Desperate Measures (2 page)

C
arter's vision swam as he came to. He was lying on his back on the net. When he reached up to touch his throbbing forehead, a golf ball–sized lump blazed with pain. His stomach clenched, but there was nothing down there to throw up. None of the
Raku Nau
runners had eaten in more than twenty-four hours.

He rolled over and looked down. Chizo sat slumped on the ground, hands around his knees, head bowed, and barely stirring.

Carter dragged himself to the edge of the net. He rolled off and dropped, ignoring the shock to his legs as he hit the ground. The pain was everywhere, but it
couldn't be helped. This wasn't over, and his best bet now was to strike first.

It was impossible to know how old Chizo was, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Definitely older than eleven-year-old Carter. But that didn't matter here. On this playing field, they were equals.

Carter lasered his focus on Chizo. He pushed his feet into the dirt. And he charged.

Chizo looked up just as Carter hit him in a low tackle. It knocked Chizo flat. With a quick scramble, Carter was on top. The adrenaline rushed through him. He pinned Chizo's arms with a knee on either side. He pressed his left hand into Chizo's chest and cocked his right fist, ready to swing—

But then he stopped cold.

The dead look in Chizo's eyes was unlike anything Carter had seen before. Chizo wasn't even trying to fight back. He'd barely moved at all. And it wasn't just from exhaustion.

It was defeat. Carter had seen that look plenty of times back home, usually on the ball field. You could always tell when the members of the other team knew
they were done. The fight drained right out of their eyes, leaving them blank and empty. Just the way Chizo's looked now.

It felt like staring into a mirror. Carter had everything he needed to win this fight, but something had just changed.

It hit him with a wave of clarity.
Raku Nau
was over. There was no winning anymore. They'd both lost. Carter wasn't going home, and without a
seccu
around his neck, Chizo's chance of becoming chief of the Nukula had just evaporated.

Other runners from the competition had begun to come off the course, too. They gathered around and seemed to be waiting for the next move. At home, there would have been a lot of shouting—
fight, fight, fight, fight
. But none of them said a word.

Carter stood up in a daze. When he reached out to help Chizo off the ground, Chizo smacked his hand away.

“Sorry,” Carter mumbled. He got it. Even now, Chizo needed to save face. And there was no reason not to let him. Whether that made Carter a wimp or a
bigger man in these people's eyes, it was impossible to say. The Nukula had their own way of thinking about things.

Out of the silence, an adult voice sounded. Carter looked up. One of the tribe elders stood at the top of the gorge that enclosed the giant three-level obstacle course around them. Her face was familiar. She'd been one of three adults acting as observers during
Raku Nau.

A moment later, the woman stepped off the gorge's edge and onto the course. She walked across a section of vine mesh as if it were solid ground, then jumped and snatched a rope on the fly to slide down one level. There, she landed on a small platform only long enough to turn and free-fall to the net below. With a final, fluid move, she landed on her back, flipped over, and let herself the rest of the way down. The Nukula seemed as comfortable off the ground as on it.

“Ekka!”
the woman said. She pointed west, where the gorge opened to the valley below. Immediately, all of the others started lining up. It seemed they were being told to head home—down from the peaks of
Cloud Ridge, into the jungle, and toward the Nukula village on the far side of the island.

Carter's pulse spiked.

What have I done?

The thought burned into his brain. Jane, Vanessa, and Buzz were waiting for him on the east shore. They'd be out of their minds by now, wondering what was up.

Losing
Raku Nau
had never even been an option. And yet, here Carter was. He'd never considered a scenario where he'd have to choose between his family's fate and someone else's. But that was exactly how it had gone down. In the heat of the moment, he'd sacrificed himself to allow Mima through.

Back home, he was always the competitive one. Maybe even the selfish one. But he'd changed. There was no denying it now. The only thing he could have done differently was to leave Mima behind and take the final
seccu
for himself. That was never going to happen.

The four of them owed her everything. If it wasn't for Mima, they wouldn't have made it past the first day. And the
seccu
was at least as important for her
as it was for them. Today, Mima's new life in the tribe could begin. No matter what else went down, Carter knew he'd always be proud of the choice he'd made to help her.

But could Jane, Buzz, and Vanessa understand all that? And, maybe more important—could they ever forgive him?

Vanessa held Jane's hand as they headed across the beach toward the woods. Feast preparations were under way. The smell of roasting meat filled the air and made her stomach rumble.

Still, it was impossible to think about anything but Carter. As they got near the clearing, Vanessa took one last, hopeful glance over her shoulder. And out there on the water, something caught her eye.

“Wait!” she said.

It was Ani, paddling an outrigger canoe toward the shore. His long, thin frame was unmistakable, even from a distance.

“Ani!” Jane called out, and ran back toward the
water. Vanessa and Buzz were right behind her.

If they couldn't be with their brother right now, Ani was the next best thing. He knew what it was to be an outsider. He'd washed ashore on Shadow Island over a decade ago. He also spoke English. From the moment Vanessa and her siblings had landed here, Ani had done what he could for them while still keeping his loyalty to the Nukula. When they'd tried to leave from the western shore that very first day, it was Ani who stepped in to warn them, and to save them.

Ani had also been there on Cloud Ridge at the end of
Raku Nau.
He'd watched as each of them grabbed a
seccu
, took a leap off the ridge, and began the final swim across the bay to the eastern shore. That meant he'd know what had happened to Carter.

“Ani!” Vanessa yelled. “Over here!”

Ani turned south then, and began paddling his outrigger parallel to the beach instead of toward it.

“What's he doing?” Buzz asked. “Ani! Come back!”

He seemed to be headed for the island's easternmost tip, a hundred yards or more down the shore. There was nothing but jungle that way. The only true
landmark was an enormous palm tree that grew way out over the water.

In fact, Vanessa realized, it was the biggest palm she'd ever seen. It dwarfed the other trees around it. A broad crown of fronds at the top shaded the shore from a hundred feet or more above the ground.

“Ani!” Jane yelled next. “Please! We have to talk to you!”

He looked over now and cocked his chin in the direction he was traveling. If they wanted to hear about Carter, their only choice was to follow along the beach. Several others had taken notice of Ani's arrival, too, and began heading through the woods in the same direction. Some traveled on the ground; others went from tree to tree, in the Nukula manner.

Vanessa, Buzz, and Jane took off running down the shore at the same time. As they headed toward the enormous tree, Vanessa heard someone shout out in a long, birdlike trill. The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, filling the air around them.

“Look!” Buzz said. He was pointing at the jungle
itself, near the huge palm. The foliage there had begun to shake. And then, incredibly, it all started to move.

Vanessa kept up her pace, squinting to make sense of what she saw. The wall of green at the base of the palm was slowly sliding away, like some kind of giant screen door.

Which was exactly what it was, she realized.

This was the genius of the Nukula. They used camouflage in ways unlike anything she'd ever seen. In the village, a man-made ceiling of bamboo and greenery shadowed the tribe from passing planes. Here, the screen hid an entrance for canoes. It ran across a swift-moving channel that flowed out of the jungle and into the ocean. Ani had already turned that way and had begun to paddle inland.

As they reached the channel, another call sounded out and the screen reversed direction. They were close enough now to see several young Nukula pushing it back into place. The screen was made from bamboo and natural foliage. The huge frame of it spanned the channel, coming to a rest against the giant palm's trunk on one side and another large tree on the other.
From the ocean, all anyone on a passing ship would see was a small river flowing out of dense jungle.

“That . . . is . . .
amazing
,” Buzz said, speaking for all of them.

But there was no time to stand around gawking. “Come on,” Vanessa said. “The sooner we get to Ani, the sooner we can get some answers.”

They cut into the woods next, skirting the edge of the screen to head upstream after their friend. Their path took them right under the enormous palm. The inland side of the tree's trunk was strung with a square lattice of vines, like a rope ladder. It was more camouflage, Vanessa saw, barely even visible from up close. The ladder rose all the way to the top, where a small hut was tucked under the palm's enormous crown of fronds.

It was a guard station, Vanessa realized. That's where the voice had come from. It was all making sense now. This was the island's most vulnerable spot. Ani had told them as much, before
Raku Nau
started.

A small number of Nukula lived on this side of the island, protecting it for exactly the reason she and her
siblings had been trying to get here. The most guarded place on the island was the only one that offered them any chance at all for escape. The odds were crazy. It was almost too much to think about.

Almost, but not quite.

Jane moved as fast as she could along the channel's muddy bank. It was hard to be patient, picking her way over the roots and rocks, but the woods were too thick for running, and the channel's current was too fast for swimming. It would only wash them back toward the ocean if they tried.

She could see Ani now, a hundred feet inland, tethering his canoe to a tree on the left bank. Several other canoes were already moored there, and a low thatched hut sat nearby.

Dozens of Nukula had already arrived at the same spot, including Mima. When she saw Jane, Buzz, and Vanessa coming, a rare smile lit up her face.

Jane pushed through the crowd, but before any of them could reach Ani, an unfamiliar boy stepped in
her way. A girl about the same age stood with him. Both wore fierce expressions.

These were the eastern-shore guards, Jane realized. Both of them were barely older than the oldest
Raku Nau
runner. And neither wore the
seccu.
That meant they'd failed to complete
Raku Nau
when they had the chance.

“Um-sha! Um-sha!”
the boy said, waving them back.

“We just want to talk to Ani—” Vanessa tried.

“Um-sha!”
the girl repeated, waving a sharpened stick in their faces.

Mima was there now, too. She laid a hand on Jane's shoulder. It seemed to say,
Don't push it
.

Soon, a man strode through the crowd toward the front, while everyone else made way. Jane recognized the shape of the man's face and the heavy brows over his dark, staring eyes. They were the same as Chizo's.

This was Chizo's father, the chief of the Nukula tribe. He was the one they called Laki.

Back in the village, Laki dressed no differently than the others. Today, he wore a long cape made
from overlapping leaves and strings of small shells. The leaves themselves had been coated in the three ceremonial colors of
Raku Nau
, like shingles of red, black, and white. On his head, he wore a band made from some kind of leather, with long narrow feathers hanging off the back.