15The first signal is only the beginning. Within hours after we leave the platform, we pick up another signal, and then another, and in less than a day’s time, the forest is teeming with squatters. Unarmed and on foot, we have no choice but to keep moving: along ridges and valleys, across streams and boulders, and always through forest. So much Rainforest, I think we could die of old age before ever covering a fraction of it. But while the Rainforest has never been our friend, it may now be our only shield against an enemy who is no more immune to its rashes, cuts, bites, and bruises than we are.

The presence of squatters in the forest has changed everything. The dawdling has stopped and the complaints have quieted, no longer any question in anyone’s mind that the danger is real. More real than it’s felt since the day we fled from the school in the dark of night, hunted by creatures we could only see in our mind’s eye.

That’s always been the problem with the enemy. The ghouls, with their incorporeal invisibility, are both a nightmare that never ends and the bad dream you shake off the moment you awake. At times, you fear them more than you ever thought you could fear anything, and others they seem to be nothing more than some convoluted fancy conceived by idle minds in need of stimulation, no matter how farfetched. But the squatters have done what the ghouls could not.

They put a face on fear.

A week passes, and still we manage to avoid detection, and yet as the enemy continues to advance, fanning out through the jungle in their frenzied search, our avenues for escape are steadily diminishing. We can’t go east to the settlements, not with the town overrun, and yet to push deeper into the jungle without proper food or supplies would surely be a death sentence. Instead, we’ve been forced to go south, ghosting along the western edge of the settlements in an erratic trajectory as we attempt to find food, stay out of town, and avoid the search parties, a nearly impossible task with both squatters and ghouls on the prowl. The squatters, at least, have com signals we can track, but the ghouls are a complete wild card, their acrid odors bleeding into the wind without warning only to disappear just as quickly.

We crouch low in the brush, forms shrouded in foliage and faces pressed to the dirt as we wait with bated breath for the enemy to pass once again. From the northeast comes a delusion of squatters, hacking their way through the jungle with knives and machetes, while to the south, just flickering at the farthest reaches of my sniffer’s range, a shiver of ghouls hunts for its prey.

Hoping to Iolanthe that prey isn’t us, I press myself lower into the brush and take a shallow breath. Air trickles through my nasal passages, bringing with it just the faintest scent of sour-and-sweet. A cold sweat runs down my back. We were running south to avoid the squatters when the sudden scent of ghouls flared up directly in front of us. Hemmed in by the settlements on the east and a nasty-looking ravine to the west, we had no choice but to halt, breaking into smaller packs and hitting the dirt in hopes that the overgrown shrubbery might hide us—from the squatters, at least. There is no hiding from ghouls. Either they’ll come for us, or they won’t.

A minute passes, and then another, and still I can scent them, a ghostly perfume drifting neither toward us nor away but just waiting, hovering at the furthest reach of my senses, while off to my right, the slash and hack of the squatters only intensifies. My stomach tightens. Unable to resist, I part the foliage in front of my face ever so slightly and peer out through the curling leaves. Shadowy forms appear off in the distance, their passage accompanied by the metallic swipes of machetes and a murmur of voices too low to make out. I track the squatters progress, perhaps a dozen in all, mentally calculating their trajectory. It’s going to be close—too close. All it would take is one wrong move, one errant sound at the wrong time . . .

Heart pounding, I hold stock still inside the bushes, body coiled and jaw tensed. Though I can’t see the others, I can hear them breathing, their shallow pants emanating softly from the shrubbery around me. The enemy passes directly in front of us, only a handful of meters away, and someone lets out a gasp. I press my fist against my mouth and will the enemy not to hear. In the dim light, their faces are all hard planes and angles, their expressions flat and unfeeling. Weapons gleam dully at their hips. I watch them troop by, pulling abreast of me one after another before continuing off into the forest. My tension starts to ease. The final man pulls abreast of me and pauses for the briefest moment. I hold my breath.

He glances around, head turning left and then right, then slapping at an insect on his leg, he moves off with the rest.

I slowly let out my breath, eyes glued to the squatters until they’ve disappeared completely into the mid-morning gloom. I take a breath, and then another, only realizing on the third one that the ghouls have gone as well. Apparently, they moved on sometime while we were occupied with the squatters, drawn away by priorities that, so far, seem to be more important than us. Not that I’m deficient enough to think that will last. The moment the ghouls find what they’re looking for, they’ll need hosts. I can only hope we’re far away when they do.

The others are returning to life now, cautiously rising from the shrubbery even as they continue to scan the forest in every direction for the enemy.

Are they gone now?

I could’ve sworn that one saw me! She looked right at me!

Maybe we should wait a few more minutes. I mean, what if they turn around and come back?

I’m sooo hungry.

We slowly reassemble, drifting in from our respective hiding places to form a ragged ensemble once more. Someone suggests lunch; Jovan says yes, Vida says no. A terse debate ensues, fraught with enough tight lips and icy glares to make it clear that on-again has now become off-again. The argument ultimately ends with a tight-lipped Vida reluctantly handing out some withered sweet potatoes, courtesy of a forgotten bushel we found sitting in an abandoned shed on the edge of a homestead two days ago. The beef jerky and oatmeal cookies we found in the bunker are long gone. We gnaw on our raw potato halves for several minutes, and then, with nothing left to do, we silently start walking again.

Time passes almost in a trance. The rain starts up again, stops, and then starts again, going from mist to drizzle to patter and then back again all in the span of hours. Sounds blend in my ears, the swish and thwack of machetes fusing with the forest’s call, and even the brilliant flora, which once seemed so vivid and alive, has begun running together in my eyes, blurring under the mind-numbing tedium of simply continuing to put one foot in front of the other. A day passes, and then another, fluttering over us in a strange collage of ennui and terror, and yet as the klicks continue to pass, it slowly occurs to me that something’s different.

The forest is changing.

I watch it transform as one day gives way to the next, subtly shifting the farther we go, as though the very nature of the world around us is being reborn into something new. It’s in the shapes of the leaves, symmetrical forms becoming irregular while smooth edges give way to razor-sharp teeth. Colors are off, familiar tints somehow looking unfamiliar beneath the alien suns, and thorns spring up in profusion as standard Earth stock begins to give way to native Iolanthian vegetation. Cloud vines, their albino skin bursting with slick blossoms dripping with mucus; leper moss, speckled and sickly as it wraps around trunks and branches like a disease; and rovers, small plant-animal hybrids that uproot themselves during the day to forage before rerooting themselves at night to sleep.

Iona trees, one of the few large flora to survive the terraforming, have begun to insert themselves in among their Earth rivals with striking frequency, their paper-thin bark glowing a milky beige beneath the double suns like stained-glass windows lit from within. From out of their trunks grow massive lobes of iridescent blue fungi as far up as I can see—a symbiotic relationship brought on by the terraforming. The Illyrian mushrooms root in the Ionas’ trunks, allowing them to survive the hotter climate by absorbing and venting off the trees’ excess heat, and in return, the Ionas produce the alien nutrients we stripped out of the soil for the fungi. On their own, neither could survive; only by throwing their lots in together were they able to carve out a niche for themselves in this strange new world.

I trail my fingertips across the fluttering bark of an Iona as I pass, its soft, almost skin-like sheets strangely cool against the heat emanating from the fungi. Maybe that was our problem all along, I reflect as I duck under a low-hanging lobe. We came to Iolanthe to kill and conquer, and all we ended up with was an untamable forest from pole to pole. Perhaps, like the Ionas and Illyrians, we needed to throw our lot in with Iolanthe, that all of us—human and plant, alien and native—might’ve survived together.

The idea is not a popular one. Whenever people talk about the failures of terraforming Iolanthe, they speak of tech that wasn’t advanced enough or planet idiosyncrasies that threw off growth formulas. It never occurs to them that maybe we were the ones in the wrong. Yet as I push through the trees with the others in search of safety, it occurs to me that this Rainforest may be the only thing that can save our lives. Perhaps we’ve already thrown our lot in with Iolanthe, and we just haven’t admitted it yet.

We hit the southern corner of the settlements and begin rounding slowly around to the east, careful to maintain our distance from town lest we invite any unwelcome attention. Every once in a while, when circumstances permit, a small group of us makes a quick foray into the homesteads at the edge of the settlements in hopes of finding food or other useful supplies, only to retreat back into the forest the minute we catch a whiff of the enemy. The short trips keep us alive, though just barely. The enemy is everywhere, and half the time we have to break off our foray before it even begins. Even when we do manage to make a raid, we rarely find enough food to sustain us for long. We need a plan—a real plan—something more than simply reacting to whatever crisis currently happens to be most pressing. Not that our two ostensive leaders seem to have anything to contribute on that front. Vida and Jovan argue incessantly, unable to agree on anything, and even Vida’s native knowledge doesn’t seem to extend much beyond telling us which jungle plants will kill us outright if we eat them and which will merely make us horribly sick.

A week and a half into our flight, we have our first piece of genuine luck in the form of an old emergency shelter left over from the early days of colonization. There are five of them scattered around Iolanthe, one for each settlement, their existence a nod to Celestial law rather than any real necessity. While the main group stays safely back a few klicks from the shelter, a small group of us goes in, opening the main doors with the swipe of a chit. I’m surprised at our easy entry, which almost seems too easy, but Mercury only shrugs.

“It’s an emergency shelter; it’s supposed to be easy to get into. Else what’s the point?”

The supplies inside are basic—food, clothing, blankets, med-kits—but to a group that’s spent the last several days in various states of starvation, the shelter is a lifesaver. While the others fall upon the food, shoving meal bars into their mouths even as they cram as many supplies into their bags as they can possibly carry, I attempt to access the shelter’s database.

A prompt asking for a pass scan immediately pops up. My heart sinks . . . until I think to try my new terraformer profile. All it takes is one swipe, and I’m in. Apparently, the terraforming bunkers and the emergency shelters are part of the same system, which makes sense considering they were both installed during the planet’s early days. I dump as much info into my chit as I can, grateful for the sat-link’s additional storage capacity, and then join the others at the supply racks. I’ve just added a nifty pair of combat lenses to my nearly full bag when a voice screams from the entrance.

“Squatters! We’ve got squatters coming! Everyone run!”

At Xylla’s cry, everyone grabs their bags and breaks for the exit, bursting into the outside world just as two roamers come screeching up the road on the other side of the building. No time to waste, we race for the shield-line.

“Hey, you there! Stop!”

The squatters immediately give chase, but we’ve got the head start and the motivation. Into the gap we go, sprinting through the shield in single file before closing the entrance behind us. We’re long gone before the enemy ever reaches the shield.

Back in the safety of the jungle with the others, I take the time to peruse the information I grabbed at the shelter. Most of what I find is to be expected—shelter rules, an inventory list, basic system instructions—but I do happen upon a surprisingly comprehensive set of geographical survey scans, along with the locations and specs for all the other emergency shelters. Most of them are just basic supply depots like this one, but one shelter, situated at the southeast end of town near the Shoqua River, appears to be significantly larger. On impulse, I pull up the inventory list for that shelter. My eyes pop.

You name it, they’ve got it. Not just food, medicine, and clothing, but outdoor gear—ropes, lanterns, tarps, climbing gear. All-season shelters. Portable generators. Sat-links and surveillance equipment. Water filters. Immuno-boosters. Weapons. And not just traditional weapons, like decimators and machetes, but actual Spectre tech: Sniffers. Ghoul lights. Stunners. Mobile force fence posts. Aero-launchers. Gas grenades.

A thrill runs through me as I peruse the list. These are more than just survival supplies. With equipment like this, one wouldn’t have to simply cower in the forest, hoping to survive. With equipment like this, one could fight.

My heart leaps at the possibility. All this time, we’ve been focused on running, hiding, and surviving. With the enemy everywhere, that seemed like our only choice. Only now that I’m confronted with another option, one I would never have dreamed possible, do I realize: I don’t want to run. I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to sit back in the shadows while the universe goes to hell and others get to decide my fate for me! I want to fight. I want to get revenge on the very creatures who have stolen everything that matters from me! With this, we could—

We.

Disappointment fills me as I’m forced to acknowledge the inherent we in my idea. As much as I want to strike back at the enemy, even I know I can’t do it alone. The enemy is formidable. To have even a prayer of defeating them, I’d need an army at my back, a capable team of spies, hackers, and soldiers with all the implied skills that go along with those roles. One look at the exhausted, arguing, mud-streaked group in front of me tells me this is not that army.

I let out a bitter snort. What was I thinking? This lot can barely manage to flee in the same direction; to expect them to fight is downright ludicrous. I might as well ask them to take down the planetary net while I’m at it.

With a sigh, I de-ack my chit and shoulder my pack. And yet, as we push on into the jungle, on the run from yet another enemy com signal, I can’t stop thinking about that shelter on the Shoqua and all that Spectre tech inside, just waiting to be found.