The hooting is a storm now; it reverberates. I want to cover my ears.
“I have it!” Das Muni says. “I have it.” I pull her back up. She raises the globe, and I see that her eyes are broad and bright and there is something like triumph on her face. But as she turns and looks behind me, the expression turns to fear.
Casamir is tangled in crystalline webbing swarming with bulbous, multi-segmented beasts. They each have a dozen legs that look like long, clawed fingers lined in black hair. Their faces are fanged, lined in six eyes and hundreds of little feathery antennae.
I pull up my walking stick and swing at the webbing. “Bring the light!” I tell Das Muni, but she is frozen in shock, mouth agape.
I plunge ahead, striking at the creatures. They burst when my stick makes contact, splattering yellow guts across my face. I try to pull the webbing off Casamir. The insects turn their attention to me. I feel their feathered antennae brush my ankles.
“The light! Das Muni!” I say.
I stab and swing. Yellow gore covers my face, my hands, smears the front of my suit. They’re crawling up my arms now. Pinching. Biting. I tear again at the webbing binding Casamir. She is so stuck now that she has ceased to struggle. She is screaming at me, but I don’t know what she’s saying because my feet are tangled in the webbing and I’m starting to panic.
“Das Muni!” I try to rise and fall. The swarm descends. I bite and kick and flail. My mouth is full of insect guts.
There is a hissing shriek. The insects skitter away.
I spit, trying to clear my mouth. Das Muni leans over me. She holds the torch high.
I yank myself free of the webbing. Das Muni helps me up. I hear the insects hooting and skittering, waiting at the edges of the light.
I hack Casamir free of the webbing. It’s rooted her in place, intricate strands so tough that she’s locked in a standing position. Finally she falls free, and I wrap my arm around her. She sags into me. “Are you hurt?” I say.
Casamir’s head lolls. “I don’t know. I don’t . . . No more than usual, maybe.”
I search her body for bites or scratches and find four small puncture wounds on her wrist and two more on her thigh. “Are they poisonous?” I ask. “The creatures?” I’m bitten too, far more than her.
“Poison? Why would they have poison?” Casamir says.
That may answer the question, or it may not. Casamir’s knowledge is based on maps and stories.
“Let’s keep going,” I say. “Das Muni, I need you to lead.”
“You take the light,” Das Muni says, thrusting the torch at me.
“I need to help Casamir,” I say. “I’m right behind you.”
“But—”
The hooting starts again. It raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
Das Muni’s big eyes widen, impossibly large, and I wonder just how well she can see with eyes so big. “All right,” she says, and takes a few hesitant steps forward. The insects stir, retreating from the light. Many swarm back toward their caves, where they continue watching us.
We walk and walk, fearful to stop as long as we can see the mounded caves. Then the floor begins to slope downward, and we move into a great forest of fungus-lined pillars that stretch so high I cannot see where they end.
The forest goes on and on, and after walking for some time without encountering hostile life, I suggest we bed down for some rest.
We spend time cleaning our wounds and untangling the webbing from our hair. I go in search of water and find brackish pools of damp among the trees. When I tell Casamir about it, she says it’s fine to drink.
“Isn’t there a way to clean it?” I say. “It’s salty.”
“You don’t need to clean water,” Casamir says, like I’m the stupidest person she’s ever met. “It’s all wet. It doesn’t hurt you. Nothing in the world is meant to hurt you.”
“What about those insects?”
“Well,” she says, rubbing the bites on her wrist, “I think we just startled them.”
I’m not convinced, but Casamir and Das Muni both drink the water, and eventually my thirst overcomes caution. We sleep, and when I wake from my doze, I find that the whole forest is filled with wispy green lights. Casamir is awake, plucking mushrooms from the trees.
I sit up and marvel at the light. “What is that?” I say. It’s a misty green luminescence, as if the air itself is glowing.
“I suspect it’s pollen,” Casamir says. “The trees are mating.”
Das Muni wakes at the sound of our voices. For a time, we sit and stare at the misty green waves moving through the trees. There are little creatures in the upper reaches of the trees. I see them hopping back and forth between them, chittering.
I lie back on the soft ground; it’s covered in dead fungi and probably the leavings of the animals up there, but it’s comfortable enough. The musty smell of it is still an improvement from the recycling pits.
“This is a journey every engineer must take,” Casamir says, popping another mushroom into her bag. “You learn more about the world, they say, and our place in it. I always feel we are very large, but out here, well, it’s clear we are a small piece of something much larger.”
“The world is massive,” I say. “I’ve seen it from the outside. I didn’t think about what was inside, though.”
Casamir eats a mushroom. “That’s a very persistent delusion you have.”
“Isn’t that the best kind?” I say. “The kind you’re most interested in.”
“It does keep you interesting,” she says. “I never liked a bore. Did I tell you a story about—”
“I’m going back to sleep,” I say.
“It’s a great story!”
“Later,” I say, and close my eyes.
She tells me the story anyway. It’s about an engineer who wanted to become a warrior but didn’t understand that you have to kill people to do it. I suppose it is meant to be funny, as she tries to kill insects and then animals, working her way up to a human, but for one reason or another, she fails at each attempted kill.
“What she realized is that we’re all connected,” Casamir says. I’m drifting off to sleep now. For better or worse, I’ve gotten used to the drone of her voice. “If you kill one thing, you kill everything.”
*
At the end of the forest is a door.
I counted the steps through the forest, and it’s upward of fifty thousand. Now I’m struck not by how far the forest stretches but how strange a door looks here at the end of it.
The door is a broad, round metal thing, like a great eye sewn into the flesh of the world. We have traveled ever upward the last thirty thousand steps. This is, almost certainly, a door to the next level.
But that doesn’t please me as much as it should. I’m mostly just shocked and confused, because I know this door. I have seen it before. Not a door like it, but this door. I’ve gone through this door. But most importantly, I remember that I’ve left something important here. Something for myself.
“Zan?” Casamir says.