Lexis was smarter than any of us. She was always mixing things up, working from a bunch of handwritten notes in a faded notebook. She said that in the early days of our peoples’ flight, they had access to a world of knowledge on some kind of device. They knew the devices wouldn’t last long without repairs, so they tried to write down anything they thought might help them survive in this hostile country.
There was a lot of stuff about bugs.
It’s how we knew that our ‘Mites were a lot like tiny insects that built giant mounds back on Earth. No way Earth people would have ever believed ours, though.
The book had all kinds of things about growing plants, treating injuries, making weapons. A lot of it didn’t apply here, because the plants were all different, but over the years our people had sorted a lot of things out.
None of it seemed to be helping much.
I was wrapping cord around an arrowhead, attaching it to a thin shaft of hardened reed, when I heard the boom. It sounded like a crack of thunder, and the whole cave shook. The air filled with the sound of a thousand bats flapping frantically around the part of the cave they roosted in.
Sunlight streamed through the open doorway. So . . . not thunder. I set down the arrow and followed a crowd of people outside to see what had made the noise.
Lexis was standing with her back to us, peering into a hole in the ground that I was sure hadn’t been there the night before. It was about an arm’s length across, and the edges of it were black. When Lexis turned around, her face was covered in soot. Under the grime, it looked like her eyebrows might not be there.
“It works!” She was grinning, teeth white against her filthy lips. “I did it!”
All the bats chose that moment to fly out of the cave. We all ducked as the dark cloud streamed by.
People crowded around the hole. I sidled in and looked over the edge, but nothing was down there. Just more black rock.
“What did you do?” I asked.
Lexis beamed. She pulled the old notebook out from under the back of her shirt. “I made an explosive.”
People backed away from the hole, eyeing it with suspicion. Nobody seemed to want to know any more about it, and after a moment, Lexis’s face fell.
She looked so disappointed that nobody had any questions, so I glanced at the book she was waving around. “How did you do it?”
The old, dry pages rustled as she opened the book and pointed to a scribbled note. “See? It’s bat guano. What you do is, you soak it in water for a couple of days. Then you filter out the crystals, and you mix them with sulfur.” She pointed up the mountain. “This was a volcano at one time, eons ago. There’s sulfur all around the rim. Took me all day to climb up and get some.”
I looked up the hill but the rocks looked the same as all the others around here. Dead and dry.
“So then,” she continued, “you take the crystals and the sulfur and you mix it with charcoal.” Her eyes turned serious. “And then you’re very, very careful with it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it explodes,” she said. “It’s not very stable, and super flammable. Just one little spark, and boom!”
I peered back into the black hole at her feet. “Boom, for sure. How much of that stuff did you make?”
She glanced over at a couple of bowls sitting on the far side of the plateau. “Just a handful. I can make more.” She grinned at the cave opening. “Not like we have a shortage of bat poop.”
I hadn’t known what “guano” meant. Now I did, and wished I didn’t. Exploding bat poop. Just what we needed.
“Could you make enough to blow up the big Hive?”
She nodded. “Probably. I wouldn’t want to transport that much. And we don’t want to kill our people inside.”
Well, no. But if we could get our people out . . . not that I had any idea how we’d do that.
“But we could maybe figure out how to stabilize it. Turn it into some kind of weapon we could use. Find some safer place to live and rig some kind of barrier so the bugs can’t get in.”
I didn’t mention that if they couldn’t get in, we probably couldn’t get out. It would take an awfully big perimeter to cordon off an area big enough to support even the small number of people we had left. Maybe if our territory included a river where we could trap seals . . .
No reason to put a damper on her mood, though. “That’s amazing,” I said, faking a huge smile. “Maybe this is a turning point for us.”
She grinned and turned back to the notebook, making her own notes in the margins. “Maybe if the Queen that Noah brought back survives, we might just have a shot. This could give us the advantage in a fight. Finally.”
We hadn’t heard anything more from the people we left with the larvae. My dad was down there. He’d told us not to come down until they sent a runner up to get us, and if we didn’t hear from them by next pollen storm, to move on to the next camp, farther down the hill on the other side. It wasn’t as safe as up there, but there were a lot of fruit trees and berry bushes we could harvest before moving to the camp after that. The endless cycle of trying to stay one step ahead of the giant bugs that wanted to kill us all.