The Lost Continent by Tui T. Sutherland
Once he got over his fear, Blue found the rhythm of Swordtail’s wings lulling him into a kind of doze. His friend seemed tireless, soaring on and on without stopping. Blue hoped Cricket was all right. He tried to call to her a few times, but the wind whipped his voice away.
After a long time, Blue noticed that he could see the outlines of shrubs below him, gray and ghostly. He glanced up and saw an expanding band of pale yellow light along the edge of the sky.
“It’s almost morning,” he called up to Swordtail.
“We should hide for the day, that’s what I think,” Swordtail answered. “It’s still half a day’s journey to Wasp Hive, and they’ll be out looking for us in force today, and it would be better to get there at night anyway. Night! An excellent time of day for heroics!”
“Cricket?” Blue called, trying to twist around to see her.
“Hide,” she panted behind them. She looked exhausted, but her wings beat valiantly. “Yes. Good. Where?”
Where … Blue studied the savanna as far as he could see in each direction. The yellow grass rippled, broken only by gnarled little shrubs, patches of barren dirt, or the winding path of dry riverbeds. The rainy season was coming soon, so the ground below them was dry. There was nothing large enough to hide in or under or behind. Hunting parties of HiveWings would spot them from the air with no trouble at all.
“Disguise ourselves as grass?” Swordtail suggested. “Disguise ourselves as shrubs! DISGUISE OURSELVES AS ELEPHANTS THAT’S IT LET’S DO IT.”
“That stuff still hasn’t worn off,” Blue called to Cricket.
“Or I can build us a web!” Swordtail said. “A giant web! And we hide underneath it and they’ll think there must be some massively enormous spiders colonizing the savanna! THIS WILL TOTALLY WORK.”
“Let’s fly … a bit … farther,” Cricket said between breaths. “Try to find somewhere.”
Blue barely blinked, he was staring so intently at the ground. Off to his left, he saw a herd of teeny tiny deer with enormous ears bounding through the grass, which was shorter and scrubbier here. A tall, long-necked gray-and-white bird stalked slowly along one of the sunbaked riverbeds, ignoring the smaller birds that perched on its back or flew down to poke the barren soil.
There was nowhere to hide. Blue’s heart sank as they flew on and the sky grew brighter. This was a mistake. The savanna was the worst place they could have gone.
And then, as the sun peeked over the horizon, he saw the vast looming shape of a Hive in the distance.
Wasp Hive.
His heart kicked hard in his chest.
The home of Queen Wasp. The grandest and wealthiest of all the Hives. The location of the temple, where the Book of Clearsight was worshipped and protected by generation after generation of Librarians. A Hive full of power and soldiers and secrets.
Where the queen might be hiding his sister … and his father, and other flamesilks.
Are we really doing this? he thought with sudden crashing anxiety. WHAT are we doing? Do we think we can sneak into WASP HIVE, of all places, and find something the queen wants to stay hidden?
Swordtail banked around, making Blue’s stomach drop, and swooped back to Cricket. “We shouldn’t get any closer,” he said. “She might send out hunters from her own Hive to search for us, too, if she’s paranoid, which she is, which she should be, because —” He cut himself off abruptly and nodded a few times. “Because REASONS.”
“But where?” Cricket spiraled in the air. “There’s nothing out here. I didn’t know it would be like this.” She looked tired and worried, and Blue felt a surge of guilt for dragging her into his mess. He tried to imagine what it must be like for her: far from home, helping two runaway SilkWings, knowing how much trouble she’d be in if she was caught with them.
“Is that something over there?” Blue asked, pointing.
There was a dark slash in the unending sea of cracked earth and yellow grass.
“Let’s find out, let’s find out,” Swordtail said. He beat his wings and soared toward it.
It’s a hole, Blue thought as they drew closer. A really big hole. It looked as though the earth had suddenly dropped away here, a long time ago, leaving a cavernous shaft lined with moss-covered rocks and long, green plants trying to clamber out into the sunshine. It was impossible to see the bottom, even when they landed on the rim and tried to peer down into it. Outcroppings of rock blocked most of their view, and where they could see past those, all they saw was more darkness, disappearing down and down.
Swordtail used his claws to cut away the silk connecting him and Blue. Blue took a few wobbly steps, shaking out his legs and trying to get the feeling back into them.
“Are you all right?” he asked Cricket, who was crouching on the edge of the sinkhole, holding her glasses on with one talon while she peered down.
“Absolutely,” she said. “What is this? How deep do you think it goes? What’s at the bottom? How did it get this way? Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“I haven’t been out on the savanna much either,” he admitted. “I didn’t know it had sinkholes.”
“Are we going down it?” she asked, turning to Swordtail. “Can we?” Her eyes were shining, as though her tiredness had evaporated in the excitement of a new discovery.
“I don’t know,” he said, hopping from one foot to another with restless energy. “This seems like the most obvious place to hide, so I assume they’ll check here, and then we’ll be trapped at the bottom of a hole with no way to escape. I still think my elephant plan is the best! Elephants are great! I can look like an elephant, no problem!” He struck an odd, dramatic pose, which Blue guessed was supposed to look elephantesque.
“What do you think?” Cricket asked Blue.
Swordtail had a point. But where else could they hide? He turned to look over his shoulder at the distant shape of Wasp Hive.
For a moment, he thought his vision had gone blurry; then he thought, fleetingly, that a swarm of insects had surrounded the Hive. But finally, with a chill of terror, he realized that the buzzing motion around the city came from the wings of dragons, pouring out of every window and door and shaking the webs with the wind they raised.
Dawn was here. The hunt had begun.
“We go down,” he said. “Quickly, right now!”
Cricket didn’t hesitate; she dove over the edge and vanished. Swordtail hooked his front talons under Blue’s arms again and leaped off as well.
They dropped down and down, pushing off from the craggy, lichen-covered walls when they got too close and maneuvering around bulbous outcroppings. The air got cooler and more damp as they descended. The shaft was narrow, leaving barely enough room in places for Swordtail to keep his wings spread.
What if there is no bottom to this hole? Blue worried. Or what if the HiveWings get here before we find the bottom?
Did they know about this sinkhole? How long before they came to search it?
Finally, below his claws, Blue saw the rocks converge onto a kind of ground, although it was really just more rock. But at least he could stand on it, and it seemed to be the bottom of the hole. Swordtail let him down gently and hopped onto a ledge to stretch his wings. Blue glanced up at the tiny strip of sunlight far overhead, then around for Cricket.
The rock under his feet slanted down and away from the shaft into a dark tunnel. It was the only way Cricket could have gone, so he followed uneasily. After a few steps, the tunnel widened into a cave, although by now the light was so dim that he couldn’t tell how big it was. He heard the faint drip-drop of water somewhere up ahead.
“Cricket?” he whispered.
“Right here.” She materialized out of the dark and brushed his shoulder with her wing. “This cave is enormous! And watch your step, because there’s a lake that starts a little ways down this slope. A lake, Blue! Under the savanna! Would you have guessed? Isn’t that wild? And there’s something else strange, come see, or I guess, feel; seeing isn’t really an option down
He jumped back, thinking it was alive — but Cricket reached for it and guided it into his talons, so he could feel that it was a large object floating on the surface of the lake. And there was a rope tied to one end of it, which led to a stalagmite that jutted from the rocky floor.
A rope. Which meant someone had been here before them.
“What do you think it is?” she whispered to him.
“I have no idea,” he whispered back.
“Someone must have left it like this,” she said. “Maybe to carry things across the lake? But why not just fly across with whatever they had to carry? This is so mysterious!”
Blue heard the rustle of wings as Swordtail ducked into the cave with them. “I think I heard voices up above,” he whispered. “Can we go deeper?”
“Let’s see,” Cricket whispered back, barely a breath on the air.
They felt their way deeper into the cave, staying close to the wall and skirting the edge of the lake. Soon that became impossible, as they ran out of shoreline, and they had to wade into the cold, still silk of the water. It was terrifying, wading into the dark and ever-deepening water, but not as terrifying as the thought of the HiveWings behind them.
Blue shivered as the water climbed up his legs, lapped at his underbelly, and soon covered his wingbuds. He’d seen the ocean in the distance from the top of the webs, but he’d never been submerged in water and he certainly had no idea how to swim. If the water got any deeper, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to go on.
“There’s a passage here,” Cricket whispered, “or an alcove or something, I think.”
Ripples flickered around Blue as Cricket ducked away, then came back to tug on his arm. He held out his tail for Swordtail to catch, then let Cricket guide him under a dip in the roof.
Now he could feel walls on either side of him, and to his surprise, here and there he saw what looked like sticky trails of light webbing across the roof above, or sliding down the walls. Cricket paused and brought her nose closer to one of these, studying it curiously for a moment before moving on.
They waded forward for what felt like an eternity. And then the passage curved — and ahead of them, reflecting off the slick wet walls, was the glow of firelight.
Blue froze, touching Cricket’s wing. She stopped, too, with a little gasp.
Fire.
Is this it? Did we find where Queen Wasp is hiding the flamesilks?
Or … what are we about to walk into?
Blue glanced back toward Swordtail, whose face was dimly visible in the phosphorescent glow from the walls. Swordtail edged past them to take the lead, and they all inched forward, step by careful step.
There was a cavern ahead. Stalactites bubbled down from a high ceiling. Streaks of orange and white marbled the stone walls, shot through with veins of glittering black-and-gold ore. The water lapped against the shore here before continuing into another, wider tunnel. Rock formations twisted up in shapes like dragon tails, making the cavern look like a weird forest of petrified trunks.
The firelight wasn’t coming from any flamesilk dragons. It flickered from a small pile of burning sticks, not far from the water.
And next to the fire, sitting with its back against one of the stalagmites, was a creature Blue had never seen in any animal studies in school.
It looked a little bit like a monkey, but bigger and not quite so hairy, apart from a patch of floppy brown fur on top of its head. It had nimble little paws, which were holding something that it was gazing at intently. Parts of it were wrapped in something like a cocoon made of jaguar fur and deep red silk.
At first, it didn’t notice the three dragons emerging from the tunnel; it was too immersed in whatever it was looking at. Blue and Cricket exchanged wondering glances. She looked as bewildered as he felt, but also enchanted.
Then Blue stepped on a rock that turned under his talons, and he lurched forward with a small splash.
The creature’s head popped up and its eyes, as brown and big in its face as Cricket’s, went wide. It jumped to its feet, revealing that it stood on two paws instead of four, dropped whatever it had been looking at, and drew a long knife from its cocoon.
Blue and his friends stopped and stared at it. It stared at them.
What is it thinking? Blue wondered. Can it think? What does it know about dragons? Is it just scared, or is it having other emotions? What a sweet little face it has. Like a marmoset — but I’ve never seen a monkey with a knife before.
Sometimes a monkey wandered up into the webs by accident, long black spidery limbs racing up the Hive vines and out onto the silvery bridges. Blue remembered one that Io had played with for an entire day. She’d wanted to keep it, but her parents made her take it back to the savanna and release it. They told her that if the HiveWings found it, they might eat it, and that would be much more upsetting. It was hard to argue with that.
This monkey’s limbs seemed the wrong shape for climbing vines or swinging from trees. And its coiled energy was more like a panther’s, poised to spring at them.
“Do you think it’s really going to try stabbing us with that thing?” Cricket whispered.
Her voice broke the spell. The creature spun around and fled between the stalagmites, disappearing through a crack in the wall behind it.
“Oh no!” Cricket cried. “Wait, come back!” She floundered through the water up onto the shore and scrambled after the little animal. But the crack was too small for a dragon to fit through. She crouched beside the opening, trying to peek inside. “I promise we won’t hurt you, little monkey. What are you? Please come back!”
“That was really cute,” Blue said. He waded onto the shore, carefully skirting the fire so he wouldn’t accidentally put it out. After the darkness of the previous caves, it was nice to be able to see — and much warmer near the fire than in the lake.
“I thought it was freaky,” Swordtail said. “Weird little thing. Did you see how it was looking at us? It was — I don’t —” He interrupted himself with an absolutely enormous yawn.
“I really want to know what it was,” Cricket said, stamping one foot with frustration. “I thought I’d studied all the flora and fauna around here, even the prehistoric stuff. I don’t remember any pictures that looked like that.” She tipped her head up, staring into space as though she was flipping through pages in her mind. “Not a gorilla. Not an orangutan. Not a chimpanzee. What in the Hive … ?”
Blue picked up the object the creature had been looking at. “Oh wow. Cricket, check this out.”
She wound her way back through the stalagmites toward him. He turned the thing over in his claws. The outside was flexible leather, the inside was many layers of smooth beaten paper, and there were little marks all over each page.
“What?” Cricket said, astonished. She took it from him and flipped through it gently. “Is this a book? It can’t be! Monkeys can’t write books! Or read them!”
“It’s not a dragon book. It didn’t come from a Hive,” Blue pointed out. “Look how tiny it is.”
“A dollhouse book?” Cricket tried. “Which the monkey found somewhere?” She shook her head. “No, you’re right. This is the monkey’s book. When we came in, I thought its expression looked familiar — and that’s because it was reading.” She hugged the book to her chest. “Mystery animals in a cave under the savanna — who can READ! Blue, this is the biggest scientific discovery of our lifetime! I wouldn’t have to be a gardener if I told the queen about this. I’m sure she’d let me change disciplines so I could study them. Don’t you think?”
“I’m a little worried she’d have them all rounded up and eaten,” Blue admitted.
Cricket looked horrified. “No way! Is that really what you think of HiveWings? That because we eat meat, we’re heartless monsters? Do all SilkWings think that?”
“Um,” Blue said, “I mean … I w
Cricket frowned and rubbed her head, as though she’d never spent any time thinking about whether eating animals was “necessary.” “We don’t eat everything,” she said after a while. “We don’t eat lizards or snakes, since they’re probably related to us. And I’m sure nobody would eat a species that can read and write and might be as smart as we are.”
A loud rumbling sound broke into their conversation before Blue could answer. They both spun around in a fright — and discovered that it was the sound of Swordtail snoring.
The handsome SilkWing was passed out by the fire, wings flopped across the stone as though he’d staggered out of the water and collapsed in the first dry place he found.
“Well, that makes sense,” Blue said. “He did carry me halfway across the savanna. He probably needs to sleep for a week to recover.”
He caught himself. It was only a joke, but who knew what would happen to Swordtail as the stimulant wore off? They couldn’t afford to have Swordtail sleep for a week — they needed to get to Luna as soon as possible, before she emerged from her cocoon all alone.
“Do you want to sleep, too?” Cricket asked. “I can keep an eye out, in case any HiveWings come all the way down into the cave, find the passage, and follow it through to here … which I don’t think they will … ”
“No, you should sleep, and I’ll take first watch,” Blue said. “You were flying all night, too.” He could easily imagine how tired her wings must be. If he were in her scales, he knew he’d be feeling very anxious and emotional as well — given the stress of running away from her own tribe and upending her safe HiveWing life. Surely even the excitement of discovering a new intelligent species couldn’t outweigh the danger she’d put herself in.
Which she did for me. To help me.
“All right,” Cricket said with a yawn. “If you’re really sure, I wouldn’t mind sleeping a little bit.”
“Of course.” He watched her stretch her wings and curl up on the rock, close enough for him to touch her talons, if he needed to wake her. Her orange-gold scales rose and fell, slower and slower as she drifted off to sleep. The firelight flickered little shadows across her back, as though the inkblot splatter patterns were spreading and shrinking and dancing.