"It itches! It itches!" Hichy cried as he woke up.
"That's normal. You're sitting on an anthill," Inata pointed out.
"On top of that, my back hurts like hell. It's horrible to sleep directly on the ground."
Despite her teasing, Inata was not faring much better than her brother. For a good part of the night, she had been trapped in a dreadful nightmare. In it, she lay down on an enormous mattress that looked soft and inviting. But when her back touched the thick layer of duck feathers, it turned out to be hard as stone.
With dirty, tangled hair, the twins rummaged through their packs and grabbed a few pieces of dried fruit. Hichy's arm was still badly mangled. The blood had coagulated and turned brown, but he did not dare remove the makeshift bandage his sister had wrapped around it. With the sunrise came the reminder that they were completely lost. Their food reserves were already scarce, but water would run out even faster.
"How could Golock let us leave with only one flask each?" Inata asked. "If he had wanted to send us to our deaths, he couldn't have done it better."
"If he had wanted to kill us, he would have had a billion opportunities to do it. And why would he have taken such care educating us if it was just to eliminate us? He must have had something in mind, that's all."
The boy stood up and awkwardly folded the canvas with his uninjured arm. A little farther away, Melio was playing with a lizard. His tail twitched with delight as he prolonged the poor creature's suffering for as long as possible before killing it.
"So now what? Which direction do we go?" Inata asked once they were ready.
"That's a good question. If only I could jump above the trees to see something."
Hichy pushed off with his legs as a demonstration and rose several metres into the air. He hovered there for a few moments before drifting gently back down. It was not extraordinary strength in his legs that had propelled him so high, but rather gravity that had temporarily weakened. He tried again with more force and soared gracefully well above the treetops.
"One… two… three!" he counted before beginning to descend.
"So what did you see up there?" his sister asked when her twin's feet touched the spongy ground.
"There's some kind of mountain in the distance. Or rather a volcano. Everything else is just an endless forest."
"Then let's go that way."
"Why? Why not the opposite direction?"
"Because it's our only visual landmark, and because what matters isn't which direction we choose, but sticking to it. We must never change course."
At regular intervals, Hichy leapt into the air to check their bearing, holding Melio in his arms. The cat, who did not seem to share his master's taste for aerial experiments, tried several times to bite him. Inata eventually agreed to carry the animal so her brother could move more freely.
"This is so cool!" he shouted each time. "It's like being on a roller coaster."
"You've never set foot on a roller coaster!" his sister mocked.
"No, but it's exactly how I've always imagined it."
Inata shrugged. As long as they did not drift too far off course, she did not care about her brother's antics. Hichy soon grew tired of the leaps anyway. The landscape was monotonous, and the volcano never seemed any closer. Each time he launched himself into the air, he felt the blood rush to his wounded arm, and the pain intensified. He clenched his teeth and said nothing so as not to worry his sister.
After two hundred jumps and a solid two hours of walking, he stumbled as he pushed off and fell flat onto the carpet of leaves, moss, and branches. Sweat covered his forehead, and fever had seized his body. His lips turned purple, and his teeth chattered.
"I don't think I'm doing well at all," he managed to say as he leaned against a tree trunk.
"Let me see your arm."
A foul stench rose when Inata removed the strips of shirt wrapped around the injured limb. The flesh clung to the fabric, and the wound was horrific. Yellowish pus oozed out, mixing with dried blood clots. The infection had spread deep inside, and unless the arm was cut off, gangrene might advance rapidly.
"I saw it in your eyes!" the boy cried. "There's no way you're amputating me! And anyway, we'd need a saw."
"It's the only thing to do. And we have your knife."
"No way! I'd rather die than live with one arm."
"Why? Plenty of people manage just fine. I even read a story about a hiker who cut off his own arm with a rusty knife after trapping it under a rock."
"No means no!" Hichy repeated. "Are you insane?"
"It's your arm that's sick. We need to get all the microbes out, and that's impossible," she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
The instant she uttered those words, Hichy felt something move inside his flesh.
"Ahhhh!" he screamed. "There are maggots in my arm! I felt them. They're eating me from the inside. I changed my mind! Cut it off! Do it! Get rid of this rotten limb!"
Inata turned her palms over and stared at them. She too had felt something strange.
"If I do this, do you feel anything?" she asked, bringing her hands closer to the wound.
"Ahhhh! It's happening again! I'm going to die!"
"No, triple idiot. It's not maggots. It's me. We already know I can move objects, right?"
"That's true."
"Your power has grown tremendously since yesterday. That means mine must have evolved the same way."
"That makes sense."
"What if I can move the microbes inside your arm and remove them?"
"You think it'll work?"
"I have no idea. But it costs nothing to try."
"And what if my arm explodes? What if you tear it off?"
"Either way, we have nothing to lose…"
As she had done with the twig and the knife, Inata focused with all her strength on the bloodied flesh. But instead of holding her breath as before, she inhaled and exhaled slowly, letting the air fill her lungs completely. Her face grew calm, entering a state of deep meditation.
Hichy's arm trembled as she brought her hands even closer to the wound.
"It's moving!"
"Shut up, idiot. You're distracting me."
"It stings! It feels like needles piercing my skin."
Tiny bubbles burst at the surface of the wound. The skin quivered, and the twin's arm jerked uncontrollably. After a while, a cloud of minuscule black particles rose above the injury, like a swarm of gnats. With a flick of her hand, Inata brushed them away as if they were insects.
"How do you feel?"
"Much better. But the wound hasn't closed. And I'm bleeding again."
"That's normal. I don't have full healing power. But the blood is bright red again, and I think I managed to remove everything that was infected."
"I can even move my fingers. Look."
Hichy clenched and unclenched his fist several times in demonstration.
"Do you think you could do the same with dirt?" he asked.
"I wouldn't risk it. You might disappear entirely."
"Oh, very funny!"
Inata's powers proved even more effective than the best detergent. In just a few minutes, she rid both herself and her brother of all the grime clinging to their skin and clothes. Only magic could reach the very heart of the fabric, fibre by fibre, without wasting a single drop of water. Even Melio, who hated water, received a cleaning that restored a glossy shine to his beautiful ginger fur.
Inata applied a fresh, immaculate cloth to her brother's wound, and they set off again, clean and refreshed as if they had just stepped out of a shower. That was when Hichy noticed a thick cloud of flies buzzing a little farther ahead.
"I'll go check," he said, covering his mouth with the collar of his shirt as he moved away.
"What do you care? Leave the flies and come back. We've already wasted enough time."
He returned moments later at a run, his face pale. He leaned against a tree to catch his breath.
"What was it?" Inata asked. "You look like you've seen a corpse."
"No. Worse."
"Worse? How could it be worse?"
"The dog."
"What about the dog? Which dog?"
"The one that bit me. It was his corpse. I recognised it."
"No, that's impossible!"
"I swear it's true."
"But we followed the direction of the volcano. We can't have gone in circles."
"There's only one explanation," Hichy said. "It's not the sun making a full turn around us every two hours. It's the forest that's turning."
"What do you mean?"
"We're on a massive rotating plate. It's like we're walking on a vinyl record. We look straight ahead in the direction we want to go, but because the disc spins beneath our feet, we stay in the same place. The path we were following is like an endless groove."