She puts the fabric back on the ground, starts to draw, hesitates, wondering how to make it look better.
The air erupts with a boom so loud and hard that it shakes dirt down from what’s left of the steeple’s ruined ceiling. The sound echoes through the jungle even as another sound joins it, a steady roar that makes everything around me shudder.
“Oh no,” Spingate says, then she’s up and out the doors. Barkah and I rush out behind her.
High in the sky, a trail of white. Memories flashfire, more of Matilda’s childhood floods in, and with a wash of heartbreak, fear and despair, I recognize what it is.
“A ship,” Spingate says. “It just entered the atmosphere, it’s coming down.” She looks at me, dread in her eyes. “It has to be the Grownups.”
Barkah hops into the steeple.
The twelve-year-old inside me cries out: This isn’t fair! We were so close. We’ve worked so hard, lost so much. Brewer told us there was only one shuttle; he lied.
Barkah comes out with my spear in one hand and his musket in the other. He tosses the spear at my feet. He waves his hand outward in a gesture that needs no translation: Go away.
Spingate shakes her head. “No, we have to learn from each other, we—”
Barkah opens his wide mouth and roars: a grinding, hideous noise. He holds the musket in both hands, shakes it at us. He’s leaning forward, his tail out straight behind him. Open aggression looks the same on his kind as it does on ours.
Spingate takes a step back, surprised, maybe even hurt.
I grab her elbow, gently pull her away. “Let’s go.”
“But why is he mad? He must have also seen our shuttle come down.”
“Look what happened after it did,” I say. “Eight of his kind are dead because of us. We have to take Visca’s body and get back to our people. Now. Look where that ship is going.”
She looks to the sky. The white line descends toward the horizon. It’s coming down fast.
Whatever it is, it will land inside the city walls.
“Maybe we should leave the body,” she says. “It’s going to slow us down.”
“He’s going to slow us down,” I say. “Not it. We’re taking him.”
We run around to the back of the ruined church. We each take a pole of Visca’s cart. It hurts so much to hold the pole, more to pull it, but pull it we do.
We head for the trail, Visca’s tied-down body bouncing along behind us.
By the time we reach the city gate, night has fallen. Spingate and I are drained. The cart is on wheels, but that didn’t make the hike through the muddy trails any easier. Raw blisters cover our palms, our fingers. My hands feel like Visca’s ghost hit them with his sledgehammer.
We call out. Coyotl slides through the tall doors, runs to us. I wait to see Bishop come out as well, but he doesn’t. Of course not—as soon as that smoke trail arced overhead, he knew what it was and went back to protect the shuttle.
Coyotl carries Visca’s body up onto the spider. Spingate and I join them. To think that this very machine might have been used to slaughter thousands of Springers, native beings who were guilty of nothing other than being where my kind wanted to live.
The spider is fast. The ride is smooth, silent—no more whine. And that rear leg…it’s not dragging.
“Coyotl, is this the same spider you rode before?”
He beams with pride. “Borjigin fixed it. Gaston helped a little, so did Beckett, but mostly it was Borjigin.”
It never occurred to me that we could repair the old machines. Can Borjigin fix any of the rusty ones in the nest?
The spider sprints down the nighttime street. If not for the rhythmic clack of metal feet on stone, I wouldn’t hear anything save for the wind whipping across my face. In minutes, we’re back at the landing pad.
A spider stands on either side of the shuttle ramp. Farrar is atop one, Bawden the other. Both of them have muskets slung over their shoulders. Borjigin is next to Bawden, doing something with the tube mounted there. Is he trying to fix the cannon?
In front of the ramp stand twenty young circle-stars, lined up in four rows of five. They wear black coveralls and boots. The shuttle’s lights glint off the metallic thread of their Mictlan patches. Three of them hold muskets. The others hold tools, tools they will use as weapons.
Bishop is walking up and down the rows. I can’t hear what he’s saying. From the frightened and serious expressions on the faces of those kids, I assume he’s preparing them to fight.
Twelve-year-old warriors. They were bred for this, yet they don’t look like real soldiers. They look like dolls dressed up for war—only this time it wasn’t the Grownups who chose the outfits, it was us.
Smith runs down the ramp, two little circle-crosses—one boy, one girl—right behind her. Spingate gets down off the spider first, then she and Smith help me descend. My hand doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Smith takes my wrist, gently but firmly.