Firefly | Shelha Series 5 | ✔

Buckthorn

Loki did not recover for several days. Sethral found she adjusted quickly to the daytime workload. Now able to focus on something other than making it to the end of her next step, she began to scan the canyon and memorize everything she saw, heard or smelled. The caves she had been to so far—fungus gardens, insect gardens, living spaces and an infirmary—had so far been dead ends, but there was a spot near the bottom of the canyon that intrigued her. There were several water-holes in the nets along the canyon bottom. When creatures dropped their buckets in most of these, the lines they dropped them on were swept taut by the river. One place, though, was different. For one, it was right near the canyon wall. For two, a bucket dropped here swept briefly away from the wall before succumbing to the dominant current. It was like there was a separate stream of water at the spot, emanating from a tunnel hidden beneath the nets.

She had still seen no sign of the Coppertails, but she caught Fletch's scent on a wall on the fourth or fifth day. He was not distressed enough to have lost his brother, so Taz must be okay, too.

"I told you," said Loki when she told him, though she could hear the tremble of relief in his voice.

"And if all of us so far have been here and uninjured, there's a really high chance we all are." Sethral closed her eyes. As it had for days, Phoenix's haunted face played across her vision. She faced it. It hurt, but she deserved that pain and she wanted to feel it. You made him look at you that way, a small part of her brain repeated. Until you hurt as much as he does, you can't understand how he feels.

Aside from the burns sealing the ends of the big Saggitayria's wings, she had seen no evidence of fire in the canyon colony, and there were plants that could have done the cauterizing. She wondered if the creatures even knew what fire was. In such a damp, thick forest, natural fires would be next to nonexistent. She wondered if the colony's ignorance had saved Phoenix's life, or taken it.

Loki had fallen asleep. Sethral rolled onto her back and listened as hard as she could to the silence, trying to detect anything in the sky above. But like the last days had all been, the night seemed clear. They had hauled twice the usual amount of water up to the gardens today. It must be a dry spell.

She was about to drift off when other noises echoed up the canyon, faint and far off at first, then louder. Then Spear-knocker's spear banged against her cage vines like a thunderclap. Sethral had never been able to not startle when he did that; in the near-darkness it nearly gave her a heart attack. She bounded upright. Spear-knocker grabbed the vines and squinted through them until he spotted her, then ran to Loki's cage and smashed his spear against it too. He always came to her first, though Loki was at the end of the cage line. Loki too was in his cage. The white Watermouse ran to the rest of the cages, repeating his check. At Whipper's there was shouting and more banging than anywhere. Whipper's screech-chatter cut it short. Spear-knocker left and shouted across the canyon. Nobody here ever shouted.

But what happened next was even more chilling. Sethral had to scrub her eyes to make sure she was seeing properly as a cluster of fireflies appeared on the opposite canyon wall. Then the cluster blossomed. Like the pulse of a heartbeat, the lights flowed from a cave and radiated outwards, moving in ribbons that dipped and swayed in eerie synchrony. It was like watching a giant, glowing spider spread its legs across the canyon wall. Then the legs began to fracture. Clusters of fireflies broke away and vanished into caves, then reappeared from them. They began to spread across the bridges. Soon the entire canyon was sparkling with disparate moving lights. One bobbed past Sethral's cage, then another. She gripped the vines until her knuckles cracked. She knew that bobbing.

Another light was approaching, a larger swarm behind it. White Watermice whispered and darted. One fumbled with the door of the cage between Sethral and Loki. When it swung open, a huge shape bounded inside and let himself be locked in. Sethral could not tear her eyes from the lights casting a cool glow over the white Watermice and the path. Bubble-creatures, the lights flashing from points in their centers and reflected around their globe-like bodies, bobbed in swarms wherever the white Watermice walked.