He felt like crying. He would have done anything to get the mynah bird to come back, the one with the streak on its bill. He couldn’t give up now.

But then he remembered something he’d learned about birds. A bird does not have a stomach. It has a crop.

Chapter 33

Edge of Tantalus 31 October, 10:15 a.m.

Karen King was curled up in a fetal position inside the crop of the mynah bird, holding her breath. The muscular walls of the crop pressed in on her, clamping her in place so that she couldn’t move. The walls were slimy, slick, and smelled foul. However, there were no digestive juices in the crop. It was simply a bag for storing food, before the food was passed down into the rest of the digestive system.

She knew the bird was flying, because she felt the regular thump-thump of the bird’s pectoralis muscles, driving its wings. She got her arms around her face and pushed outward, and managed to open a space for her nose and mouth.

She took a breath.

The air smelled horrible, with an acid stench of rotting insects, but at least it was air. Not much air, though. Almost immediately it became stifling hot and she began to pant. A wave of claustrophobia came over her. She wanted to scream. With an act of will she tried to calm herself. If she began to scream and struggle, she would use up the air quickly and would suffocate. The only way to stay alive was to stay calm, move sparingly, and try to make the air last as long as possible. She straightened her spine and pushed her legs out. This stretched the crop and opened up a little more space. Even so, she was running out of air.

She tried to get her knife in her hand, but she’d tucked it down deep in her hip pocket. She couldn’t reach the knife. The muscular walls of the bird’s crop held her arm back.

Damn. Gotta get that knife.

Right then she vowed to hang her knife around her neck, in the future. If there was a future…she drove her right arm downward, fighting against the rubbery walls that surrounded her. She forced her fingertips into the pocket, and let her breath out with a whoosh, gulped in nasty air, and coughed. Her fingertips closed on a bottle in her pocket-what was this? It was the spray bottle. Filled with beetle spray. Rick had filled it.

A weapon.

She grimaced, and dragged the bottle out.

At that moment, the bird maneuvered in flight. The crop tightened, the muscles squeezing the breath out of her lungs with a whoosh. A sensation of weightlessness came over her, a sense of falling. Then came a lurch and a bump. The bird had landed. She lost consciousness.

The mynah had returned to the same spot where it had caught Karen, looking for more food. It stared at Rick Hutter, cocking its head.

Rick recognized the black streak on its bill. The same bird. It had eaten Karen; no way of knowing if she was still alive. But she might be. He waved the harpoon in front of him and advanced toward the bird. “Come and get me, you cowardly bastard.”

The Masai thrust. That was what he had to do to this bird. A young Masai warrior, a boy of thirteen or fourteen, can kill a lion with a spear. It’s doable, he told himself. It’s all about technique.

The bird hopped toward him.

He watched, judging the distance, timing his move, planning what he would do with his body, the angle of the harpoon. He would have to use the animal’s own strength and weight against itself, as Masai hunters do with lions. The Masai hunter provokes the lion to charge him, and at the last instant he plants the butt of his spear in the ground, with the point angled toward the lion, and he kneels behind the spear: the lion runs onto the spear and impales itself.

The bird struck at him with its beak. As the strike came, Rick jammed the harpoon’s butt at an angle into the ground with the point aimed upward at the bird. He took his hand off the harpoon and threw himself forward, diving under the bird’s chest to get out of the way.

The harpoon caught the bird in the neck as the bird pecked down at Rick. With a barbed tip honed to greater fineness than a surgical needle, and drenched with poison, the weapon pierced the bird’s neck, breaking through the skin, and the barb stuck there. The bird backed off with the harpoon dangling from its neck. It shook its head, trying to dislodge the harpoon, while Rick crawled away. He sat up and drew his machete. “Come on, fight!” he shouted at the bird.

Karen heard Rick’s voice. It brought her to her senses-she had passed out momentarily. She started hyperventilating, drawing air into her lungs, but she couldn’t get enough to breathe. Prickles of light flashed in her eyes, a sign of oxygen starvation. She became aware of the spray bottle clutched in her fist. She pulled the trigger, and felt a horrible burning sensation as the chemicals surged out and spread around her. The muscles squeezed tighter, and the stars turned into fog and then into nothing-

The mynah wasn’t happy. The harpoon had pricked it, and there were unpleasant sensations in its crop. It vomited.

Karen King landed in the moss and the bird took off.

She was unconscious. Rick knelt by Karen and felt her neck for a pulse, and discovered that her heart was still beating. He placed his mouth on hers and drove a breath into her lungs.

With a rasping sound, she took a breath on her own. She coughed, and her eyes opened.

“Ohh.”

“Keep breathing, Karen. You’re okay.”

She still gripped the spray bottle; her hand was locked around it. Rick pried her hand open and released the bottle. Then he dragged her under a fern. There, he helped her to sit up, and then he cradled her in his arms. “Take deep breaths,” he said. He pulled a strand of hair off Karen’s face, and smoothed her hair. He didn’t know where the birds were, whether they were still hunting in the area or had moved on, but their screams had grown more distant. He propped Karen against a stem and sat beside her, drawing his knees up. He kept his arms around her.

“Thank you, Rick.”

“Are you injured?”

“Just a little dizzy.”

“You weren’t breathing. I thought you were…”

The cries of the birds faded. The flock had moved on.

Rick made a quick survey of their remaining gear. Their survival was in real jeopardy. The truck was gone. Erika dead. Most of their supplies had gone over the cliff with the truck. The harpoon was gone, as well, for the mynah had flown off with the barb still lodged in its neck. The backpack lay near the pool. They still had the blowgun and the curare. A single machete lay on the ground. Danny Minot was nowhere to be seen.

But then they heard his voice coming from above. In his panic, he had climbed up a vine, and had come out at the top of the rock. They saw him crouched up there, waving his good arm. “I see the Great Boulder! We’re almost there!”

Chapter 34

Nanigen 31 October, 10:20 a.m.

Drake had taken over the communications room. He was staring at the screen of the remote tracking system that had been pinging the hexapod truck. Right now, he was a little puzzled by what he saw on the screen. The crosshairs on the cliff face, indicating the approximate position of the truck, had suddenly shifted downward by a hundred and fifty meters-by about five hundred feet. At first he suspected a system error. But as he watched, and waited, the truck’s location didn’t change. It wasn’t moving.

He allowed himself a modest smile. Yes. It looked like the damn truck had fallen off the cliff. That had to be it. The truck had plunged down the cliff face.

He knew that a micro-size human body could survive any fall, any distance. But the fact that the truck wasn’t moving meant that, at the very least, the truck had been damaged. It might be busted.