Zahrah the Windseeker (12 page)

"How do you feel now?"

"Tired, dizzy."

"Concentrate on your feet," I said. "One step at a time."

Then I started counting out loud with each step. "One, two, three..."

Dari's eyes closed, but thankfully he seemed to concentrate on the numbers and moved his feet as I counted. We walked the long mile out of the jungle and emerged from the path onto the street. Then we stumbled down the street to Kirki's main road. Across the street were a few Kirki Farms office buildings.

"Help!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. Dari crumpled to the ground. I took another deep breath. "HELP!
Someone!
"

"Your son is an extremely rare case," the doctor said hours later that night, clipboard in hand.

My parents stood pressed together, their faces still in shock. Dari's parents clutched each other, somehow holding each other up. They were run down with stress. Dari's father rested his head in his wife's puffy Afro, his face wet with tears. Looking at him made me want to cry some more. The doctors had run a quick series of tests, and we all knew the news would be bad. Dari's mother's face was frozen in a sad grimace. The room smelled of baby oil, oranges, and soap.

Dari had fallen into a deep, deep sleep even before one of the employees in the office building had finished calling the ambulance. I refused to leave Dari's side. I rode with him in the ambulance, and then sat next to him in the emergency room. When he was moved to a hospital room, I stationed myself in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand. Even though he couldn't communicate, I was sure he was aware of me, that he could hear every word being said. I sniffed and wiped my eyes.

"War-snake bite," the doctor said. She shook her head and looked at Dari's medical files. "I still can't believe it. You kids should
never
have gone into the forbidden jungle. You
know
that. It is called the forbidden jungle for a reason."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. I'd been saying that since Dari and I got to the hospital, and each time was like being stuck with a pin. We should have known. I explained how we had ventured into the jungle out of curiosity. I didn't tell them about my ability. What good would that have done? It would only have added more confusion and shock.

I wasn't asked much after that. At that moment, everyone was more concerned with Dari's condition than with why we were in the jungle in the first place.

"I'm sorry too, my dear," said the doctor. She looked at her clipboard. "Dari's condition has stabilized. He's not going to die from the bite ... at least we don't think he will."

She paused and looked at Dari's parents.

"However, I have done some research and consulted with other doctors. Let me present you with the situation. And I must warn you, it is not good," she said. Dari's mother sighed quietly. His father held her more tightly. My parents looked away.

"Your son was bitten by an incredibly rare snake from the forbidden jungle. Normally, it lives very deep in the jungle. How do we know this? Well, we don't. Not really. All the information we know about war snakes we got from this." The doctor held up a tattered green book. The edges were dog-eared, the pages yellowed and dusty. It was titled
The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, Volume
439.
It was the same book that Dari had borrowed from the library, except this was part of the printed version. I took in a short breath and looked at my feet to hide my recognition.

"This is a field guide to the forbidden jungle," the doctor continued. "I'm embarrassed to say that the hospital owns a copy of it. We keep all the volumes in the basement ... just in case. Most of what you find in here is nonsense. But we have no other way of knowing anything about the jungle. Anyway, the book says that the venom doesn't kill. War snakes eat small rodents. It is believed that they kill their prey by constriction. They bite only as an act of aggression. The venom affects all the victim's nerves. Lulls him into a deep sleep, a coma. One thing we know for sure after running tests on Dari is that he will not wake up."

Dari's mother gasped and began to weep. I rested my head on Dari's chest, all seven of my dadalocks spilling over his belly. I could still hear his heart beating through his hospital pajamas. He was still alive.

"The book, however, says there's a cure," the doctor continued with a soft chuckle. I held my breath. "But even if this were true, it's impossible to obtain. The yolk of an unfertilized elgort egg. Elgorts are raging with life, angry with it. The rage is transferred from mother to baby through the egg. For some reason, or so it says in this book, the extracted yolk reverses the effects of the venom."

"Elgort?" his father whispered. "But that's—"

"Yes, impossible, " the doctor said. "And even if the book was right about the antidote and one could
get
an unfertilized elgort egg, Dari would have to be administered the elgort egg serum within about three to four weeks for it to work."

I glanced at Dari's parents. His father's eyes were shut, his eyebrows pressed together, his lips quivering. Is it not the worst pain to know there is a cure for your child's illness and then not be able to obtain it?
Oh it must be one of the worst types of pain in the world,
I thought. And it was my fault.

Dari's father must have wanted to tear himself away from his wife and run into the forbidden jungle and find an elgort, but even he knew that if he did so, the book's serum recipe might not work. And even if it did and he went in search of it, he'd never see his family again. One of the many mysteries of the forbidden jungle would certainly kill him before an elgort got the chance to do that. Most people of the Ooni Kingdom knew of the elgort, though very few had ever seen one. They were nightmarish monsters that populated the stories of children's books, adult horror novels, and gory digi-movies. The closest people came to elgorts was in the market, where hawkers sold false elgort teeth.

My cheek was warm from Dari's warmth, which radiated through his green pajamas. He still wore the glass luck charm Nsibidi had given him. It glowed a faint green. I looked at his serene face. I wasn't used to seeing him like that. He was usually smiling broadly, making jokes, telling stories based on history, and laughing loudly. Tears slowly dripped sideways down my face and onto his clothes. It was at that moment that I made my decision. It was like a seed sprouting, slowly growing and taking over my mind.

"But we have the best facilities to make sure he stays healthy," the doctor said. She paused and then softly said, "I'm sorry." Then she left the room.

I had things to do.

I started my journey using the same path Dari and I had used only three days ago. I'd taken two days to think long and hard about my decision. I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing. And in the end, I concluded that there was no other way.

I left Dari's side for the first time the morning before I went.

"You need to go home for a little while, Zahrah," my mother pleaded with me. I hadn't said a word to anyone while maintaining my vigil at Dari's side, and both sets of parents were growing worried.

"Take a bath, get some sleep, " Dari's mother said.

I sighed and said, "OK. But can I have a few minutes with him in private?"

The moment the door shut, I leaned close to Dari's ear and whispered, "I'm planning something." I glanced behind me. "Don't worry. Maybe I'm too afraid to fly, but I'm brave enough to save your life."

My mother drove me home, and when I stepped into my room, I stared at my schoolbooks. It was Monday, and I hadn't even thought of the fact that I was missing the last day of school for the dry season. It didn't matter anyway. If I didn't do what I was going to do, Dari would miss more than the last day of school.

"Will you be all right?" my mother asked. "I have to go to work."

I only nodded, sitting on my bed.

"Take a bath," my mother said, and I took her advice. As I sat in the water, sponge in hand, I thought about my decision. I would pack my things that night and leave the next morning before my parents awoke.

***

So there I was, all alone, less than a mile from the forbidden jungle. I wished I'd had a chance to talk to Nsibidi before leaving, but there was no time. I stopped and looked at my digital compass. It was the size of a coin, and its face glowed a lime yellow. It pointed north. I pressed the button on its side and turned it on; it was showing the bright yellow rotating flower I had programmed it to show.

Then it said in its high-pitched whiny voice, "You are heading north into the bowels of the Forbidden Greeny Jungle! I have no idea why you would do such a thing, but I am just a compass and you are just a thirteen-year-old girl. I must warn you, you are five hundred and forty yards north—"

I sighed and pressed another button on the side to shut the compass up. I wished there had been a built-in option to change its voice. And its attitude.

"Fine. You don't want to hear my words. It's your loss. Carry on then," the compass said.

I put it into my pocket, making sure that there was no way it could fall out. Of all the things I had, the compass was not something I could lose. It was the only thing that would lead me back home.

I carried a satchel on my shoulder and a bundled blanket strapped to my back. I'd considered bringing a carrying pod to hold the elgort egg in, but I had no idea how large elgort eggs were, and a pod would have been too heavy for me to carry as far as I had to travel. I figured I'd find a way to hold the egg when the time came.
If
the time came.

I held a paring knife that I'd taken from the kitchen in my left hand and a glow-lily hand lamp in my right. I had never gone camping, but I looked up tips the night before on the network. But even with that information, I felt like a fish out of water. I tried not to think about the fact that I really didn't know what I was doing.

I paused at the jungle border and bit my lip. On one side was the red soil, which was my home, all that I knew—safety and family—and on the other the dark brown soil, the unknown—danger, madness, and very possibly death. Fear landed on my shoulder like a heavy, bloodsucking masquerade. I pushed the story the farmers told Dari and me out of my head. It was just a story, I told myself. Maybe. I closed my eyes and stepped with a shaky leg across the line. This time I didn't look back.

I stopped at the tree where Dari was bitten. Of course the war snake was gone. But the digi-book Dari had dropped was still there. I brushed the spot with my foot to see if anything was skulking around the book. Then I flipped the book with my foot to make sure nothing was underneath. I slowly picked it up and pressed the "on" button. Nothing happened.

I pressed it again and still nothing happened. I jiggled the digi-book a bit, as I'd seen Dari do, and smacked it on the side. With the second smack, it made a peeping sound, and I quickly pressed the "on" button and up popped the title page. It showed the lush green jungle of palm, coconut, rubber, banyan, bush baobab, iroko, and mangrove trees, each of them labeled. The picture looked very much like the jungle around me.

The authors of the field guide were the Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure Organization, a group of radicals who had trekked into the Forbidden Greeny Jungle at different times over fifty years ago. Dan had read about these people. Just before he was bitten, these explorers had been his idols. Of course, the digi-book was packed with information about each of the many contributors to the book.

"They were a group of students from Ooni University who were determined to change the world," Dari had said during one of our days in the jungle. "Many of them didn't live past thirty! And even more of them emerged with odd afflictions. One came out of the jungle with strange green birds nesting in her hair and some even stranger disease that made her skin grow fish scales! But she also wrote three books about all that she saw!"

Dari said the digi-book offered not only lists and descriptions of creatures and plants of the jungle but also an extensive list of cures and precautions and even short stories and poems written by the authors while they were in the jungle.