We’re on another planet.”

Yoshi jolted awake, his eyes opening to a sky without stars.

Had he really heard the murmured words? Or had he been dreaming?

He sat up, shivering in the cold. Looked around.

“Sorry,” came a whisper from the darkness.

It was Molly who’d spoken. She’d said the same thing hours ago when she’d floated back to the ground—we’re on another planet—in the same stunned voice. Now she was sitting up by the dead fire, framed by the pale horizon.

She pointed at the sky.

Yoshi looked up and came fully awake.

At some point the mist had cleared a little. Now the two moons were dimly visible from here on the ground. Close together, red and green, they stared down at him like the mismatched eyes of some vast monster.

“Did you think I was kidding?” Molly whispered. Her smile glimmered in the dark.

Yoshi shrugged. Somehow, teleportation to another planet seemed harder to believe than being taken away on a spaceship. Or at least harder to come back from.

But those were definitely moons in the sky. Plural.

He decided to change the subject.

“Too hungry to sleep?” His own empty belly had been keen and sharp in his dreams. Last night Molly had offered him one of her food bars, but he’d said no. It was his own fault he’d set out to explore the jungle with nothing but a sword.

“Not hungry.” She looked at the others, both asleep. “Just nervous about what might be out there. I thought I’d keep watch.”

“Alone?” Yoshi shook his head. “You mean, you’ve been up all night?”

She nodded, looking only half awake.

“Did anything try to eat us?” he asked.

Molly didn’t smile, just turned toward the darkness.

“There was a noise.”

Yoshi frowned. The jungle was full of noises—the buzz of insects, the flutter of birds, the scampering of small feet through the undergrowth. And always the shushing of wind in the leaves and fronds.

He listened but didn’t hear anything beyond the usual ruckus.

“What kind of noise?” he asked.

“Like a foghorn, maybe. Far away.”

“You mean, a ship?”

She shook her head. “No, an animal. But a really big one.”

“Oh.” Yoshi patted his katana. “Well, maybe it’s big enough to feed eight people.”

“Big enough to eat eight people, you mean.”

Yoshi considered this. “Then it’s probably too big to sneak up on us. You should get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

She looked at him a moment, weighing the offer. Like she didn’t trust him not to fall asleep.

“I’ve got stuff to do.” He pulled out the piece of tanglevine he’d saved and started to peel the leaves away. It was green, though many of the plants here were red as blood.

Molly just stared at him. “Um, is that what I think it is?”

“Yes. I saved some.”

Her eyes widened. “What for?”

“To study. I’m pretty sure it’s not edible. All muscle.” Yoshi had to smile. “I didn’t know engineers were so squeamish.”

“Anna loves dissecting things.” Molly’s gaze stayed locked on the dead vine. “But I prefer stuff that isn’t squishy. Give me a user manual and numbered parts.”

“Ah, you like order. You and my father would get along.”

Molly looked up at Yoshi. His words had come out colder than he’d meant them to.

He turned away and added mildly, “Even dead, the vine is very strong. Useful, maybe. I bet it holds more weight than those bungee cords.”

“We want stretchy, not strong. We crash into trees a lot.” Molly shuddered. “Also, I’m not wrapping a dead thing around my waist.”

“You never had a leather belt? That’s made out of a dead thing.”

“Okay, I’m not wrapping a dead alien thing around my waist.”

Yoshi shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’ll hang on to it, just in case. We might be stuck working with squishy stuff for a while.”

“You’re probably right,” Molly sighed. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

“Then sleep,” he said, but she was already stretching out on the stony ground. A moment later, her eyes were closed.

Yoshi pulled the rest of the leaves off the tanglevine, then tied it to his scabbard, which was made of sharkskin. Another predator, like the vine.

He slid his katana out, inspected the shine on the blade. Perfect.

There was nothing to do but stare out into the darkness and listen to the jungle. All together it was a roar, like ocean waves rumbling in chorus. But each sound had its own little story—the shriek and flutter of two birds fighting, the skittering of a creature along a branch. Nothing deadly.

But not long before dawn, Yoshi heard something bigger out there. Something pushing through the trees, making branches creak and snap.

Something that moved with purpose and strength.

He tensed, hand on the pommel of his sword, eyes aching as he peered into the darkness. Finally, the sounds faded, until he wasn’t sure if he had imagined them. It was Molly’s fault, for talking about monsters that sounded like foghorns. There was probably nothing out there.

But Yoshi was glad when morning came, and the horizon finally started to turn bloodred.

When the others were finally awake, the four of them tied themselves together—with bungee cords, not tanglevine—and started to jump for home. They followed a rushing stream that ran away from the waterfall, back toward the plane.

It was Molly’s idea, a way to find the closest source of fresh water to camp. The glimmer below was easy to spot through the trees, reflecting the white sky. The stream led them on a winding path, but every ten jumps or so, one of them was flung higher to look for the crashed airplane.

It all seemed sensible to Yoshi, and he let the three engineers do their work. They saw everything as a puzzle to be solved, which kept them focused, instead of worrying about the fact that none of them might ever make it home.

They listened nervously for the “shredder birds,” like rabbits in an open field. Like prey.

He decided not to tell them about the large beast he’d heard in the night. It would only scare them and had probably been his imagination anyway.

The engineers were wary of the taller trees that sprouted from the jungle. These trees were spindly, soaring up to disappear into the mist, and came in perfectly round clusters. Even weirder, every cluster seemed to be exactly the same diameter.

“That looks designed,” Yoshi said to Molly when they landed a few jumps from one of the towering stands of trees.

“I know.” She was untangling her bungee cord. “Like a sign of intelligent life, right? I’d love to check them out, but listen.”

Yoshi closed his eyes, and deep within the babble of birds and insects he heard a sound that made his skin crawl. It was almost a growl, like pigs grunting.

“Your ‘shredder birds’?”

She nodded, and when they jumped again, it was in the opposite direction.

As they soared, Yoshi shook off the creepiness of the shredder sound and went back to enjoying the heady feeling of floating through the misty branches, a sword on his back.

It was like being a warrior in a fantasy. As if all his years of manga, anime, and movies—and the sword training it had inspired—had been in preparation for this place.

Whatever this place was. It still felt contained to Yoshi, moons or not. More like a huge starship than a whole world. The mist was a low ceiling overhead, the dense jungle like walls around them. And those neat circles of trees were something from a giant’s garden.

But mostly there was that rumble he’d felt from beyond the waterfall. A vast sound, like the roar of space on the other side of a hull.

Though space was silent, wasn’t it?

The roar of engines, then.

He had to go back and discover what his radio had picked up, once the whole starvation problem had been solved. Maybe there was a huge transmitter broadcasting to distant stars.

Whether this was a starship, another planet, or whatever, it made the concerns of his father seem so small. Calligraphy and grammar. Business etiquette and making money.

None of it compared to this—a whole world to explore, monsters and all. Maybe a whole universe.

Did you do anything useful today, son?

Not much. Just learned to fly.

Yoshi had almost forgotten about the shredder birds when they attacked.

An unearthly screaming came out of the mist, and Javi cried out. Anna switched the device off for a split second, then back on, bending their course downward. With a sickening lurch, Yoshi found himself crashing through layers of branches that scratched and slapped. The creek they’d been following loomed below.

When they were only a few feet from the ground, Anna turned off the device again, and they all splashed heavily into the cold, shallow water. Yoshi stood up to gasp for breath, and he saw that his hands were scraped and bleeding.

Above them, the birds went shrieking through the canopy, like a roiling green dragon with a thousand tiny wings. Sliced-through fronds floated down, but the birds didn’t seem to notice the humans below.

“See that, Yoshi?” Javi said. “They only care about the device. It’s like a homing beacon.”

“They’re alien birds,” Anna said. “It’s alien technology. They fit together somehow.”

Molly shook her head. “But what was alien tech doing on our airplane?”

Yoshi hunkered in the water, watching as the flock coiled away into the sky. They had sounded so angry and fierce, like vengeful monsters.

“Maybe someone stole it,” he said.

They all looked at him.

Yoshi sloshed his way to the bank. “That thing wasn’t made by us humans, but what if one of us stole it? Like forbidden magic. The aliens wanted it back, so they took the whole plane.”

“Okay,” Javi said. “So why dump us in an alien jungle full of stuff that wants to eat us?”

Yoshi sighed. These engineers were good at conjectures and theories, but they weren’t very good at stories. He suspected they were too coolheaded to understand anger and revenge.

“Maybe they don’t care which human stole it,” he said. “And they’ve chosen us to be punished for the crime.”

“Seriously?” Molly asked.

“Guys,” Javi interrupted. He was pointing at a tree.

Yoshi looked up. There were gouges in the bark, deep and savage. About twice his height, they made a crude X in the tree.

“Okay, weird,” Molly said softly. “Would an animal do that?”

“None that I know of,” Anna said.

Yoshi took a step closer. Unconsciously, his arm moved in a figure-eight pattern, as if welding a sword to mark the tree.

“What?” Molly asked. “You think a person did that?”

He shook his head. “It’s too crude. But you know how cats sharpen their claws on scratching posts?”

“That’s a pretty big cat,” Javi said.

Yoshi looked at Molly, whose eyes widened.

“I heard something last night,” she said. “A cry. Something big.”

Yoshi nodded. “I heard it, too, moving out in the jungle.”

They all stared up at the marks for a while.

“I say we keep moving,” Javi finally said.

An hour later, Yoshi spotted the airplane’s crash-landing trail.

It was easy to see from a hundred feet up. Miles of sheared-off trees, scattered wreckage, and spilled luggage. So much destruction and mess. He wondered how long it would take for the jungle to swallow it.

To swallow them all.

Yoshi wafted down to the others and pointed. “The airplane’s that way. Maybe thirty jumps.”

Molly looked down at the glitter of water below. “Let’s keep following the stream, see if it gets closer. We got lucky, though. It looks like thirst won’t kill us!”

Javi rubbed his belly. “No, that would be hunger. I hope those guys haven’t eaten all the pretzels.”

Yoshi hoped so, too. It had been a day since he’d eaten. His hunger seemed to change by the hour, sometimes clanging like an alarm in his head, other times settling into a fuzziness that made everything even more unreal.

Anna kept saying that if you had water, it took two weeks to starve. But after only one day, Yoshi was ready to eat one of the bulbous green berries that grew down by the stream. Or kill and roast one of the fat multicolored birds that sounded like crying babies. Even the big green insects with pinecone heads were starting to look tasty.

Yoshi shuddered at the thought. Maybe when the airplane snacks were all gone …

“Let’s go,” Molly said. “We’re almost home.”