"Nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"Are you really sure?" Inata asked.
"I'm telling you," her brother replied. "I didn't see a single structure, not the slightest sign of civilisation—let alone a city. The forest stretches as far as the eye can see."
"And the disc?"
"It's gigantic. But you can only see the edge. It's going to be hard to get back to the centre."
"If you climb even higher?"
"It would be completely pointless, even with our cat vision. Even when the trees don't disappear behind the clouds, we're limited by the horizon and the Earth's spherical shape."
The wooden tower Hichy had crafted was already more than tall enough. He had assembled a good thousand trunks to raise a structure over a thousand metres high, working like a madman for an entire week. A vast clearing now surrounded them, where he had harvested the trees needed to build it.
Meanwhile, Inata had built a dwelling one could call a house without blushing, so much did it resemble a real home. She still had not managed to make windows, but aside from that, they now had all the comfort they could dream of.
At the top of the tower, the sway was so violent that no sane person would have dared venture up there. Only because he could now control any fall did Hichy feel no fear at all walking so high above the ground.
A human body in free fall reaches a maximum speed of 200 km/h after only eight seconds and two hundred metres. Beyond that, altitude makes no difference. Though he was not yet capable of jumping so high—his leaps topped out at barely fifteen metres—Hichy had gained the ability to slow his descent from any height.
Launching himself into the air above the platform held little interest, except to come back down faster by letting himself glide to the ground as if he were wearing a parachute—which was exactly what he had done to rejoin his twin back on solid ground.
"Any theory is only valid until you find at least one example where it proves false," Hichy said.
"Yes—and where are you going with this?" his sister asked.
"Maybe Descartes was spectacularly wrong. Imagine we're on a planet that isn't Earth and is entirely covered in forest. If we always follow the same direction, we'll go all the way around the planet and return to our starting point. In that case, Descartes's theory doesn't apply because the forest isn't bounded. He simply didn't take space into account along its three axes—x, y, and z—and placed himself on a two-dimensional plane."
"Not stupid. But I'd like to see it with my own eyes," she said, stepping onto the wooden ladder.
Inata quickly realised the scale of what her brother had accomplished by building something so tall. The summit was still far away and yet the trees already looked tiny down below. It took her three hours to complete the ascent, and it was almost night when she finally reached the top. She could only confirm what her brother had already told her, with no hope of overturning what was obvious beneath her eyes: the forest stretched beyond the horizon with no visible end.
The wind had picked up, and the tiny platform began to wobble dangerously. As she became aware of the altitude and the sun setting, Inata started trembling with cold, her teeth chattering. How had her brother been able to throw himself from such a height? Though she believed she had been convinced by his demonstration, she could no longer bring herself to believe it was possible to imitate him without, at best, breaking both legs—and at worst, smashing violently into the ground.
Vertigo seized her. Her knees knocked together. The wooden structure groaned under the wind, and terrible cracks threatened to bring it down at any moment.
"Go on! What are you waiting for? Jump!" she barely heard her brother shouting from far below, despite her cat hearing.
The more she questioned herself, the more fear hardened into certainty—and day into night. She knew now she would never have the courage to jump. She also knew she no longer had the strength to climb back down that makeshift ladder, paralysed, her nails dug into the wood of the platform.
Air entered her lungs with increasing difficulty. She was now suffocating, her skull aching. Anxiety choked her so violently that she was about to faint. She closed her eyes and let herself go, convinced she was going to die.
That was when she rose into the air, light as a feather. She floated, free and stripped of her fear. She drifted through the clouds, with no risk of being hurt.
When she opened her eyes—convinced she had finally found the courage to throw herself from the top of the tower—she understood with horror that the sensation of gliding through the sky was due to the fact that she truly was gliding through the sky, but not of her own will. She was in the talons of a gigantic bird of prey—an enormous two-headed eagle—its first head facing forward while the second scanned the ground below, where Hichy stood.
At that distance, he could barely make out a black dot in the sky that should have drawn closer vertically, but instead was moving inexorably away—horizontally. Something was not going as planned. Even by jumping from rung to rung, it was already far too late to do anything. Inata was gone.
The pain of watching his sister pulled away like that was magnified by helplessness. He had no idea where she was, and even less how he could come to her aid. He could not stay frozen, and—leaving behind his cat, who no longer needed his help to find food—he leapt at once in the direction he had seen her vanish into the sky.
Leap after leap, at a frantic pace, he reached the edge of the disc within a few hours. Under the centrifugal force, rocks, earth, branches, and even whole trees were slamming violently into the ring of debris surrounding it.
He threw himself over that double barrier—static for the accumulated rubble, yet carrying terrible kinetic energy for the projectiles that peppered the disc's rim like the most powerful cannons.
And yet those obstacles were nothing compared to the brutality with which he was hurled backward by those moving masses. He had barely set foot on the ground when he was pushed back with unbelievable force. Ejected like a common stone and flung several kilometres from the point of his assault, he bounced across the ground several times before coming to a stop, bruised all over and stunned.
And still he attacked that monster of mineral and organic matter again, mad with rage and despair. His clothes were in tatters, his face smeared with blood. Every muscle hurt, and each new attempt was more painful than the last. His limbs were nothing but a mix of bruises and wounds, yet he refused to give up. He could not give up.
After hours of useless struggle, he was forced at last to accept his helplessness and stow his anger away, turning it into resignation. He had lost all sense of time, and it was the rising sun that told him he had spent an entire night fighting his despair. He needed to find the way back to the house his sister had built, but he was now dozens of kilometres from where he had started.
He lifted his nose and sniffed the air, the way his cat did so well. A multitude of scents assaulted him—ones he had never had access to before. Among them was a familiar one: the smell of a little ginger animal he loved dearly. Among them was also one that warned of great danger.
Only a few hundred metres away, there was a creature with a powerful olfactory signature. It announced the presence of an animal whose aggressiveness seeped from every pore—a terrible beast thirsty for blood. It wasn't an Odilphin. It was something else, at least as big and perhaps even more dangerous.
Too exhausted to fight, Hichy forced himself into a leap to avoid any confrontation. Jump after jump, he felt the distance widen between him and the hostile creature. His muscles answered only with effort now, and it was in his mental strength that he found the courage to draw on his last reserves. Jump after jump, Melio's scent grew stronger, giving him back some courage.
When he finally reached the comfortable shelter his sister had built, the little ginger animal was waiting, tail twitching, completely unaware of the gravity of the situation. Hichy collapsed onto his bed, filthy and exhausted. He began to sob with his whole body. Melio, who didn't understand what was happening, bit him to demand that he play.
"Why do you bite me all the time? What I need is a cuddle."
As his tears ran over the cat's magnificent ginger coat, a strange flame lit in the animal's eyes and, for the first time in his life, he licked his master and let himself be petted. He curled up against the boy, who fell asleep—spent, bruised, and desperate at the thought of never seeing his sister again. He feared she was badly hurt, perhaps even dead.
During the night, he dreamed she was sleeping peacefully beside him, and that she had never climbed to the top of that cursed tower. Melio was biting his toes through the sheets, and sunlight filtered through wooden shutters. A warm smell of hot milk rose from the dining room. They were back in the house in the clearing, surrounded by their parents and Golock, their animals and their books.
"Well then—you sure slept," Inata said when he opened his eyes again.
"You're not dead?"
"It would seem not. But why would I be dead?"
"You at the top of the tower, the black dot moving away… I dreamed all that?"
"Not at all."
"Then how?!"
"Wait—I have to tell you. You're not going to believe your ears…"