Lucia pulled herself over to Carlo and he handed her the spyglass.
“I can’t promise you anything from one incident,” she said. “But they probably are cos.”
“That will have to be good enough,” Carlo decided. “We have to take them.”
Lucia returned the spyglass, then scrambled back to the fork in the branches where she’d tied up her equipment. She left the compressed air cylinder where it was and began unreeling the hose with the gun. Her safety rope was beginning to get tangled; Carlo moved to another branch to give her room. “Quickly!” he urged her. The male was almost finished with the lizard. The dart gun had its own small sighting telescope; Carlo watched Lucia take aim, then turned his attention to her targets.
The gun could shoot a dozen darts in rapid succession. Two struck the male in the back; the female barely had time to look around before Lucia planted three in her chest. The arborines’ posture slackened, but they clung on to their branches. They might manage to drag themselves a few strides back into the trees before they were completely paralyzed, but once the toxin took full effect they wouldn’t be going anywhere for six or seven bells. Carlo considered waiting for Amanda to return before trying to retrieve the animals; the three of them working together would make the job easier.
A slender gray arm reached out from behind a clump of yellow flowers, grabbed the male by a lower wrist and yanked him out of sight.
Carlo was dumbfounded. “Did you see—?” Before he could finish speaking, the paralyzed female had gone the same way.
Lucia said, “It looks as if their friends are trying to hide them. We should—”
Carlo turned to her; she was struggling to untangle her safety rope. “Can you push me across first?” he begged her. She’d spent half her life in the forest, so she’d have no trouble following him unaided, but after his last misjudged leap he didn’t trust himself to aim his own body across the gap.
“All right.”
Carlo unhitched his own rope from the tree, tucked its coils into his harness, then crawled onto the branch in front of her. She took his lower hands in her upper pair, and they both bent their elbows, making a catapult of their arms. Carlo hadn’t done this with anyone since childhood, playing with Carla in some ancient weightless stairwell.
Lucia gripped the branch tightly with her lower hands, sighted their quarry and maneuvered Carlo’s body into alignment. They unlinked their fingers, leaving their hands flat, palm against palm.
“Now!” she said. Carlo pushed against her and she reciprocated, propelling him away from the tree.
His progress through the air felt painfully slow. Flurries of dead petals swirled out of his path; even inanimate matter could outrace him. But as he drew closer to the far side of the gap the onrushing branches began to look threatening. He reached out and grabbed them, twigs scraping his palms and his shoulder muscles jarring as he brought himself to an ungainly halt.
Carlo looked around to orient himself. He was clinging to a pair of jutting branches, and he recognized the yellow flowers in front of him; Lucia had sent him to exactly the right spot. He could see her preparing to launch herself, but he decided not to wait for her; there were twigs rebounding just a stretch or so ahead of him, and if he delayed giving chase he risked losing the trail. The arborines were agile, but their paralyzed companions would make unwieldy cargo. If he could pursue them closely enough to put them in fear of ending up in the same condition then they’d have no choice but to abandon their friends.
Carlo dragged himself toward the retreating animals, moving as fast as he could, dislodging whole bright blossoms and snapping small twigs as he advanced. The tree’s less yielding parts pummeled and lacerated him in revenge, but he persisted. It didn’t take long for him to lose all sense of his location, but he kept catching glimpses of the arborines, near-silhouettes against the floral light, deftly pushing branches aside and swinging their passengers this way and that to spare them the kind of punishment Carlo was receiving. Their gracefulness was as humbling as it was infuriating, impossible not to admire even as it mocked his own brutish efforts. If the animals had been unencumbered he would not have had the slightest chance of staying close to them, and as it was they were going to make him suffer.
“Carlo!” Lucia wasn’t far behind him.
“I still have them in sight,” he called back to her. “Just follow me!”
“Take it easy, or you’ll make yourself sick,” she warned him. “You haven’t been in a proper bed for days.”
The arborines hadn’t been in a bed, ever, but their smaller size made air cooling more effective. Then again, they were carrying twice their usual mass—and it was his ancestors who’d developed a way to store heat and discharge it later, letting them grow larger than their air-cooled cousins. The question was, had he already saturated that heat store?
Carlo pushed on, maintaining his pace, sure the gap was narrowing. He couldn’t tell how much of the stinging sensation in his skin was due to hyperthermia and how much to the thrashing he was getting from the obstacles in his path, but the arborines had to be tiring too.
He forced his way through a tangle of vines sprouting brilliant green flowers and almost collided with the paralyzed male, drifting alone between the branches. Carlo chirped in triumph. They’d made a hard choice and abandoned one friend, but the female they were still carrying was larger. And though they’d lightened their collective load, he couldn’t see it being much help to them: trying to share the burden as they moved through this painfully narrow labyrinth would only complicate the task.
“Lucia!” he called out. “They’ve left the male! Can you watch him? I’m going on.” He would not have put it past the arborines for one of them to double back and spirit the male away if he was left unattended.
“All right,” Lucia replied reluctantly.
Carlo couldn’t see his quarry. He waited, surveying the luminous forest around him, ignoring the mites that were starting to insinuate themselves into his broken skin. Then he caught the tell-tale twitch of a branch in the distance, and set off in pursuit once more.
The arborines had changed direction. Carlo had been more or less lost from the start, but at least he’d recognized when he’d been traveling from the outer tips of branches in toward the trunk. Now he was being led in some kind of arc, or possibly a helix, crossing from branch to branch around the axis of the tree.
It was exhausting work, propelling himself across these treacherous gaps full of fine twigs that scraped against him—sometimes snapping, sometimes rebounding, deflecting him unpredictably. But it had to be less punishing than penetrating deeper into the thicket of branches. His skin tingled, no doubt from trapped heat as much as every other insult, but whatever failures he might yet be forced to swallow he was not going to abandon this chase out of sheer lack of stamina.
Carlo could see the three arborines clearly now, framed between thick branches bearing radiant blue flowers. The ambulatory female gripped the paralyzed one with her right hands, while the male kept pace beside them, offering occasional nudges whose purpose and efficacy were hard to judge. The darkness behind them was tinged with the red moss-light of the cavern’s ceiling. They were heading straight for the canopy, Carlo realized. The female had seen him stranded there; she knew that if they leaped through the air to another tree he’d either be afraid to follow them, or his aim would be so bad that he’d never catch up with them.
Carlo quickened his pace, pushing off harder from each branch, trying to maintain momentum, fighting a powerful urge to be more cautious. Weightless or not, now that he had it fixed in his mind that he was moving
More and more moss-light was penetrating the canopy, but Carlo had the arborines fixed in his sight, and he could see that he was gaining on them. Their coordination as they swung between the branches was a marvel, and the male seemed to have taken on a kind of shock-absorbing role—pushing back on the paralyzed female when she threatened to tear herself out of her friend’s grip through sheer momentum—but all this heroic effort had a cost. They were flagging. They were not going to escape.
The male leaped off to one side, shrieking noisily, as if he imagined he could serve as a decoy. Carlo ignored him and forced himself onward; his own strength was dwindling rapidly, but he was sure he still had the edge. All
