Chapter 2
Kyan swung through the treetops on his springy creepers. They expanded with his weight and then recoiled to whip him through the air. Natalie kept her arms wound around his neck and her legs locked around his waist to keep from falling. She couldn’t see the ground below. Hitting the ground from this height would kill her for certain.
The wind whipped her cheeks, and leaves and branches tore past her eyes. She buried her face in Kyan’s neck and let the forest fly away behind her. Where he took her, she couldn’t guess.
On and on they flew. Would they ever get there? Just as Natalie made up her mind to open her eyes and look around, Kyan took one last leap into the air and came to a stop. Natalie pried her eyes off his neck and blinked.
They stood on a platform high in the canopy—so high sunlight winked through the leaves above them. Natalie turned her face up to the light with a sigh of relief, but before she could relax, her eye caught a green shape move against the tree trunk opposite her. A tiny Eblian stared out at her with enormous green eyes.
“I’ll go get Melanie,” Kyan told her. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Natalie turned to speak to him, but he was gone in a flash. His creeper whipped through the air, the leaves rustled, and then silence enveloped the forest again. Where were the screeching creatures she heard earlier? Not a voice quivered in that trackless forest.
The tiny Eblian stepped out onto the platform and stood right in front of her. It gazed up into her face. Natalie tried to smile at it. “Hello.”
The creature leapt backwards and caught its breath. Then it took a halting step toward her again. Natalie took a good look at it. Its skin glowed leaf-green, just like Kyan’s, but it wouldn’t stand as high as his waist. From the size of its head and eyes were too large for its body. It must be a child.
It extended its finger and touched the white skin of her arm. Then the child pulled its hand back with a squeak.
Natalie tried again. “Hello. What’s your name?”
The child stared up at her with its mouth open. “Are you......are you real?”
Natalie couldn’t stop herself from smiling. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. This child acted like any other child anywhere else in the galaxy who saw someone different for the first time. “Yes, I’m real.”
The child swallowed hard. “What....what are you?”
“I’m human,” Natalie replied. “I come from a planet called Earth, and I’ve come to stay here with Kyan. Do you know Kyan?”
The child nodded. “He’s my cousin.”
Natalie’s eyes widened. “Your cousin!”
The child nodded again. “They said he came back. We’ve been waiting for him.”
Natalie looked around. “Who has been waiting? I don’t see any others.”
The child waved toward the treetops. “They’re at the village.”
“Where is the village?” Natalie asked.
The child didn’t answer. “Are you Police, too? My mother says he was on the Police.”
Natalie smiled. “I’m not Police, but I met him on the Police ship.” She pursed her lips. “It’s complicated.”
The child pursed its lips, too. “That’s what everybody says. That’s what my mother says when she doesn’t want me to know what’s going on.”
Natalie peered into the foliage. Where was Kyan? How long before he came back? “If you’ve been waiting, why haven’t the others come to see us? Why do they keep themselves hidden?”
The child put its head on one side. For the life of her, Natalie couldn’t figure out if it was male or female. “Are you male or female?”
Natalie blushed. “I’m female. Do you think Kyan would bring a male to live here?”
The child cocked its head the other way, but it didn’t answer her question. “They said there were others. Where are the others?”
Before she could answer, Kyan sailed up through the leaves and landed at her side. He set Melanie on her feet and let go of the creeper. Then he gazed down at the child. “What are you doing here, Malika? You should be at the village with the others.” He glanced at Natalie. “Malika’s my cousin.”
Natalie smiled down at the little girl. “She told me.”
Malika lowered her eyes. “I know I shouldn’t have come. Mother will be annoyed when she finds out. But I only wanted to see the strangers up close. You know they won’t let me come near them in the village.”
Kyan squared his shoulders. “Then you better get back before us. You’ve seen the strangers, so you go now, and your mother will never know you sneaked out when you weren’t supposed to.”
Malika raised her eyes to his face, and a glorious smile spread over her cheeks. Then, with a bound and a skip, she dove off the platform into the thick foliage. Only the twang of the creeper told Natalie she hadn’t plummeted to her death far below.
Melanie craned her neck to peer over the platform. “What was that all about?”
“Eblians are a quiet people,” Kyan told her. “We keep to ourselves, and we stay in our village and wait for visitors to come to us. That’s one way we protect ourselves from encroachment. Children especially are supposed to stay hidden until newcomers introduce themselves to the village elders. If Malika’s mother found out she came here to see you, she would be very angry.”
“Would she punish Malika?” Natalie asked.
Kyan tilted his head to one side. “Punish? No, we don’t punish children, not even for an infraction as serious as that. Making their parents and relatives angry is punishment enough.”
Natalie and Melanie exchanged glances. “That’s an interesting way to look at it.”
Kyan turned away. “It seems to work.”
“But Malika came out here to see us when she shouldn’t have,” Natalie began.
“Do you really think she should be punished for that?” Kyan asked.
Natalie stared down at her toes. “Not really.”
Kyan sighed. “If you’re ready, we’ll go up to the village.”
Natalie surveyed her surroundings. “Where is it?”
He pointed up into the treetops. “Up there.”
Natalie couldn’t see anything. This world contained so many things she couldn’t see and couldn’t understand, but she would learn. She’d been on the planet less than two hours, and in a minute, she would meet her new people.
Kyan wrapped his arm around her waist again and pulled a creeper out of nowhere. In a flash, they zinged through the air and came to rest on another platform still higher in the canopy. Here, nothing separated them from the wide dome of sky. Clouds sailed through the blue firmament overhead, and miles and miles of endless forest stretched in all directions around them. Natalie couldn’t even see the lake.
But what really caught her attention was a cluster of leafy bunches dotting the canopy around her. They formed small stepping stones through the treetops around the platform. Another Eblian child peeked out from one of them. This child was definitely a male. When he spotted Kyan, he ducked back inside his leafy shelter.
Kyan let go of Natalie, and a moment later, Melanie joined them on the platform. Kyan let out his breath. “Here we go.”
He stepped onto a tree branch and picked his way over it toward one of those shelters. Natalie stared down at the branch. Was it strong enough to hold her? It must be, since Kyan outweighed her by a mile. Still, it looked dangerously fragile. It bounced at every step, but he tripped over it with quick, certain steps.
When he reached the other end, he proceeded toward the leafy shelter without looking back. He expected Natalie and Melanie to follow. It never crossed his mind that they might hesitate. He bent down and said something into a hole in the shelter. He wasn’t thinking about her at all. Natalie summoned all her courage and put her foot on the branch. It swayed under her, and she drew her foot back.
So this was how the Eblians moved around in their treetop home. If she hoped to make a life here, she better learn to move around the way they did. She took a deep breath. She put all her trust in Kyan. If she slipped and fell off that branch and plunged headlong through the canopy, he would surely catch her. How he would do that, she couldn’t say, but she trusted him to do it. He wouldn’t expect her to cross that branch if he thought she was endangering herself.
She eyed the branch one more time. He balanced on it like a tightrope, and he kept his eyes on the little leafy house on the other side. He never looked at his feet. Natalie straightened her back and put her foot back on the branch. Then she started walking.