Free Alight by Scott Sigler Page B

moves to the inside walls, checking them carefully, his thighbone held in front of him. Farrar takes the outside.
    Bishop remains at the fire pit, fingers drumming an absent pattern on the head of his axe.
    I kneel next to him. “Could they have heard us coming?”
    “No, we were very quiet. Even you and Spingate.”
    He sounds surprised by that. I take it as a compliment.
    I am both afraid and excited. We couldn’t have missed the fire-makers by much. They could be close. They might come back.
    Spingate joins us. She pokes at the ground next to the pit, pinches her fingers around something small and black—it’s a bone.
    “There’s a little bit of flesh on here,” she says. “This animal was cooked .”
    She waves her bracelet over the tiny bone. I wait for the jewels to give off the orange warning color, but they do not. Instead, they flash with a mixture of blues, greens, purples.
    Spingate smiles.
    “Edible,” she says. “No sign of the red mold’s toxin.”
    That food in the warehouse—if all we need to do is cook it, we’ll be fine.
    “Did the fire burn it off?”
    “It doesn’t work like that,” she says. “Fire kills the mold, but won’t neutralize the toxin secreted by the mold.”
    Dammit.

    Spingate turns the bone, looks at it from a different angle.
    “Maybe the mold can’t grow on live animals,” she says. “Or maybe this particular animal is resistant to it. We need to catch one to find out.”
    She doesn’t have answers, but at least there’s hope. We have to find the people who built this fire, befriend them if we can, learn their secrets.
    “Em, Bishop,” Farrar calls out softly. “Come see.”
    We join him at the collapsed wall. He taps the tip of his shovel against the rubble.
    “The broken edges are clean,” he says. “No moss or dirt on them. Something knocked this wall in, and very recently.”
    In the fading light, a spot on the ground just past the collapsed wall catches my eye. A patch of blackness. I walk to it, careful not to trip on the loose rubble. The spot is a neat hole, from something long and pointed punching into the dirt.
    Long and pointed…like the feet of the creature that chased us out of the city.
    “I think a spider knocked down this wall,” I say. “Maybe to get at the people who were inside.”
    Is that why the fire was abandoned? Whoever the fire-makers are, I hope they got away.
    We are all suddenly aware that danger could be close by. Our eyes flick to every growing shadow, to every dark spot in this tangled mass of yellow, green and brown.
    Those colors…the spider’s shell matches them. Exactly .
    I glance at Bishop, Farrar, Coyotl. Their charcoal and vines and mud…camouflage that lets them blend in to the jungle.
    “We have to get out of here,” I say.
    Bishop nods, his mud-smeared face turning this way, then that, white eyes wide and darting.
    “Back to the city wall,” he says. “And move quietly .”
    —

    Darkness falls. For only the second time in my short life, I see stars.
    We walk along the city wall, quiet as can be. We don’t use the flashlights for fear they might draw attention from the animals screaming in the night, or from the dreaded spider.
    Bishop leads us; Farrar and Coyotl stay a few paces behind. I can’t help but look up through the thick jungle canopy. Countless pinpricks of bright light, like sparkling jewels, impossibly distant and immensely beautiful. There are two big circles up there as well: one bluish, the other maroon. Spingate says the circles are moons —small planets that orbit Omeyocan. That sounds impossible to me, but if Spingate says it, I believe her.
    City wall on our right, dark jungle ruins on our left. The spider could be anywhere. At night it would be almost invisible in the trees, even if it was only a few steps away. But there was that whine—if it comes, hopefully we’ll hear it before it sees us. If so, maybe we can hide.
    Spingate says the spider isn’t alone, that there have to