Jordan Black's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The cliffs could wait for morning. Jordan and his three friends agreed on that inside the old hut. No one could climb rock in the dark, and the missing four were south, past reach for now. But their stomachs growled, and the water was gone. So Jordan and Matt stepped back into the trees to hunt for food. Matt led. He always did in the wild. His parents were survival guides, and he read the forest the way Jordan read a crowd. His dreads swung as he crouched over broken ferns. "Water runs downhill," he said. "Follow the green." They walked until the ground went soft. A thin stream cut through the roots. Matt cupped his hands and drank, then nodded. "Clean." Jordan looked up and stopped. A tree stood over the stream, thick with fruit in colors that made no sense. Blue spikes. Pink swirls. A purple one shaped like a fist. "Tell me those won't kill us," Jordan said. Matt broke one open. He smelled it, then rubbed juice on his wrist and waited. "No burn. No bad smell." He touched a drop to his tongue and held still. "Sweet. It's safe." They filled their shirts with fruit and carried it back. Trina met them at the door. She was Jordan's friend, though barely — the rich girl who paid her way onto the trip and kept trying to prove she belonged. Her pink sneakers were caked with mud now. She stared at the fruit. "That looks fake," she said. "I'm starving. I hate that I don't care." Matt built a fire while Jordan cleaned two small silver fish they'd pulled from the stream. Soon a neat ring of stones held glowing embers and fish on sticks. They ate the fish first. Then Jordan bit into a blue fruit. It tasted like nothing he knew — cold, then warm going down. Trina ate a pink one. Her eyes went wide. "I can hear the fire," she said. "I mean, I can hear it move. Every crack." She wasn't joking. She named the sound of a bug landing across the clearing. Jordan stood and felt it hit him. The dark stopped being dark. He saw the treeline sharp, every leaf edged, like someone turned up the light behind his eyes. He reached for a coconut Matt had missed and crushed it in one hand. The shell burst like paper. Matt looked at his own hands, then vaulted over the fire in a single easy jump. He landed light. "That's not me," he said. "That's the fruit." They stood in the firelight, breathing hard, changed. The fruit had done something to their bodies. Jordan flexed his fingers and thought of the cliffs waiting at dawn — the rock he couldn't climb before. "We eat more before we go up," he said. "Whatever this is, it just made the mountain possible."