Fragment

9:11 P.M.

Pairs of hendropods grabbed Thatcher. He had frozen stiff in panic, making their job far more difficult. They carried him across the hand-ladder bridge and finally dropped him unceremoniously into the basket.

The door from the trunk of the tree exploded into a thousand pieces.

Nell whirled as two six-foot-long spikes reached through the shattered door.

A huge alpha spiger squeezed through onto the branch thirty feet behind her. It folded its spiked legs under it like a mantis shrimp as it scuttled forward, scanning her with swiftly moving multicolored eyes. Waves of orange, yellow, and pink light pulsed over waving stripes around its jaws.

“Nell, hazar-do-us!” Hender shouted.

“Come on, Nell!” Andy yelled.

The spiger’s vertical jaws, three feet tall, opened wide and she could smell its sour breath as it raised its striped haunches up behind it.

“Nell! Jump!”

She turned and jumped, grabbing hold of the first rung. Hender was there to meet her, but she swung quite capably hand over hand as Hender backed away rapidly in front of her, using four hands and keeping one eye on the spiger at her back.

The spiger advanced to the edge of the branch where she had jumped, smelling her, the eyes on its head and haunches locking on their target-then it used all six legs and its tail to hurl itself through the air after her.

Hender grabbed Nell with his legs and two arms, pulling her forward just as the spiger’s spikes lashed down through the air inches behind her head.

The spiger plummeted past the basket, snapping its jaws a few feet in front of Thatcher’s face, and fell with a piercing wail seven hundred feet to the sea below.

Hender dropped Nell into the basket and jumped in behind her.

The thick cable of rope had apparently been woven from some kind of pale green fiber. The basket was made of the same fiber laced through large skeletal plates from some creature, perhaps the mega-mantis. It creaked now and stretched, dangerously overloaded.

“OK!” Hender said.

The other hendropods warbled a musical cacophony as the two remaining spigers peered over the edge of the branch, trying to gauge the distance to the basket that dangled like a feast before them.

“We gotta go!” Zero shouted at Hender.

But Hender stood motionless, looking upward. “OK, dudes!” he yelled. Hender reached an arm two meters up and pulled a rope that unlatched the pulley; the basket descended as the huge wheel turned.

The hendropods, normally solitary, clung to each other in the center of the basket, watching the spigers above.

The island that had been their home and world forever disappeared into darkness as they descended.

Geoffrey and Nell found themselves lying next to each other on their stomachs, looking over the edge of the basket at the sea as they sank alongside the ancient cliff. Geoffrey waved a glass jar of glowing bugs over the side.

“Impressive moves back there, Duckworth. I thought we might lose you.”

“Thanks. I always was a tomboy.”

“In case we don’t make it, I just wanted to say…” He looked at her urgently, dropping all sarcasm. “There’s nothing sexier than a brilliant woman-even if she has a funny last name.”

“You mean I’m not beautiful?” she said.

“Maybe that came out wrong…”

She laughed and kissed him quickly on the lips as they plunged down toward the swirling sea. “In case we don’t make it,” she told him.

The crew of the Trident spotted the faint light sinking down the cliff and Captain Sol unlatched the winch to let the Zodiac out.

Two crewmen paddled the Zodiac as the winch-line unspooled.

“It could work, Captain,” Cynthea said, standing next to him at the stern of the Trident.

“Yes, it could work, Cynthea.” Captain Sol sighed as the deck heaved and some big swells moved under the ship.

Second mate Samir El-Ashwah and crewman Winger paddled the Zodiac.

“So far so good,” Samir said. “Steady, mate.”

Winger saw the Trident rolling on a swell behind them. “Looks like the Navy’s kicking up some wake on the way out.”

“Bloody great,” Samir said.

Heavy seas rolled toward them, submerging the towline and buffeting the Zodiac.

Samir pointed above. “There! Ya see ’em?”

A small green smudge of light was slowly descending the cliff.

“Yeah!” Winger exclaimed, narrowing his eyes against the saltwater spray of the buffeting waves.

Samir switched on a flashlight and wedged it in the bottom of the boat, lighting up the inside of the Zodiac like a lampshade.