How’s she doing?” Oliver asked again.

Javi looked up tiredly and tried to sound more certain than he felt.

“She’ll be fine.”

Oliver looked away, his lips pressed tight together. Not believing.

Molly hadn’t opened her eyes since fainting after the engine fire. Her breathing had been fast and shallow all night, and she was covered with a sheen of sweat. When Javi dribbled water between her lips, she would swallow a few drops and murmur meaningless words, but that was the only sign of consciousness.

The illness seemed to be consuming her. Her face was gaunt, and her muscles and veins stood out on her already wiry limbs.

Worst of all, the wound on her shoulder still glowed that awful, luminous green.

At dawn, Akiko had lured two fat slide-whistle birds straight into Javi’s net, and they had a pile of red berries ready, but there was no way to get Molly to eat.

Oliver stood there, waiting for more, and Javi wondered if he wanted the truth. The kid had fought hard to make them all stop sugarcoating things. Maybe it was time to talk to him straight.

“I don’t know how she is, but I’m worried,” Javi said.

“Then what do we do if the others don’t come back?” Oliver asked.

Javi just stared at him.

“We said we’d go look for them after three days.”

“Oh, right.” Javi looked at Molly, laid out on their remaining airplane blanket. The idea that she could travel in two days seemed ridiculous. “We can’t leave her.”

“But they’ll run out of food!” Oliver persisted.

“They know which berries to eat.”

Oliver didn’t look satisfied.

Akiko came through the trees, bringing more water. When the fire had been at its hottest the night before, they’d carried Molly away from the airplane and closer to the stream. One flash of smart thinking in a night of terrible decisions.

The mistakes kept echoing through Javi’s head. Why use the device on settings they didn’t understand? Why experiment on the aircraft itself? Since when was messing with the laws of nature ever a good idea?

Javi stared at what was left of the plane. Their only shelter, their only connection with Earth, and they’d burned it to the ground. Most of the equipment they’d painstakingly collected had been incinerated, along with everything they could have scavenged from the hundreds of pieces of luggage they hadn’t even opened yet.

The whole camp smelled like a disaster area. Javi’s lungs were scorched and his skin was coated with smoke. The surrounding trees were white with ash, and if the dreadful duck appeared again, they had no place left to hide.

Akiko knelt to dribble some water into Molly’s mouth, and Javi stood up to stretch, trying to breathe deep enough to clear his mind of awful thoughts.

“She won’t die, will she?” Oliver asked softly.

Maybe he didn’t want the truth after all.

Javi shook his head, and not just for Oliver’s sake.

Molly couldn’t die.

Without her, they weren’t a team anymore. Without her, they had no leader, no one to challenge them to find solutions in this strange place. It was bad enough, the thought that they might never get home.

But to lose Molly as well …

The explorers came back that night, a day early.

They must have seen the signal fire, which Akiko and Oliver had built to help guide them home. The three of them came skimming in just as the sun was setting, bounding over sliced-off trees in the landing path.

As they descended, Javi felt the low-gravity field of their device lift his tired muscles for a moment. The bonfire ruffled and sparked, then settled again as normal weight returned. Akiko and Kira ran to embrace each other, spinning off into their own private stream of French and Japanese.

“Are you okay?” Oliver said. He was staring at Yoshi, whose knee was wrapped up in a bloody bungee cord.

“I’m fine,” came Yoshi’s answer. But he looked pale, and he walked toward the fire with a definite limp.

“He had an argument with a robot,” Anna said.

Yoshi half shrugged. “Which I won.”

They looked exhausted, and when Anna spotted the slide-whistle bird plucked and ready by the fire, her eyes went wide.

“Wait,” Javi said. “Did you just say a robot? Does that mean you found people?”

Yoshi started to answer, but then he saw the form stretched out in the shadows beyond the fire. “Is that Molly?”

Javi nodded. “She’s worse. Um, we kind of blew up the plane.”

“We saw,” Anna said blankly.

A moment later all six of them were crowded around Molly’s unconscious form, and Javi was explaining everything—how they’d found the two new settings, set the airplane on fire, and barely escaped being burned to death. And how Molly had fainted after all the excitement.

“She hasn’t moved since,” he finished. “I don’t know what to do.”

“We can get her help,” Anna said.

Oliver looked up. “So you did find people?”

“No.” Anna took a breath. “But someone made this jungle, and we think we know where they are.”

Javi blinked, his brain too tired to understand.

“Wait. We’re on Earth?” he managed.

“We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be,” Yoshi said. “Behind the waterfall was a huge wall of stone, maybe miles high. Someone built it. Someone built all of this.”

“The wall’s full of machines,” Anna said. “Tons of weird technology, along with robots that maintain it. The whole thing is wrapped around this valley, to protect it.”

Javi stared at them. They looked tired, but not like they’d gone crazy in the last two days. And he’d seen plenty of stranger things than robots and giant walls since the crash.

“Protect it from what?”

“The arctic,” Yoshi said simply.

“We were almost at the top of the wall,” Anna explained. “And when we doubled the gravity, a ton of snow came tumbling down. We triggered an avalanche, because our plane crashed exactly where it should have—somewhere not that far from the North Pole.”

“We even saw the Big Dipper.” Yoshi looked up. “Also known as Ursa Major. That’s what Caleb was trying to tell us.”

“The walls are heated, to keep the jungle warm,” Anna said. “The water comes from melted snow, and the mist covers everything because it’s way hotter down here than the tundra around us.”

“Down here?” Javi asked.

“We’re down in a valley, a rift in the earth.” Yoshi said something to Kira, who brought over her drawing pad. “We saw a model of the whole thing. The jungle’s at one end, and some kind of huge building is at the other, with a lot of other stuff between.”

Javi stared at the drawing—some strange futuristic castle. “But why would anyone build a whole valley in the arctic? And such a weird one?”

“Good question,” Anna said. “But whoever it was, they must know how to help Molly. If they designed all this, they can fix whatever poison that bird left in her.”

Javi could only nod at this. If it would save Molly, he was willing to believe anything. “So how do we contact them?”

“They don’t answer the radio, and there was no one in the wall,” Anna said. “So we have to go to the other end of the rift.”

“It’s that way.” Yoshi pointed toward the front of the plane.

Javi sat down heavily, staring into Molly’s still face. For a moment, he’d thought they were all saved. That it was simply a matter of sending out a distress call and waiting for rescue parties to show up.

“How are we supposed to get there?” he asked. “She can’t walk.”

Molly’s eyes fluttered open.

“Simple,” she said. “We fly.”