“Two, sir.”

“I’m giving you two more shares.”

Makele’s expression didn’t change. “Thank you.”

Don Makele had just made two million dollars on this conversation. The man would keep his mouth shut.

Chapter 21

Fern Gully 29 October, 4:00 p.m.

Be quiet and don’t move. They have keen eyesight and sharp hearing.” Erika Moll was speaking. She was looking up into the branches of a mamaki plant, which extended some distance over their heads, unfolding large, lobed leaves. Clinging to a leaf was an enormous creature, a winged insect. The animal shone with brilliant greens, and its body was enclosed by a pair of lacy, green wings that looked like leaves. The animal had long antennae, bulging eyes, jointed legs, and a bloated abdomen, visibly packed with fat. They could hear a faint hiss, uhh, hiss sound as it breathed, the air flowing in and out of a line of holes in its flanks.

It was a katydid.

Rick took one of the blowgun tubes he had made and balanced it on his shoulder. He fitted a dart into the tube. The steel tip had a glob of stinking poison smeared on it, wafting a smell of bitter almonds and nastiness: Rick’s curare. A wisp of mattress stuffing, which Rick had taken from Station Echo, was fastened to the butt of the dart.

Rick knelt and brought the tube to his lips, being exceedingly careful not to get any curare in his mouth. The cyanide made his eyes water, and his throat felt tight.

“Where’s the heart?” he whispered to Erika Moll, who crouched beside him. She would direct his shot, for she knew insect anatomy best.

“The heart? It’s posterior dorsal to the metathorax,” Erika said.

Rick grimaced at Erika. “Huh?”

Erika smiled. “Just under the top of the animal’s back.”

Rick shook his head. “Can’t make the shot. The wings are covering the area.” He aimed the tube this way and that, and finally decided on a gut shot. He took aim at the animal’s lower abdomen, took a deep breath, and fired.

The dart sank deep into the katydid. The creature gasped and shivered its wings. For a moment they thought it would take off and fly, but it didn’t. The animal let out a deafening shriek, an earsplitting cry. Was it a cry of alarm, of pain? Its breathing sped up, and it sagged, and slipped, and dangled from the edge of the leaf.

Amar cringed, watching this. He had never realized how the suffering of an insect could affect him. Rick’s curare was very powerful.

They waited. The katydid now dangled upside down. Its breathing slowed, the hiss, uhh, hiss dragging out and sounding raspy. Then its breathing stopped. Shortly afterward, the katydid fell to the ground.

“Nice work, Rick!”

“Rick the hunter!”

At first the dead katydid didn’t seem appealing to anyone except Erika Moll. “I ate some termites once in Tanzania. They were quite delicious,” Erika said. “People in Africa consider insects a delicacy.”

Danny Minot sat down on a twig, feeling sick. He felt like he might heave just looking at the dead bug. “Maybe we’ll find a burger joint around here,” he said, trying to make a joke.

“Insect meat is not as bad as hamburger,” Amar Singh said. “Mashed muscle, blood, and connective tissue of a bovine mammal really grosses me out. I will not eat a cow. But a katydid…well…maybe.”

As they stared at the dead animal, their hunger grew sharper and more insistent. Their small bodies had been burning energy at a high rate. They simply had to eat. Had to. Their hunger overcame their squeamishness.

They butchered the katydid with machetes, while Erika guided them through the anatomy. As they pulled out meat and organs, Erika insisted that everything edible be washed in water. The animal’s blood, the hemolymph, was a transparent, yellow-green liquid, and it dripped out as they cracked open its armor. They removed the legs, cutting through the tough bioplastic to get at the meat inside the legs. The upper rear legs, once split open, revealed masses of lean white muscle. They sliced steaks out of the largest parts of the legs. The animal’s blood might contain toxins from the dart, and so the meat had to be washed. But after they’d dipped and rinsed the flesh in dewdrops, it smelled clean and delicious. They ate the meat raw. It had a mild, sweet flavor.

“Not bad,” Rick said. “Tastes like sushi.”

“Really fresh,” Karen said.

Even Danny began eating the meat, gingerly at first but with increasing gusto, until he was cramming katydid steak into his mouth. “Needs salt,” he mumbled.

The fat of the animal, soft and yellowish, oozed out of the abdomen. “The abdominal fat is good for you, I’m sure,” Erika said. When none of them would try it, she scooped some fat out with her hands, and ate it raw. “It’s sweet,” she said. “Slightly nutty taste.”

Their bodies craved the fat, and soon they all dug into the katydid’s abdomen, scooping out the fat and gulping it down, licking their fingers.

“I feel like we’re lions at a kill,” Peter said.

The katydid yielded far more meat than they could possibly eat. They didn’t want to let it go to waste, so they gathered up bundles of moist moss, and wrapped some of the meat in the moss, as much as they could carry, and stuffed it down in the duffel bags to keep it cool. They ended up with enough katydid steaks to keep them going for a while, anyway.

Feeling much better, they consulted the hand-drawn map. Peter had been carrying the map, and had been guiding them with the compass. He pointed to features.

“We’re right here, I think,” he said, noting a cluster of tree ferns that appeared on the map. “We’re pretty close to Station Bravo. We might make Bravo by nightfall.” He looked around and up at the sky. The light was going; it was late afternoon. “Let’s just hope the station is intact.”

Peter sighted the compass on the distant trunk of a palm tree, and they headed out, carrying the duffel bags and stopping once in a while to smell and listen for ants. Whenever they ran into an ant, they knew there would be more. As long as they moved quickly away, the ants wouldn’t get too excited. The big danger was a nest entrance. As the sun began to set, shadows deepened on the forest floor, and Peter, who was leading, became more cautious about ants and more worried about stumbling into an ant nest. But so far, so good.

“Stop!” Peter said. He examined a mark on the stem of an ilihia plant growing up from the ground like a miniature tree: the stem had been cut with three V-shaped notches, and above them was splashed an X made of orange paint.

It was a blaze.

They had come to a trail.

Peter advanced, and found another orange X sprayed on a pebble. The trail proceeded onward, a faint disturbance of the soil marked with blazes at points along the way.

Minutes later, he stopped at the edge of a large, ragged hole in the ground. The soil around it had been dug up and turned over. Around the hole, giant footprints were impressed in the ground. The footprints had filled with water, like swimming pools. Peter consulted the map. “We’re at Station Bravo,” he said. “But there’s no station.”

The footprints told a story. Somebody had dug the station out of the ground and taken it away.

“We have to assume the worst,” Karen King said, taking off her backpack and sitting down by the hole. She wiped her brow. “This is Vin Drake’s work. It means he knows or suspects we’re still alive. He’s taken away our means of survival.”

“So Drake could be hunting for us,” Peter said.

“But how would he find us?” Rick wondered.

It was a good question. Their bodies, less than an inch tall, would not be easily noticed by a normal-size person. “Radio silence is essential now,” Peter said.

The disappearance of Station Bravo meant that they had no place to hide during the hours of darkness. The sun was setting, and night was coming on fast, as it does in the tropics.