visca’s sledgehammer.