“No,” he said.
He bent down, picked up a larger stone from the gravel bed, and tossed it toward the vine. Where the rock struck, the leafy cord gave a muscular twitch, and hooked barbs sprang out, glistening with sap.
“Poisonous,” the boy said. “Stings very bad, then you die.”
She flinched, thinking about how blithely she had entered this bower earlier. She watched those hooks retract again, reminded of an Australian rain forest vine that was armed with similar barbed hooks. She tried to remember the name, but the growing fog in her mind made it harder and harder to think.
Off at the clearing’s edge, the Megatherium returned a paw to the gravel, its claws digging furrows. Whatever fear held it back was waning.
The boy found her hand and squeezed tightly.
More shadows shifted around the edges of the glade, closing in around them.
Jenna pulled the boy closer and slightly behind her, ready to protect him. She whispered to him.
“What’s your name?”
1:48 P.M.
A concerned voice drew Kendall’s nose out of the stack of Cutter’s research notes. He glanced over to see Cutter’s wife enter the lab. She looked distraught, lifting an arm upon seeing her husband.
“As-tu vu Jori?”
“Jori?” Cutter asked, crossing from a workstation toward his wife, speaking French. “I thought he was with you.”
Ashuu shook her head.
Kendall placed a finger down on the paper to mark his place. He had been reading rapidly for the past few minutes, not sure how long Cutter would allow him access to these files. They concerned his experiments with magnetism to shatter XNA strands, ripping those iron backbones under just the right pulse. He had scribbled down the man’s findings on a notepad: must generate a field strength of at least 0.465 Tesla using a static magnetic field.
“We’ll check the cameras,” Cutter said, touching his wife’s shoulder reassuringly. “You know the boy. He’s always exploring. He’s at that age, full of curiosity, his hormones beginning to surge, struggling to find his place in that world between a boy and a man.”
Cutter crossed to Kendall and shooed him out of the way. “You can read those later.”
Kendall rolled his chair aside, taking the papers with him. He had dimmed the monitor after seeing Jenna leave her cage and wander into the forest. He hadn’t wanted to see what happened from there. Cutter woke the screen back up, returning the view into that forest clearing.
Kendall had been about to return to the notes when movement caught his eye on the screen. Jenna had returned, her back against those cages—but she wasn’t alone any longer.
A young boy had her by the hand, holding a cattle prod.
Cutter leaned closer. “Jori . . .”
Ashuu hurried forward, saw the screen, and let out a small gasp of fear, clutching her throat.
Cutter turned, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gently but firmly shifted her toward Mateo. “Stay here, mon amour. I’ll get our boy.”
Kendall kept staring at the screen. He saw a dark, hulking shadow move into the clearing. Whatever it was, it remained at the periphery, but he imagined it was what he had briefly spotted earlier. He pictured those claws, that shaggy dark coat.
Megatherium.
A creature out of the last Ice Age.
“Look!” Kendall called out, drawing the other’s attention back to the screen.
Cutter stepped over, glanced at the monitor, and swore.
By now more shadows shifted at the edges.
“You’ll never make it down there in time,” Kendall said. “But look at Jenna. Look at what she’s doing.”
1:49 P.M.
C’mon . . .
Jenna faced the camera. It was strapped high up a tree, pointed down into this glade. Earlier, she knew she must have been under surveillance. Luckily the boy had known where the camera was located.
She craned up to the lens and pointed an arm toward the cages, while making a cutting motion across her own throat.
Turn the damned electricity off.
The boy called to her. “Light is green!”
Finally.
She swung back to the cage. They had two options: hide inside and hope someone reelectrified the bars again . . . or travel the boy’s path up into the canopy.
It was not a hard choice.
She glanced over to the Megatherium. The beast stood half in the clearing, half in the forest, balancing at that edge. She remembered it rising up to its full twelve-foot-height, each claw eighteen inches long. She didn’t feel like trusting her life—or the boy’s—to those thin steel bars, electrified or not.
And it wasn’t just this one sloth they needed to fear.
She had caught glimpses of at least another four.
Pointing to the top of the cage, she said, “Up you go.”
Jori passed her his cattle prod and clambered like a monkey up the bars. Once he reached the top, she passed the prod up to him. He crouched above, covering her, snapping sparks of electricity toward the Megatherium in the clearing.
She grabbed the cage, set a foot in the first crossbar—and watched as a sloth crashed out of the forest on the far side of the pens and came charging toward her.
She realized her mistake.
It hadn’t been fear that held off the pack.
The beasts had waited until they knew the electricity was off, and not likely to be turned on again, using the boy like a test balloon. As long as he was up there, they knew they could attack without fear of getting shocked.
“Jori! Jump!”
She got the door open a second before the sloth struck the far side. She rolled inside the pen and slammed the door. Overhead, Jori leaped from the top, caught hold of a branch, and flipped expertly over it.
Under his heels, the sloth hit the triple pen, rocking the entire unit up on one edge. As the beast reared, claws grabbed the top edge, ready to topple the cages the rest of the way over. She would be trapped inside if it landed door side down.
“Jenna!”
Jori hung upside down and dropped the cattle prod toward her. Rather than falling cleanly through the bars, it struck askew, and began to roll down the slanted side of the pen, right between the paws of the giant. She scrabbled for it, grabbed the handle, and flipped its business end toward the towering sloth. She stabbed at the tender armpit, where it was less furred, and the contact points exploded against its skin, looking hot enough to sear.
The Megatherium bellowed and fell away, letting the cage settle back into place. Twisting to the side, the creature dropped down, licking at the sting under its arm, and retreated.
Jenna popped back out of the cage, waving the prod broadly, trying to encompass the entire clearing.