I pick up the little spider toy, hold it so everyone can see it.
“We can make these go away,” I say slowly. “We can make it so they never hurt you again.” I tap the drawings he made of the plants and animals. “But we need food.” I point to my open mouth. “Food. Can you help us?”
Barkah stares at me, trying to work out my meaning.
“He doesn’t understand,” Spingate says, frustrated.
A short horn blast echoes through the jungle outside, the same sound from when the Springers set fires to herd us.
Barkah rushes to the doors, peeks out. He then hops between two of the strange statues and brushes dirt away from the warped wooden floor there. He slides his fingers into a small hole and lifts: a trapdoor, leading down.
He waves to us, wide-eyed and urgent.
“He wants to hide us,” I say.
I grab my spear. Spingate and I run to the trapdoor, the floor squeaking beneath us with every step. Barkah is letting me keep my weapon, so if this is some kind of trick it’s not a very good one.
The old stairs creak even more than the floor. Spingate is right behind me.
At the bottom, I step into standing water that comes up to my knees. This is a confined space, smelling of rot and mildew, dark save for a long, thin sliver of light—coming through a slot left by a missing board, just above ground level, that looks out on the jungle in front of the steeple’s doors.
Noises from outside…I hear something coming.
The trapdoor quietly shuts behind us.
I can see through the tangled old vines outside the slot—Springer feet, legs, tails. Five Springers out there, maybe more. I see gun butts resting on the ground next to those feet.
The Springers talk. I recognize Barkah’s voice. I squat down, changing my angle, and I can see his face. He’s just in front of the steeple doors. He’s talking to a blue, older and bigger…and then I see the blue’s copper necklace.
“The king,” Spingate whispers. Her breath is warm on my ear. “Is Barkah handing us over to him?”
Out in front of us, one of the Springers turns, looks around. Did it hear her talking?
Spingate and I stay motionless.
For a half-second, I swear the Springer’s three eyes are staring right at us, but it looks away—it didn’t see us through the thick vines.
I glare at Spingate, hold a finger to my lips.
The king’s tail comes around quickly, slaps into Barkah’s head. Barkah staggers, then straightens. He doesn’t react, doesn’t fight back. Some kind of discipline, parent to child? We don’t even know if they are parent and child. We know almost nothing of these creatures.
I see Springers walking past Barkah and the king, coming from inside the steeple…they’re carrying the dead. Then two more Springers, pulling a rolling cart with Lahfah on top. He’s bundled up in a blanket.
Will they search the back of the church? If they do, they will surely find Visca’s body.
The king’s tail slaps Barkah’s head once more, then the older Springer hops away toward the trail. His entourage follows, pulling the cart with Lahfah on top. They slide into the jungle. Just like that, they are gone.
Spingate’s breath in my ear again: “Should we go up?”
She’s getting on my nerves. How can she be so smart in her lab and so dumb about just staying quiet?
“Just wait,” I whisper.
That’s exactly what we do. We stand in calf-deep water, our feet growing colder by the second. I try to imagine the king and his followers moving down the trail, try to project how far away they are.
The floor directly above us squeaks. When Barkah finally opens the trapdoor, we’re shivering. He waves us up.
Save for his drawings and the statues, the room is empty.
Barkah seems shaken, upset.
Spingate steps close to him.
“Food,” she says. She points to her mouth, her belly. “Food.”
She’s so single-minded she doesn’t seem to understand how close we just came to getting caught. What would have happened to Barkah for hiding us?
“Maybe I can draw the purple fruit,” she says, then moves to the fire. She flips over a sketch, picks up a piece of charcoal and starts to draw.
That catches Barkah’s attention, makes him excited. He glances at the closed doors, then two hops take him to Spingate’s side.
She sketches an oval. She starts to shade it in. The charcoal is messy. She’s pressing too hard, sending dust everywhere.
She holds up the sketch for me to see. “Does this look like the purple fruit?”
“It looks more like a turd.”
I hold back an embarrassed laugh. When Matilda was a little girl, saying the word turd would have gotten her punished. Badly. Our father didn’t like nasty language of any kind.
Barkah squints at the drawing. He mumbles something I don’t understand. I get the feeling he’s not impressed with Spingate’s artistic skills.
Spingate sighs. “Let me do it again.”