Page 35 of Blightfall

Arturo barreled past me, catching up to Alanik, when a shout rang out in a language I didn’t recognize.

“GOTCHA!” my earpiece helpfully translated.

Stars. Had we been spotted? I ducked behind a tree trunk and peeked around it in the direction of the voice.

The tree monster had stopped following us, and now it had a large net draped over its head, hanging from the chunk of bark like a loose veil.

More voices echoed through the woods, and my earpiece translated. “We got him! Take that!”

A human appeared—a man with brown skin wearing loose cotton clothing—grabbing at one of the creature’s leg-branches with a hook at the end of a long pole.

The rest of the flight crouched in the underbrush.

“Alanik,” Arturo whispered. He unzipped his pouch to check on Suki. I caught sight of the back of her furry head—she appeared to be furiously drawing away on her tablet, so I assumed she must be unharmed.

“Hoid is covering us with a leafy illusion,” Alanik said. “Blending us into the forest.”

“Good job, Hoid,” Arturo said.

We all watched as the humans surrounded the tree, catching it with hooks and lashing them around its body, compacting it. They threw more nets over it, binding some of its legs to its body, and then used the hooks to drag it forward on its remaining limbs, leading it in the direction of the river. They didn’t seem to have noticed us.

“What the scud are they doing with that thing?” Nedd asked.

“I don’t know,” Arturo said. “But they’re moving toward the city, so we’re going to follow them and find out.”

Eleven

Sadie

The other humans made slow progress as they prodded their restrained tree monster through the woods toward the river. We made even slower progress behind them, trying to fade into the underbrush, allowing them to get ahead so they wouldn’t hear us creeping along.

When they were far enough ahead that I was sure I wouldn’t be heard, I turned to the others and whispered, “Did you see that thing? It was—”

“Don’t tell me it was awesome,” Arturo said. “It attacked us!”

Okay. Fine. But not telling him didn’t make it less so. “Did it?” I asked. “It didn’t really hit you that hard. Maybe it was just, you know, poking you.”

“Poking me?” Arturo said. “It punched me in the shoulder!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen a new critter, like a squirrel or a rat, and just…poked it to see what it felt like? Maybe it was doing that.”

“I’m glad that wasn’t your first reaction to meeting me,” Suki said.

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re a person.”

“I’m a person!” Arturo said.

“Okay, sure. But maybe the tree didn’t know that!”

“I like this idea,” Nedd said. “Tree monsters that go around poking people for fun. Sign me up.”

“To be fair,” Suki said, “I’m not sure we have evidence that the tree wasn’t a person.”

“What I’m still trying to figure out,” Nedd said, easing his way between two trees, “is where Sadie found a squirrel and got close enough to poke it.”

“There were lots of them in the Yeongian caverns,” I said. “They escaped from one of the animal preserves, I think. They like to eat our crops. And they’re very pokable, if you can get them to hold still.”

Oh scud. I was still trying to find my place in this flight, and now I was outing myself as that weird girl who pokes squirrels. “The weird one” was not a role I aspired to. It wasn’t exactly a title that would stop the flight from underestimating me. Though, if I didn’t do anything to distinguish myself, maybe they were just…estimating me.