Dagger's voice called out behind me, but I didn't stop. He might have been strong or stupid enough to stand there and discuss what all this meant, but whatever gratefulness the men had for saving their lives was gone.
Besides, I'd dreamed of running through trees my entire life.
Oh Xyla, if you could see this.
The trees wove a maze different from the Belly, my feet unused to the uneven footing. Even so, the beauty felt somehow right, as if my blood and bones remembered the earth and trees. Xyla and I had read countless stories with the towering plants, discussed them a thousand times, but words did them no justice. A fingertip graze from my magnets in my metal hand told me there was no metal in them. So, how then, did they stay upright? There wasn't time to stop and investigate.
Voices called out behind me, but none pursued me. I knew what Xyla would say: Men are all the same: always talking, fighting, or both. Still, if the Kaptain was telling the truth, and we had to survive a week before the Letter Trial, then the best thing I could do was put space between me and them. Dagger's dark eyes flashed in my head— I pushed the image away. This was a new trial, and whatever had brought us together in the depths of the tank was gone now.
I kept running, the trees reaching up straight and still, the bright, golden light offering no shadows and escape—everything the Belly wasn't. Still, the room had to end somewhere.
After a few minutes of running, my breath and legs demanded I slow, and I allowed myself one small moment of curiosity. Flesh then metal fingers ran over a branch, and plucked a single, perfect leaf. It was thin, like paper, but waxy, with tiny, branching veins inside and a soft, nearly sweet scent. Every now and then, in the Belly we had something green in our soup—but they were sad wilted things, not like this. I placed the leaf carefully in my pants' pocket. After all, I needed proof for Xyla, and here in the trees, it felt like anything was possible.
Farther ahead a wall of green finally emerged, and I slowed as I approached the end of the forest. An ivy covered wall blocked my path as I stepped out from the trees. The wall curled away from me in both directions, revealing both the incredible size of the room, and that it was most likely a circle—strange in and of itself.
"Come out and play, little fox!" Skull's voice rang through the trees behind me.
Every instinct from the Belly screamed for me to run. Instead I hit the ground and forced my body into stillness, laying flat and pressing one ear to the ground. Nothing. I dug my metal fingers into the earth. No vibrations rose up to greet me. Unlike metal, the earth held its secrets.
Xyla's voice filled my head, in her all-knowing tone. Breathe, Z. The Letter Trial isn't for a week. Why would they let the men kill you before then? Unless too many men really was a problem, and this was their solution. Now Yaneli's voice rose, as if they were having an argument in my head. Don't trust any of them Z. You have everything you need to survive. Use it.
Through the trees, men crashed and called out. It seemed like they had finally come up with a plan: find me.
The room was massive, but with no place to hide, I couldn't run from the other men forever. My talents from the Belly wouldn't help me here. And the little I knew of the Jackals was based more in fiction than fact: they ate the bodies of their dead, they had fangs instead of teeth, their eyes glowed red. Then again, I hadn't seen a single Pucker with a tail, so maybe the stories were only that.
Still, I needed to do something. I lifted my head just enough to watch figures in the distance move through the maze of trees, then crawled closer to the ivy-covered wall. We'd come into the room through a door, it didn't take an engineer to reason out there had to be doors that led out. My steel fingers dug through several inches of thick vines, a dusty, ripe scent wafting out when I finally felt the knowing tug from my magnetic fingertips, and with it relief. This was a wall, just like any other in the Beast.
So how to get through it?
Then, not ten feet from where I laid, a girl stepped free of the vines. I could only stare in shock.
A Jackal. She's a Jackal.
Unlike the stories, her eyes didn't glow red. If not for her clean skin, and the strange, patchwork dress of green cloth, she could have been from the Belly. Had I not been laying on my belly, in a strange room hunted by a group of dangerous men, I would have been disappointed.
The men's voices grew louder: they were headed this way. I stood up and stepped closer to her, hoping this wasn't some sort of trap. Her lips lifted wider, revealing white, straight teeth, like little pearls all in a line. Not fangs— that's good at least. There was no fear in her stance, only a quiet confidence that reminded me of... well, myself. For a moment I wondered if she was fake, a sort of projection, but then she took a step toward me. I turned to the vine covered wall and pointed, miming opening a door. She only smiled wider.
"There she is!" Louder voices this time. The girl reached into the mass of vines. A soft metallic scraping noise came from the base of the wall and I watched as a narrow, round hole opened where the earth met the vines. A steep chute led down into darkness. She didn't say anything, but it didn't matter. A belly rat didn't ask questions—it just took the darkest, quickest path to escape. The men's voices called louder behind me now, so I took a deep breath, held it, and then slid into darkness.
Please don't empty into an Incinerator.
The tunnel dropped sharp and then spiraled in pitch darkness as I imagined the worst; getting dumped into dark water, or flames or—