danger. If anything, I just felt embarrassed for getting careless. I picked myself up, feeling for bruises, as Kelvin and Tarsi appeared above.
“Are you okay?” Tarsi asked.
I looked up. “I’m fine. Just feeling stupid.”
More heads appeared around the hole as the rest of the group caught up.
“Maybe we should explore this one,” Mindy said.
I grabbed the ladder of brambles ahead of me and began crawling out.
“I say we go until it gets dark or rains.”
“Maybe this was a sign, though.”
“Now you sound like Oliver.”
I felt like saying something in his defense, then froze at the sound of a distant and faint rumbling.
“Quiet up there,” I hissed.
A few people kept whispering, arguing about what to do with the rain coming.
“Keep it down,” I begged. I lowered myself a few feet and pressed my ear to the brambles.
Kelvin bent his waist over the edge. He grasped the limbs above me and lowered his head down near mine. “What is it?” he whispered.
I held up my hand. It wasn’t thunder, so my first thought was the beginnings of another earthquake, but it sounded too high-pitched and consistent to be that. The group above began laughing at something—drowning out the sound—and by the time Kelvin shut them up, the noise was gone or too faint to hear. We waited a second to see if it would come back, but the roll of distant thunder had me wondering if it had ever been there at all.
“Did you hear any of that?” I asked Kelvin.
He nodded, then pulled his head out of the hole.
“What was it?” Tarsi asked.
“Probably his stomach,” Kelvin said. He reached his hand down for me. “C’mon,” he said, helping me up.
After another few hours of hiking, the edge of the canopy finally came into view. The sun had begun moving behind the darkening clouds, which rumbled louder and more frequently as they approached. Only the base of the nearest mountain remained visible between the canopy and the storm, which forced me to concentrate on a single, jagged pattern of rocks to aim for lest we begin walking in circles.
“End of the road up there,” I said, stopping to allow the others to catch up. I watched as Karl and Mindy began gathering some of the chips the vinnies preferred while several others noted the location of a hole or two.
“Are you sure that’s the edge?” Jorge asked, squinting ahead.
“Yeah, I can see it,” Tarsi said, pointing out past me.
“Why are we stopping here, then?”
“Because I don’t want to keep walking while it thins out,” I said. “Besides, think of the size of the clearings between the trees. We might be past the trunk of this one already.”
There were grunts of accord, then Leila voiced a fear I think many of us shared: “What if there isn’t a way down this tree?” she asked.
“Then we build a shelter up here,” Kelvin said. “There’s plenty of building material. There’s food—and water coming. We’ll keep exploring until we find something.”
“Speaking of shelter, I just felt a spot of rain.”
As if to punctuate the sentence, a large drop smacked a nearby leaf with an audible crack.
“We need to set up the tarps,” Tarsi said. “I’m dying of thirst.”
The clouds swallowed the last of the sun, and a premature darkness fell across the landscape. Fumbling with Kelvin’s knots, I managed to loosen the safety rope; I dropped it around my feet. I untied my shirt from around my waist and shrugged it back on, the chill setting in quickly.
“Let’s camp here for the night,” Mindy suggested.
“Agreed,” said Karl.
The rain pattered down around us, and I cursed our stupidity for waiting so late to get settled. The rush of reaching the edge had interfered with good sense. Around us, dozens of the smaller vinnies began scampering to and fro, our constant companions seeming to react to the moisture. Only, instead of looking for shelter, their number appeared to be swelling.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones getting thirsty,” Tarsi said.
Leila pulled her tarp out of her pack. “Let’s set up to collect some water.”
“Are they coming out of any one hole more than another?” I asked.
“Karl and I saw a whole train coming out of one back there,” Mindy said, pointing back the direction we’d come.
“What are you thinking?” Kelvin asked.
“Just trying to find something that separates them. I feel like we’re sitting on top of a maze, and I don’t want to just start at random.”
“And I don’t want to get trampled,” Jorge said.
“I’ll go explore it,” said Samson. Vincent agreed, and the two of them set off, but not before dropping their scraps of tarp and water containers.
“I say we set up close to their hole,” Tarsi said. “We can take shelter in it while the water puddles.”
We thought that was the best plan and followed the two boys back toward the hole. Meanwhile, hundreds of vinnies could be seen writhing across the landscape all the way into the distance. Tarsi stood beside me, watching them. “Almost feels like a party up here,” she said.
“Yeah,” Kelvin said, handing us one side of a tarp. “I just hope the grown-ups aren’t invited.”
• 26 •
Down
Yet another sleepless night ensued as the rain thundered down on the leaves above us. Our entire group had retired into the large tunnel Karl and Mindy had found, but it was impossible to sleep with the sporadic vinnie traffic and the rough tangle of woven limbs beneath us.
Kelvin and Samson went up onto the canopy once to cut some leaves away and bring them down for bedding, but the waxy surface was too slick to sleep on thanks to the slope. And just like the major tunnel we had come up, the only flat dip in the upper section was soggy with collected water.
I rarely used the flashlight in order to conserve our only battery, which meant a night of damp and uncomfortable darkness. Whenever a vinnie would creep up from below, one of us would shriek in terror, causing the rest of the group to shift out of the way as it pushed itself up to the canopy. Nobody wanted to be the lowest person, the one the vinnies reached first, which resulted in a tight clump up where the slope was steepest. We clung to the brambles and each other, shivering and miserable.
We waited all night for the precious sun to come up. Minutes ticked by like hours. We took turns asking our neighbors what time they thought it was, but the answers were nothing more than guesses. I could feel the group growing restless, the reaction to a passing vinnie turning into anger rather than annoyance. Several times, Jorge crawled up and lifted the flap of leaves above us, poking his head out to look for the sun. After the fourth or fifth time, someone told him to give it up as each peek just brought down a small shower of cold rain.
“I don’t think it’s coming,” he said. “I think it’s morning already, but the clouds are so thick the sun can’t get through.”
Looking up, I could see the faintest of silhouettes around me.
There did seem to be light filtering in from somewhere.
“I can’t stand this,” someone said.
“We need to just take our chances and go down. I’d rather be walking or riding a vinnie than sitting here like this.”
“Agreed. My ass is cramping.”
