“What are you saying-?”

“But the police may not believe your story so readily. You could already be implicated in Eric’s death, and now this-dumping those kids in the most dangerous place-intentionally. That’s murder, Alyson.”

“Well, you’ll tell the police the truth!”

“Of course,” he said, “but why should they believe me, either? The fact is, Alyson, we have only one way to go here, and that is to continue on the plan we started. Their disappearance has to be explained as an accident. Then if they reappear miraculously later on-well, Hawaii is a magical place, wonderful place. Miracles happen here.”

She stood very still in the darkness. “We should just leave them?”

“We can look tomorrow, in daylight.” He squeezed her shoulder, pulled her close to him. He shone the flashlight down. “Here. Let’s follow the path, we can see what’s ahead, and we can leave safely. Then we’ll come back tomorrow. But right now we have to deal with the car. Okay? One thing at a time, Alyson.”

Still sobbing, she allowed herself to be led out of the forest, back to the parking lot. Vin Drake checked his watch: it was 11:14 p.m. There was still time to carry out the next stage of his plan.

Chapter 12

Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 11:00 p.m.

The students were jostled inside the paper bag, every movement of Alyson’s magnified and accompanied by a loud rasping sound as they scraped back and forth across the paper. Peter never realized that ordinary brown paper was so rough: it felt almost like sandpaper to his skin. He saw that the others had all managed to face inward, so they didn’t abrade their faces as they slid back and forth. They had been driven somewhere, and it had taken a long time, but where were they? And what would be done to them? It was hard to talk as they fell this way and that, and difficult to come up with a plan when everybody was talking at the same time. The Nanigen man, Jarel Kinsky, kept repeating that there had been some mistake. “If there was some way I could talk with Mr. Drake,” Kinsky said.

“Get over it,” Karen King snapped at him.

“But I can’t believe Mr. Drake would just…kill us,” Kinsky said.

“Oh, really?” Karen said.

Kinsky didn’t answer.

The bigger problem was that they didn’t know what Vin or Alyson were up to. They had been driven around in a car, but where had the car ended up? It made no sense. Then Vin and Alyson seemed to reach an agreement (their exact conversation was impossible to follow) and Alyson carried the bag outdoors. Into darkness.

“What’s this?” Karen King said, alarmed, as they were carried along. “What’s going on?”

They heard a booming sound. It was a snuffle. Alyson Bender.

“I have the feeling she wants to save us,” Peter Jansen said.

“Vin will never allow it,” Karen said.

“I know.”

“I think we better take things into our own hands,” Karen said. She produced her knife, unfolded it.

“Now hold on,” Danny Minot said. “This is a decision we have to reach together.”

“I don’t know about that,” Karen said. “ ’Cause I’ve got the knife.”

“Don’t be a child,” Minot said.

“Don’t be a coward. We act, or they act on us and they kill us. Which is it?” She didn’t wait for Danny to answer. She turned to Peter. “How far above ground do you think we are, right now?”

“I don’t know, maybe four and a half feet…”

“Hundred and thirty-seven centimeters,” Erika Moll said. “And what’s our mass?”

Peter laughed. “Not very much.”

“You’re laughing,” Danny Minot said, amazed. “You people are insane. Compared to our normal size, a drop of four and a half feet is the equivalent of, uh-”

“Four hundred and fifty feet,” Erika said. “Say, the height of a forty-five-story building. And no, this would not be the equivalent of a fall from a forty-five-story building.”

“Of course it would,” Danny said.

“Isn’t it great when the science studies people don’t know any science?” Erika said.

Peter explained, “It’s a little issue of air resistance.”

“No, that doesn’t matter,” Danny said through clenched teeth, clearly stung by the criticism, “because objects fall in a gravitational field at the same rate irrespective of mass. A penny and a piano fall at the same rate, hit the ground at the same time.”

“Nothing can be done for him,” Karen said. “And we have to make a decision now.”

The jostling in the bag had slowed; Alyson was making up her mind to do something.

“I don’t think the distance we fall matters very much,” Peter Jansen said. He had been trying to figure out the physics of being very small.

It was all about gravity. And inertia.

Peter said: “What’s important is Newton’s equation for-”

“Enough! I say we jump,” Karen interrupted.

“Jump,” Jenny said.

“Jump,” Amar said.

“Oh God,” Danny moaned. “But we don’t know where we are!”

“Jump,” Erika said.

“This is our only chance,” Rick Hutter said. “Jump.”

“Jump,” Peter said.

“Okay,” Karen said. “I’m going to run along this seam at the bottom, and cut it open. Try to stay close together. Imagine you’re skydivers. Arms and legs wide, a human kite. Here we gooo-”

“But just a minute-” Danny yelled.

“Too late!” Karen shouted. “Good luck!”

Peter felt her brush past him, the knife in her hand, and a moment later the paper bag tilted beneath his feet, and he fell into darkness.

The air was surprisingly cool and wet. And the night was brighter, now that he was outside the bag: he could see the trees around him, and the ground below as he fell toward it. He fell surprisingly fast-alarmingly fast-and for a moment he wondered if they had collectively made a calculation error, out of their shared dislike for Danny.

They knew, of course, that air resistance was always a factor in the speed of falling objects. In daily life, you didn’t think about it, because most things in life presented similar air resistance. A five-pound barbell and a ten-pound barbell would fall at the same rate. Same thing for a human being and an elephant. They’d fall at pretty much the same rate.

But the students were now so small that air resistance did matter, and they had collectively guessed that the effect of air resistance would overcome the effect of mass. In other words, they would not fall at their full-size speed.

They hoped.

Now, with the wind whistling in his ears, tears blurring his eyes as he fell downward, Peter clenched his teeth and wiped his eyes and tried to see where he was headed. He looked around and could not see any of the others falling through the air, though he heard a soft moan in the darkness. Looking back to the ground, he saw he was closing in on a broad-leafed plant, like a giant elephant ear. He tried to spread his arms wide and shift his position so he would hit the leaf in the center.

He hit it perfectly. He smacked into the elephant ear-cold, wet, slippery-and he felt the leaf bend beneath him, then rise back up and in a swift movement toss him back into the air, like a tumbler on a trampoline. He yelled in surprise, and when he came down again he landed near the edge of the leaf, spun, and slid on the water-slick surface down to the far tip.

And fell.

In darkness, he hit another leaf beneath, but it was hard to see down here, and he again rolled down toward the tip of the leaf. He clawed at the green surface, trying to halt his inevitable descent. It was to no avail-he fell-hit another leaf-fell-and finally landed on his back in a bed of wet moss where he lay, gasping and frightened, staring up at the canopy of leaves high above, which blotted out the sky.

“You just going to lie there?”

He looked over. It was Karen King, standing over him.

“Are you hurt?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Then get up.”