1
Taiyo Yamazaki wiped the mist and sweat from his face, eyed the water in the estuary, and listened.
Nothing.
Nothing but insects and the distant haunting of songbirds in heavy air.
People think survival is all about getting water and shelter, but Taiyo knew those people were wrong. After you secure your basics is when it really starts. That’s when your thoughts turn inward. That’s when you start to feed the monster. Only crumbs, at first. Time passes. You become more aware of how fucked you are. So you feed it more. You feed it, and it grows. It wants more, and it takes, and it eats, and it grows so big the only thing left to fill its belly is you.
Closer to the headland, rivulets of volcanic runoff raked the beach like wounds, forest to sea. The sand swallowed and stained Taiyo’s toes. He looked up from his rust-red feet and could no longer see the headland. It’d been there a minute ago; a finger of jungle creeping into the sea to scratch the coral reef. That fast, the fog had come down from the mountains and devoured it.
He’d go just a few more meters. Twenty at the most. … Maybe fifty. Unless the fog cleared. Then he’d go out to the end, take a picture, and get back to the others. No hanging around.
Nice and cool as the water felt, he made sure to inspect even this rivulet for movement before crossing. Once through, he paused, careful to keep from the water’s edge, and glanced back down the beach at the faint outlines of the other five candidates. Blinking away the mist, he checked the time on his phone: thirteen minutes until the end of the break.
He kept going.
The headland didn’t stretch far but had no solid surface aside from the slick crisscross of mangrove limbs and a spine of knotted foliage. Low tide had exposed the black, skeletal root network, making it resemble the half-submerged carcass of a giant serpent.
He clambered up onto the disjointed appendages, keeping a stride between himself and the lapping sea to his left.
There it was up ahead. The fog had cleared enough to reveal the tip, where the murky world of mangroves yielded to the clear water of the Coral Sea. He crept closer, hand over feet. Against his bare soles and palms, the roots felt more like fish scales or clammy flesh than like tree parts, and the whole jumble seemed to flex beneath his weight.
Almost there.
Standing with the aid of a wilted trunk, he saw the straw-haired tendrils of a more distant tree drooped out over the water and clawing through the waves at the coral. He permitted himself a smile and released a pent-up breath. This was the place where one World Heritage Site touched another—the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.
He pulled his phone from his belt and snapped a pic. Then another. Whatever came of the next three weeks, he’d remember this spot as a marker between the old life and new.
A gust tested his grip on the skinny trunk. He put the phone away to hold on with both hands, but the tree bent back and dumped him waist-deep into the briny water between the roots. Mud and saltwater doused his eyes. Scrambling, he regained a foothold only to slip again. Two scraped shins and a thumping heart later, he’d hauled himself up out of the water, safe, for now, from what might lurk down below.
He wiped the sting from his eyes on his undershirt and looked around. Nothing had changed. The ordeal hadn’t even left a mark on his surroundings. How stupid he’d been to come out here. What had he been thinking taking dumb risks before the mission even got going?
The water was still too close—beneath his feet and on three sides where the sea enclosed the protrusion of mangroves. He looked around for a safer path back to the beach, for a route up the more-elevated and forested middle.
Something shook the trunks and bushes. The water stirred. Waves lapped the roots, growing in strength then crashing. With the splashes came rhythmic thuds—a sound rising and falling in pitch as it neared.
Bwaaab … Bwaaab … Bwaaab …
He spun around. Unable to spot the source through the thicket, he jerked backward to flee. Water shot up between the roots. He grabbed another trunk and held on while the reverberation tightened his skin to his chest.
Bwaaab … Bwaaab …
He sprinted root over root from the threat, pulse racing, deeper into the knot of mangroves for shelter, fell through the limbs, recovered, clambered to stay above water, scurried until the foliage was too thick to go on.
The rhythm turned into a roar.
Bwaaawaaa …
Closer.
Louder.
He trembled in the branches. Birds burst into flight, shrieking as they fled.
He sprung to the edge of the mangroves, leaped in feet first, and dashed inland through the blood-red stream to the wall of jungle where he grabbed a stick and spun around, ready to fight for his life.
But there was nothing there. … Only the noise.
Gasping, hands on his knees, face dripping in sweat and brackish water, Taiyo watched a pontoon boat round the tip of the headland. The outboard motor groaned into the fog, and the bow thudded rhythmically against the waves.
Bwaaab … Bwaaab …
He spat the brine from his mouth and cursed, more disgusted with himself than with the taste. He rolled down a sleeve to wipe his face and caught the agency’s patch out of the corner of his eye.
Explore to Realize, it said. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency—jaxa.
The magnitude of it all swept through him, a swell of combined horror and exhilaration for the coming weeks.2
