Every day, a thirteen-year-old child inhales 10,000 liters of air. Breathing is so natural that we no longer pay it any attention, yet lacking air is the worst torture of all. Those were the last thoughts that crossed Hichy's mind as he gave up. It was the first time in his life that he stopped fighting to live and accepted that death would take him. Terror immediately gave way to a kind of surrender that also felt like deep relief. His muscles loosened, and he closed his eyes.
"So you can't sleep without your cuddly toys, you triple idiot!"
When he lifted his eyelids, his sister was leaning over him, snickering. A gigantic cloud of little white balls was spinning above them. Hichy vowed to savour, from now on, every moment of the flow that regularly filled his lungs to oxygenate his blood.
"Good thing I was here, or you would've ended up suffocating under your cuddly toys," Inata went on. "I didn't understand why Melio was biting my feet. It's true he bites all the time, but this was even more than usual. When I turned my head and saw you weren't there anymore, I knew something was going on. You owe him big-time, because it's thanks to him that I woke up."
As if to confirm it, the ginger cat pounced on Hichy and bit his arm. The boy tried to pet him, but the little animal was far more in the mood to play and wrestle. The rabbits were still swirling through the starry night. Inata flung them as far away as she could, hoping they would be rid of those cumbersome plush balls long enough to finish the night in peace.
The two children and the cat went back to sleep in their shelter of branches and leaves, but Melio was now wide awake. For a while he kept bouncing from one end of the tent to the other, jumping and biting the two children, before finally calming down and letting them fall asleep again.
When the sun rose, they were still dazed and exhausted by the night's events.
"This time, it's the end of our supplies," the twin noted bitterly. "We don't have a single dried fruit left. You could've kept a few rabbits."
"I'm not eating rabbit any more than I'm eating dog."
"Why not? Because they're cute? So everything is about looks for you, then. I'll remind you they came a hair's breadth from choking me."
"Doesn't matter. I don't eat those animals."
"OK. In that case, there's only one solution left: Melio."
"You're not going to eat the cat!" his sister cried.
"Not in a million years. Are you crazy? I'll never eat my beloved little cat. If he can find food in the forest, we have to do the same thing he does."
"You want to eat voles?"
"Exactly. And you, with your powers, you should be able to flush them out. And there might be wild strawberries."
Half an hour later, the lifeless bodies of small rodents were roasting on a wooden skewer above the fire. Melio circled the unfortunate little victims, meowing, while Inata watched her brother with a disgusted look. When it was time to eat, her stomach proved stronger than her reason, and she threw herself on the small pieces of grilled meat her twin handed her.
"What we're missing is vegetables, fruit, and grains," the boy remarked. "Meat is good, but it isn't enough, even with mushrooms. We have to get out of this infernal forest as fast as possible."
Back on the move, the two children resumed their ritual, Hichy leaping regularly to orient himself on the rotating disc. The hours followed one another, each one identical to the last, inside a vegetal universe that seemed endless.
It was only after two weeks of that regime that the effects began to show. Each evening, the children built a shelter, increasingly refined and increasingly sturdy. They surrounded their tipi with a kind of palisade of branches, brambles, and nettles. The fire crackled in front of their camp as they fed on grilled voles, mushrooms, and sometimes currants or blackberries. Their clothes stayed clean thanks to Inata's powers, and they could have kept walking like that for years.
One morning, Hichy noticed their pace had quickened, and the confident stride they had acquired since leaving could not explain everything. It felt as if the ground were slightly sloped. When he leapt into the air, he now landed a few meters away from his starting point. And he had the impression that the distance grew over the course of the day.
"Don't you think there's more and more wind?" Inata asked that evening.
"Yes, I noticed. It's coming from our right, which means it's caused by the disc's rotation—and that we're moving in the right direction."
"Have you seen the trees? They look more and more tilted."
The phenomenon intensified again the following day, so much so that Hichy no longer needed to leap above the trees to know which way to go. He only had to let himself be carried along in the direction of the centrifugal force—first hopping like a little goat, then, when it became too strong, holding back his steps as if on a downhill slope.
Melio's fur stood on end in an increasingly violent wind, and the cat clung to his master, not hesitating to sink his claws into the flesh of Hichy's arms. The little animal seemed terrified at the idea of being swept away like a straw.
The movement pulling them away from the center grew exponentially. The trees were now outright twisted, drawn toward the outside of the disc as if by an overpowered magnet, bending under the force of the sideways wind. The two children struggled more and more to hold back their steps. Despite his protests, the boy was forced to stuff his cat into his backpack for fear of seeing him slip out of his arms.
The centrifugal force became so strong that it was now impossible to resist it, and they could no longer go back. It was like a slope that grew steeper and steeper—impossible to fight—dragging them inexorably downward.
They passed the first uprooted trees without being able to stop, and stones began to roll at their feet. The wind became so violent that the canvas was torn from Hichy's pack, and it felt as if their hair would be ripped from their heads. Their feet started to skid, and without even moving, they could no longer slow their wild slide.
"This way!" Hichy shouted, crouching low to the ground.
He sprang sideways, taking his sister with him. They managed to land on a tree whose deep roots had held. They sat on the trunk, so tilted that their bodies were parallel to the ground. The notions of up and down had become hard to grasp, the centrifugal force now overpowering earthly gravity.
A mix of leaves, branches, and stones slid across the ground like a torrent, and the trees cracked constantly around them.
"And now?" Inata yelled over the wind.
"We have no choice. We're completely trapped. Our only way out is to keep going forward. Do you think you can push matter far enough away from us to form a protective bubble?"
"I can try, but I've never done that before. Do you—"
Without waiting for his sister to finish, Hichy grabbed her hand and threw himself into the cascade of stones, earth, and vegetation. Inata tried to repel the matter that surged dangerously close, but the continuous, extremely rapid motion of the stones made it especially difficult. They tumbled among trees that no longer held in place. They slid faster and faster, tossed in every direction and battered by the raging elements.
Without Inata's powers, they would have been reduced to pulp, like in a gigantic blender—shredded by sharp-edged stones and knocked senseless by massive branches. Everything was moving so fast now that it was impossible to tell sky from ground, right from left, wind from solid matter.
Then they were flung like balls out of the disc and landed on an enormous barrier of debris, made of everything the forest had vomited up after grinding it into pieces. They vaulted over that makeshift rampart—upon which the disc continued to rain down whatever it ejected under centrifugal force—and threw themselves onto the ground to catch their breath.
"We're out of the disc," the boy said.
"Yeah, I could've guessed that," his sister scoffed.
Melio burst out of the backpack, fur wild, offended at having been shut in. He pounced on a fly and went back to his games, completely unaware of how close he had come to death. The children's arms were covered in scrapes, and a little blood ran down Inata's leg. Aside from those superficial injuries, they had come out more or less unscathed.
Around them, the forest still stretched as far as the eye could see. They moved away from the edge of the disc to get completely out of range of the flying debris, and Hichy leapt above the trees to survey the area.
"Damn it!" he exclaimed as he landed.
"What is it?" his sister asked.
"The volcano."
"What about the volcano?"
"I can't see it anymore. It must be on the other side. We're completely lost, and I have no idea which direction to go. That mountain was a good landmark—a goal to reach."
"Anyway, we had no way of controlling where we'd land, and nothing says that volcano was interesting. Do you know Descartes?"
"Yes. The philosopher."
"He said: 'Travellers lost in a forest will put an end to their wandering by always walking in the same direction rather than constantly changing (turning now one way, now the other). Whatever direction they take, they will necessarily leave the forest, since it is bounded.' So let's pick a direction—any direction—and…"
While they were lecturing each other about philosophy, they hadn't even noticed that someone was watching them closely, without a word.