Whatever happened after today, though, I knew I wanted to get more experience on the ground. It was a place I was still uncomfortably unfamiliar with.
But first things first. We need to get help.
After what felt like another three hours of walking, but was probably only one, my father pointed across a familiar stretch of trees and announced, “There’s our ladder.”
“Oh, joy,” Jessie wheezed. She’d been sucking down everyone’s remaining water faster than a dry plant, and I had given her my own canister to finish.
“Let’s go, go, go,” I murmured, leaving the sheltered riverbank and sprinting toward the ladder.
I was the first to reach it, and I grabbed onto the rungs and quickly hauled myself up to make room for the others. I should’ve been keeping a more careful watch for insect nests asI climbed, as this ladder wasn’t used very often, but with the sight of the platform looming above me, I couldn’t help but speed up.
When I reached the final rung, I gripped the base of the deck and pulled myself up, then kneeled on the familiar floorboards, drawing in deep breaths. Robert and Jessie joined me on the floor, while my aunt, uncle, and father remained standing, their eyes already fixed on the zip line.
“Right,” my father said, casting a grim look at his brother. “Let’s get this meeting together.”
They zipped off toward the tree houses with barely a second’s pause to recover from the climb, which made me feel guilty for not doing the same myself.
Robert and Jessie gathered themselves back up in front of me and headed off after the other members of my family, while I was delayed a few seconds more. To my annoyance, one of the loops in my harness had come loose. I fixed it quickly and was on the verge of surrendering my weight to the line when a soft scratching noise behind me made me stall.
I looked over my shoulder and realized it came from beneath the platform. It sounded like something grating against the bark of the tree. Stepping back, I moved to the edge. I looked down.
My blood turned to ice.
Scuttling up the trunk toward me was a giant metallic spider. At least, that was what it looked like on first glance, until I realized how familiar its body was.
Its sleek, cylindrical surface had a slight dent in the center, where it looked like it had been struck by a hard, sharp object. Two small, brown lights blinked intermittently on either side of its head.
The drone hadn’t died. It had followed us all the way back.
Judging by the sharp, flexible legs it had sprouted,which gripped at the bark like knives and propelled it upward with ease, this machine was a lot more than met the eye. I knew nothing about the tech, but if it could fly, crawl, and climb, it could probably swim too.
Which would explain how it had fooled us all. It had a number of tricks at its disposal for navigating various types of terrain. We had almost missed spotting it in the jungle before, when it had been right in front of us. It was smart, stealthy, and tough.
And five feet away from reaching me.
I broke out of my stupor of shock and screamed. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins as I staggered back, jerking my backpack off my shoulders. I thrust my hands into it and whipped out my slingshot and pouch of projectiles, but the drone clambered onto the deck before I could release my first shot.
Its eyes switched to a fiery red and it took to the air, sucking its spidery legs up into its body.
The blood pounded in my ears as the machine rose higher, and a primal anger filled me. My heart burned with the need to defend. To retaliate. It felt like it had stolen something from me by coming here—something precious. It had invaded our privacy, our sacred space. It had no right to follow us. It had no right to be here!
I didn’t know how, but I had to kill the thing. Get it out of the sky, stop it from soaring any higher, where it would have a full, unhampered view of our settlement. Of our home.
The anger added fire to my heels as I shot toward the ladder that connected to the upper level of the lookout. I heard my friends shouting from the other end of the zip line, but I ignored them, unable to waste a precious second to explain.
I reached the lookout’s highest platform, and turned, my gaze locking on to the ascending drone. I instinctively fired for the eyes, releasing projectile after projectile, butwhile the small, sharpened stones dented the metal, they did not hamper its flight. A few seconds later, it was all but out of my range as it continued its rise into the sky.
What is it doing?
Why is it here?
I screamed out in frustration, before it let out a noise of its own—a sudden shrill sound, so loud it hurt my ears, though I was a dozen feet away.
And then came a third noise, from some distant place behind me. It was a low, rumbling sound, so deep and penetrating that I felt its vibrations in my stomach. It sounded like the bellow of a monster—a creature that didn’t exist in real life, but in the throes of a nightmare.
And when I whirled on my heels to look in its direction, that was exactly what I saw. A nightmare.
A hulking shadow loomed in the distance, marring the clear blue sky. It hovered over the treetops, and, like the drone, its frame looked like black, glinting metal. Only it was more than two hundred times the drone’s size.
