Page 36 of Blightfall

“Have you all forgotten that we were just attacked by a tree?” Arturo said again.

“I don’t think we’re at much risk to forget,” Alanik said, peering over a shrub in the direction the monster had been taken. I could still see its highest branches poking through the net, but not much else.

“And it was awesome,” I added. “There, I said it.”

Now I was going to get in trouble for talking too much. I waited for Arturo to lecture me, but he sighed. “How many of these trees do you think have faces? It isn’t…all of them, is it?”

Oh scud. I hadn’t thought about that, but weaving through the trees suddenly seemed a lot more dangerous.

“I doubt the planet could sustain that many mobile organisms,” Suki said. “There must be millions of trees in these woods, and large organisms that move require more energy than those that don’t.”

“Still,” Arturo said, “since the tree that moved was indistinguishable from the others, we have to assume that any one of them could be a creature and not a plant.”

“Or a plant creature,” I said. “Do you think they photosynthesize? If they do photosynthesize, then they all could be walking tree monsters, couldn’t they? Suki, do your lore books talk about this?”

“They will when I am finished with my research here,” Suki said. “I am taking copious notes.”

At least she was using her body to shield the light from her tablet screen so it wouldn’t show through the mesh. If anyone noticed her writing and sketching, her presence would be difficult to explain.

We followed the humans until the glimmer of the river shone through the trees ahead. The humans stopped when they cleared the tree line, shouting to each other, though our pins were too far away to catch the exact words for translation.

“Let’s move downriver a bit,” Arturo said, “so we can watch from a distance. Have Hoid put up our disguises again. Can he match our jumpsuits to their clothing?”

“Clothing!” Hoid chirped from inside Alanik’s backpack, and a moment later we were all wearing carbon copies of the loose cotton clothes the humans wore.

Arturo cringed. “We should vary them a little. We can adjust after we get a better look.” He led us through the woods to the left, down to the river, about eighty meters downstream from the group of humans. We broke through the tree line and the fullness of the river came into view.

The river was wide—we could have fit several starfighters across without touching wings. On Detritus we watered our vat-grown crops from underground lakes, so I’d seen some large bodies of water before, but the canals that piped water from the lakes to the vat beds were nothing compared to this.

Branches tangled along the edge of the river, twining around each other like fingers knotting themselves together for support. The lowest branches were fifteen meters above the surface of the water, though they grew lower and more densely over the bank, jutting down and burying themselves in the soil, as if the tree didn’t distinguish between branches and roots.

The sun hadn’t moved in the sky since I’d glimpsed this landscape from the canopy, giving the impression that time here was frozen. Upriver, the humans used their long hooks and spearlike prods to urge the tree creature onto a large, rectangular craft anchored on the side of the river. On it was an enormous cage, big enough to fit the entire tree creature.

“See if you can add some nuance to our clothing,” Arturo said to Hoid, and our outfits began to subtly shift, the colors and cuts varying slightly from those worn by the barge workers, so we wouldn’t look like we’d stolen their clothing. A motorboat headed in the direction of the city honked a horn at the people on the barge but didn’t pay us a bit of attention, which had to be a good sign.

“Any way to know how deep that water is?” Arturo asked.

“We could poke it with a stick,” Nedd said. “I hear that’s Sadie’s specialty.”

“That could work,” Suki said through the mesh of Arturo’s pack. “Not every piece of knowledge needs to be gained with advanced technology. Why use sonar when a stick will do?”

“It might need to be a long stick,” I said. “But this forest is sure full of those.”

“Can anyone swim?” Suki asked.

“I can,” I said.

Arturo and Nedd both nodded, but Gilaf shook his head and Alanik just eyed the river nervously. They came from a planet without lakes or rivers; they supplied all their drinking water from condensation on their city-sized trees or from atmospheric generators.

“We shouldn’t swim in it anyway,” Arturo said. “I don’t want any of us picking up parasites.”

“I’d rather ride on a boat,” I said. “These are the best boats I’ve ever seen.”

“I assume they’re the only boats you’ve ever seen,” Alanik said.

“Not true,” I said. “We had little dinghies for the reservoir caverns at home. And these are about a million times cooler than those!”

“I know the boats she’s talking about,” Nedd said. “They aren’t a lot of competition.”