Connect the Stars Read online

  “Who knows?” I said breezily. “Maybe.”

  But that night, I stayed awake inside my tent for a long time, thinking about what Aaron had said.

  I’d expected that Aaron would have to come wake us all up when his watch alarm went off, but even though I was two tents away and sound asleep, I heard it, a bright, hard, mechanical pinging, bouncing like a tiny hammer against the soft, wide quiet of the desert night. I knew it was actually early morning, but most of my brain and my entire body thought it was still night. It was only by sheer force of will—and picturing Daphne instead of Louis sleeping on that air mattress—that I was able to drag myself up and out of my tent. But when I stood, stretched, and breathed in, the air smelled fresh and crisp and lush and alive.

  I figured I was the first one to emerge, but after a moment I noticed that Louis’s tent was already down, and then I saw his large, bunched silhouette against the backdrop of trees. Either he’d decided not to wear his earplugs after all or he’d been too nervous about hiking in the dark to sleep. He was sitting on his pack, and his hands were around his face. His shoulders were slowly rising and falling. I thought he might be crying.

  “Louis?” I whispered his name so softly that it was more like a breath, because I knew he hated things coming at him out of nowhere, and I wasn’t sure if this included his name. But he didn’t jump at the sound, just turned his head in my direction and nodded. I walked over and saw that he had one hand clamped over his mouth. The forefinger of his other hand was pressed against the side of his nose, squeezing shut his right nostril.

  “Oh. Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, moved his hands away, and exhaled, long and slowly, like he was blowing out birthday candles.

  “I do that too, sometimes,” he said. “Throw up. I guess I still could. It’s early.” He gave a shaky laugh. “But no, I was reducing my oxygen levels and increasing my carbon dioxide.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “I was overbreathing,” he said. “Also called hyperventilating. But just the word ‘hyperventilate’ makes me anxious, which is basically the last thing you want when you’re panicking. I find the word ‘overbreathing’ more calming.”

  I considered this. “I can see why you would. Are you feeling . . . better?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and lifted one finger to tell me to wait, and I wondered if he was trying to look inside his own head to see if it was all finished panicking. Finally he opened his eyes and nodded.

  “I think so.”

  “It’ll be okay, you know. It really will.”

  He gave a decisive nod. “Definitely.”

  And it was okay, mostly. Kate had the brilliant idea of tying two bandannas together to make a scarf about two feet long, then tying one end to her pack and giving Louis the other end to hold.

  “I’ll walk ahead of you,” she said. “If you get nervous in the dark, it might help to know you’re connected to someone.”

  Louis eked out a smile. “It’ll help. I’m sure it will.”

  When he said this, I met Aaron’s eyes, and he smiled. I knew we were both thinking about Seabiscuit and Pumpkin; I also knew that once you started having inside jokes with people, it was really, really hard not to become friends with them. But I couldn’t help it. I smiled back.

  We retraced our steps from yesterday, heading back toward the gully. Because the path through the creosote bushes was narrow, Aaron went first, then Kate, then Louis, then me.

  A couple of times, I heard Louis’s breathing get faster, but each time he used the birthday-candle blowing to calm himself down. It didn’t take us long to get to the deep cleft in the rock that we’d found the day before, and by then, the eastern sky had gone from black to smoke gray to rose. Just as we stopped hiking and stood staring uneasily into the gully, the sun popped up behind us and turned the rocks the color of pumpkin pie.

  Aaron said, “Okay, how about if I go first? Then I’ll yell back to let you know how long it took, and also if there’s anything specific to watch out for.”

  “Are you sure? I can go first,” I said, but he was already going. The space was narrow enough so that if he opened out his arms, both hands could brush the sides of the crevice, and after about twenty feet, it curved down and away to the right. Something like two minutes went by before we heard him call out, “Through! It gets a little bit narrower for about ten steps, but then it opens up. It’s brighter in there than you’d think. Don’t worry, Louis. It’ll be fine!”

  “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” said Louis, in a squeaky whisper, to himself.

  “You got this, Louis,” I said.

  Kate gave him a quick look over her shoulder. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” said Louis.

  The three of us stayed close together, shuffling more than hiking, Louis clutching the bandanna rope with both hands. I could hear his breathing growing shallower and shallower. Soon he was trembling so much that his pack was quaking.

  “The walls won’t actually close in on us, right?” he asked.

  “No way,” I said. “Never. This crack in the rock has been here for a million years.”

  When we got to the narrowest part, he stopped and leaned against the rock wall. His face was pale and beaded with sweat. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  “We know you can do it, Louis,” I said. “Right, Kate?”

  Kate nodded, and then she did something I’ll never forget. In a soft, steady voice, she began to sing.

  “‘My bonnie lies over the ocean. My bonnie lies over the sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.’”

  I joined in. “‘Bring back, bring back, oh, bring back my bonnie to me, to me. Bring back, bring back, oh, bring back my bonnie to me.’”

  It was all we knew of the song, but it didn’t matter. At the beginning of the third round of it, in a small, quivering voice, Louis started to sing too. By the chorus, he had picked up the bandanna rope again, and we were walking, singing in time with our steps. Kate was amazing. I would never have thought of singing, but it was exactly the right thing. Her parents knew what they were talking about when they told her she was good at walking around in other people’s shoes. But about five paces into the narrowest section, I heard Kate’s voice falter, and she stopped walking.

  “Hey,” she said quietly, without turning around. “Louis, why don’t you close your eyes for this part.”

  “Oh,” he said. He seemed to be about to ask why, but then he didn’t. “Okay.”

  When I got to the place Kate had stopped, I saw why she’d done it, and my heart took off like a racehorse. On the rocks, about two feet above my head—which would have made it about one foot above Louis’s—was a tarantula as big as my hand and looking exactly as hairy and terrifying and magnificent as tarantulas always look in pictures. I had to swallow a screech at the sight, but Louis’s singing hadn’t missed a beat. With his eyes closed, he’d walked right by the tarantula like it wasn’t even there.

  With a loud, collective sigh of relief, the three of us spilled out the end of the slot where Aaron was waiting. We all just stood there for a while, feeling the huge space around us and the sun on our faces. Louis was still pale, but he seemed to be breathing normally. When we’d caught our breaths, Aaron said, “Hey, follow me. I need to show you something!”

  He led us over a small round hill like a swell in the ocean of desert and pointed.

  “What?” I asked.

  And then I saw it: a cardinal-red flicker against the sky. The flag!

  “What’s that?” asked Louis nervously.

  “It’s the flag!” said Aaron. “We’ve won! Or almost.”

  “No,” said Louis, cupping his ears with his hands and scanning the sky. “I mean, what’s that noise?”

  It took the rest of us a few more seconds, but then we heard it too. It sounded like a faraway waterfall: a high, fragile singing and a splashing, splashing, splashing.
Even though I couldn’t see anything yet, I knew what I was hearing: hundreds of voices, echolocating; hundreds of wings, flapping. Then a black boiling cloud poured over the hill in front of us.

  “A flock,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “A colony,” said Aaron, correcting me.

  “Oh, no!” cried Louis.

  Kate just stared with her big, bottomless eyes.

  Bats. And they were headed straight for us.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Aaron Archer

  El Viaje a la Confianza

  WE FROZE. THE TORRENT OF bats narrowed like the tail of a twister as they swarmed into their cave in the base of the cliff. They flocked from every direction, so there was no escape. In half a second, Louis went—I hate to say it—bats. He screamed. He clawed at the air. He ran in place so fast I couldn’t see his feet, but he got nowhere. “Get them off me, get them off me, get them off me, get them off me, help me, help me, help me, get them off me . . . ,” he wailed.

  “Louis!” called Kate, like he was half a mile away. But he couldn’t hear. Because in a way, I guess he was half a mile away. At least.

  “Get them away, get them off, help me, help me, help me . . .”

  “Bats,” I yelled into his ear, “are equipped with onboard sonar capable of locating objects in complete darkness, enabling them to avoid collisions. Their brains construct detailed three-D acoustical images of nearby hazards or prey—”

  “You mean they know what we look like?” shrieked Audrey, grabbing wildly at one of Louis’s windmilling arms. “Gaaaah.”

  “Bats almost never collide with stationary items,” I shouted.

  “If you’re telling Louis to stand still, it’s not gonna happen,” cried Kate, lunging for the other arm.

  “Aaaah, baghabaaaa, horrrghggggfffff,” gasped Louis weakly.

  “The average brown bat poses far less danger to a human being than a mosquito,” I added.

  “Aaron!” shouted Audrey. “Do you really think this is the time for a science lesson?”

  “I just mean,” I said, “if a bat can locate a gnat in the dark, don’t you think it can tell where we are?”

  Louis’s flailing hands whacked a bat, which veered off course and smacked into his forehead. It fell to the ground and staggered away like a leather crab on its little claws before wobbling back into the air.

  “Get behind this boulder!” Kate shouted to Louis. “The swarm is splitting apart to fly around it.” She managed to catch one of his hands so she could drag him behind a big rock. Audrey and I followed. Bat wings fluttered so close to my face, it felt like they were vacuuming my breath out.

  Louis’s too. He gasped for air like he was suffocating. Then he collapsed.

  “Louis! Louis!” screamed Kate. “Louis!”

  Audrey hollered something about increasing carbon dioxide levels. And reducing oxygen. If I remembered anything about this, I didn’t remember that I remembered. My brain went staticky.

  “Please, please, please,” sobbed Kate. Audrey held her hands over Louis’s face and clamped his nose shut. “Louis! Wake up!”

  But Louis didn’t look asleep. He didn’t look like he’d fainted. He didn’t even look knocked out. In fourth grade, Hardy Gillooly had cold-cocked himself on the edge of Mrs. Mattson’s door in the school hallway, but even lying on the tile floor, he’d seemed alive. His face still had “Hardy” written on it, and I could tell by looking that any second he’d roll over and stand up. But Louis looked—dead. While I watched, his hands and feet twitched, and then his body went slack.

  Time stopped.

  All at once, I realized how many things could go wrong out here, and I realized that if we really needed help, we didn’t have a prayer.

  “Louis! Louis!” screamed Kate.

  “He’ll be okay,” said Audrey. But she didn’t sound convinced. She kept her hands covering his mouth and nose.

  “Let him breathe,” cried Kate.

  “Breathing is the problem,” said Audrey.

  “What?” sobbed Kate. “What does that mean?”

  The bats had all flown into their cave and latched onto the ceiling like a squirming, breathing, squeaking, furry drape. A roadrunner streaked across the trail ahead of us. The woody arms of an ocotillo clattered together in the wind.

  Kate collapsed into tears.

  “Hyperventilation,” I finally remembered. “He doesn’t have enough carbon dioxide in his blood. And he has too much oxygen. The blood vessels in his brain are constricting.”

  “Wake up, Louis,” whispered Kate. “Please just wake up.”

  “Ohhhh,” groaned Louis, his eyes blinking open. “Did I overbreathe?”

  “If that’s what you call it,” gasped Kate.

  “That’s what I call it,” said Louis, struggling to sit up.

  “Then that’s what you did,” said Kate, laughing through her tears.

  Gravel skittered down the rock face and spattered in the dust around us. We glanced up to see where it’d come from, and I caught a flash of orange hair disappearing along the cliff above us.

  “Randolph!” said Kate.

  “And Daphne and the rest,” added Audrey. “They really did go the wrong way! They’re stuck at the top of the cliff!”

  “Did they see us?” I asked.

  With a massive effort, Louis tried to pull himself together. “I’m pretty sure Randolph did,” he said, squinting upward.

  “So now they know where we are,” said Kate, who had wiped her eyes and shouldered her pack.

  “But they still have to double back to the beginning of the canyon and hike down it to get here,” Audrey said.

  “How much of a head start do we have?” wondered Louis.

  “Maybe an hour?” I said. “Maybe a little less.”

  “And the flag is right there,” said Louis, pointing up the next hill.

  “Come on,” said Audrey. “Let’s go!”

  We heaved on our packs.

  But Louis took one step, and his feet walked off in two different directions. He sat down hard. His arms dangled by his sides. His head lolled like Pinocchio’s before the magic spell, when he’s still a marionette and nobody is holding his strings.

  “You guys go on,” Louis mumbled, staring at the ground. “I’ll be okay.”

  “We can’t leave you by yourself!” Audrey protested.

  “I’ll stay,” said Kate.

  “No. You guys go. Hurry,” said Louis. “I’ll be fine. Get the flag. And you can come back for me once you’ve got it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Audrey. “We’re not leaving you here. You’re still shaking.”

  “No, I’m not,” Louis replied. He shivered. “Okay. I am. But you still have to go. It’s our only shot.”

  “Actually,” I said, “studies have shown that in situations like this, teamwork is key. Statistically, our chances are better if we stay together.”

  Audrey looked at me quizzically.

  “It’s true!” I said. “Overall! According to many experts!”

  Audrey shrugged and turned back to Louis.

  Ten minutes later, we had him on his feet. He tottered like an eighty-year-old man, but he was walking, and the good news was, there was no sign of Daphne, Randolph, Edie, or Cyrus. The sun was still less than a quarter of the way up the sky, and what was left of the morning breeze cooled our faces. I stayed in front, but now Louis came second and Kate walked behind him, because she wanted to keep an eye on him. Audrey took up the rear.

  We walked for an hour, but the flag refused to get any nearer, although the day sure got hotter. Louis kept getting wobblier, and Kate started to drag her feet like they were too heavy for her to lift. But we could see the flag, and nobody felt like giving up or slowing down. I tried to think of something to tell everybody about. Something that would help us get to the flag sooner. I wondered if there was anything like that to tell everybody about. The Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole? No. Not quite right. They’d gott
en there second, and then all died. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbing Mount Everest? Didn’t seem to fit.

  “Aaron,” said Louis while I was still thinking, “should get the air mattress the first night. Because without him, we’d never have figured out all those clues.”

  “No way,” Kate replied. “You should get it. You need it most.”

  “Sure, Louis,” I pitched in. “You get it first.”

  “That’s the whole point,” said Audrey. “So you can get a good night’s sleep.”

  “But I don’t want it first,” said Louis as we dropped into a crease in the desert floor and the flag disappeared from sight. “I want it last, so I can dream about it longer. If I know I’ll get to sleep on the air mattress soon, just looking forward to it will make me feel so good, I might get some sleep.”

  “Louis,” said Kate, “you always get some sleep. I mean, you don’t stay awake all night.”

  Louis didn’t say anything.

  “Do you?” asked Audrey.

  I thought about how he’d looked the first morning.

  “Do you?” I chimed in. Louis just kept walking. Slowly. It was about all any of us could manage. “All night long? Without any sleep?” I remembered the two times in my life I hadn’t been able to sleep. Just for a few hours. Until one a.m. In my own bed, at home. I remembered how the darkness swirled and formed itself into a tunnel, and how the tunnel led through hours and hours that seemed endless, deserted, pitch black, and sinister. I remembered feeling like the only person in the world, and feeling afraid I would always feel this way. I remembered wishing that dawn would hurry, and knowing that it wouldn’t, and couldn’t, and didn’t want to, because it was huge and slow and, like night, didn’t care about me.

  “When it’s daylight,” said Louis quietly, “I’d rather not talk about the dark.”

  So then I did what Kate did when she listened to Louis talk about his life, and I thought about what night must be like for him, on the ground, rocks grinding into his bones no matter which way he turned, with the hours stretching into the darkness. And I realized that if he’d been to sleep since we’d begun el Viaje a la Confianza, it hadn’t been for very long.