George the bumblebee had planned for thirty things. Rain at this altitude was the thirty-first. He had studied three hives, read the colony collapse records, and tracked two seasons of rainfall charts before picking the abandoned hive deep in this rainforest. He meant to crown himself its new queen by nightfall. Instead, a fat drop hit his left wing like a thrown stone, then another struck his thorax, and the canopy above him went from green to gray in a breath. His wings soaked through. He dropped. He landed on his back in mud. His field compass slid out of the pouch strapped under his abdomen and rolled to a stop near his head. The glass was cracked. Water beaded across its tarnished face. He had bought it for the river crossings he had mapped weeks ago, and now it lay useless beside him, the needle spinning. George rolled onto his legs. Above him, the storm cloud pressed low between the trees, dumping more water than the leaves could catch. To his right, a wet mound of earth rose higher than his head, soft-edged and slick, hemming him in against a tangle of roots. He could not climb it. He could not fly out of it. Something moved on the far side of the mound. George flattened himself against a root. A line of ants, each twice his size, came around the curve of the mud in single file. The lead ant stopped. Its antennae found him before its eyes did. George ran through his contingencies. One was for rival bees. Two was for wasps. Three he had written at two in the morning and did not trust. None of them covered ants. He grabbed the compass, jammed its cracked face into the mud, and shoved. The casing sank an inch. He shoved again and it tipped, sliding down the slope of the mound and into the path of the column. The lead ant lunged at it. The others piled in behind, mandibles working at the metal. George climbed. He used the roots, then a strand of vine, then the lip of a curled leaf, dragging his soaked wings behind him like wet paper. By the time the ants understood the compass was not food, he was four bee-lengths up the trunk, out of their reach. His wings were still useless. His compass was gone. The hive was somewhere north, or what he had thought was north before the needle started spinning. He pressed himself flat against the bark and watched the rain fall. He was alive, and he was lost, and the climb to the canopy was going to have to start from here.