"Now that you mention it, I can feel it too," Inata said.
"See?" her brother replied. "It's a barely perceptible movement that only animals like cats can sense. We now know which direction to go to reach the centre of the disc. I can feel it beneath my feet and even through my whole body. We don't even need to follow the movement of the sun anymore, and it's becoming rarer and rarer anyway."
The twins' fur clothes made them look like shaggy animals. Compared with their horrible rags, the beast skins of Cro-Magnon men would certainly have counted as high fashion. The effect was even more striking when they leapt ever farther and ever higher, their powers growing stronger day by day. As for Melio, his winter coat had become magnificently beautiful in inverse proportion to the ugliness of his masters' pelts. His long silky fur begged to be stroked, and he fended that off with a few bites and swipes of his claws. The ginger of his tail shone more brightly than ever, and the white of his neck was more dazzling than before.
"All the leaves have fallen from the trees now," Hichy observed between two long glides. "It must be six months since we left."
"Golock said it would take us a year," his sister replied, "but a year on foot. We're moving much faster than that. Unless he hadn't expected us to head in the wrong direction and need half a year to get back to our starting point."
That uneasy thought made them hesitate for a moment, but they no longer wished to listen to Descartes' advice, whose simplistic solution had only got them more lost instead of helping them. It took them only three days to reach their new objective, and they knew they had arrived when they discovered the clearing opening up in the middle of the forest. It was perfectly round, just like the stone shepherd's hut standing at its centre.
"It's the first time since we left that we've seen a human construction," Inata pointed out.
"I'm not unhappy about that! Do you think we'll find something to eat inside?"
"You and your stomach! You're even worse than Melio."
They went around the building, which had no windows at all, before discovering a wooden door. Hichy pulled on the handle, but the door resisted because it was locked.
"I'm going to craft a battering ram," Hichy announced at once.
"That's completely stupid! You'd do much better to craft a key!"
"Oh really? And are you the one who's going to make steel, maybe? Did you see how long it took me last time?"
"Why would we need steel? We can make one out of earth."
"Out of earth?"
"Yes. If I keep the molecules under the control of my power, it should work. And it'll let us adapt the key to the shape of the lock. Look."
Inata gathered a small amount of earth and sent it into the lock. Then she turned her wrist counter-clockwise. Something grated inside, but the bolt stayed shut.
"It's completely rusted," she observed. "We'd need oil."
"Are you sure you'd rather not let me smash it in? And where do you want to find oil, anyway?"
"There's some in walnuts and hazelnuts, and also in certain plants like sunflower or hemp. I'm sure there must be some around here."
The twin walked off and came back a little later with two half-rotten walnuts. She extracted a little oil from them and sent it into the lock to lubricate the mechanism. Then, after waiting a few minutes, she inserted her earthen key again to work the lock, without success.
"So who's the triple idiot now?!" her brother asked. "Move aside."
Equipped with a huge log to which he had attached two handles, he swung it several times before hurling the battering ram with all his strength at the door, which burst apart with almost no resistance.
"Wow! I've become super strong!" Hichy marvelled at how easily it had been forced in.
"And super brutish too," his sister lamented. "Now he's going to..."
"Have you lost your mind?!" shouted a voice from inside. "Didn't anyone teach you to knock before barging into people's homes and smashing everything apart?"
Despite the gloom inside the single room, their cat eyes saw a bearded dwarf raising a shotgun in their direction. The openings of his eyes were empty of any eyeballs, which did not stop him from pointing the barrel of his weapon straight at them.
A dreadful smell of stale confinement hit their nostrils. The inside of the hut was utter chaos, the floor littered with dirty, stinking clothes, the walls grimy, and piles of dishes heaped into some kind of little basin. There was no bed, only a sort of pallet laid directly on the floor, and there was neither table nor chair in the cramped space.
"Please accept our apologies," Inata said. "We did not know this hut was inhabited."
"That's exactly why you knock before coming in!" the dwarf snapped. "And when I say knock, I mean with your knuckles and very gently, not with a tree trunk. Come in now that you're here. I wasn't expecting you so soon."
"You were expecting us?" Hichy asked in surprise.
"Well yes, obviously. Otherwise what do you think I'd be doing in this godforsaken place? There's not even any Wi-Fi or 5G."
"Any what?"
"Never mind. It's far too complicated a concept for your little heads. I was told you were ignorant, but I didn't think it was this bad. Still, you fell into the trap like all the others. Children are just too predictable."
"And now?"
"Get out of my house before I really lose my temper."
The twins turned around, apologising once again, when the dwarf spoke up a second time.
"No, not that way, you scatterbrained children! You're not going to go back where you came from, are you?"
As he said this, he pointed to a trapdoor on which there lay an old rotten sock and a filthy pair of underpants. The children hesitated a moment before stepping into the putrid den and pushing the soiled clothes aside with their feet. Hichy lifted the trapdoor, beneath which they discovered a spiral staircase descending into the earth.
"Finally!" the dwarf exclaimed, pulling the wooden panel shut behind them. "Now that I've finished my mission, I'll be able to go play Roblox."
"What did he say?" Hichy asked.
"No idea," his sister replied. "I didn't understand a thing, but I get the feeling he isn't right in the head."
As they went down, step after step, Melio began to rebel, biting Hichy's hands as he held him in his arms. He scratched him so violently that the boy let him escape. They heard him race down the stairs at full speed until the sound of his paw pads on the stones vanished into the darkness. They would not have been able to see a thing if they had not had feline eyes, but even so they were struggling to make out what surrounded them.
The air grew colder and damper, and the atmosphere more and more gloomy. The staircase was so narrow that they were forced to walk one behind the other, their fur clothes scraping the walls and collecting all sorts of creepy-crawlies and bat droppings. The boy, who was in front, felt spiderwebs clinging to his face and hair. They were so numerous and thick that no one could have passed that way for several centuries.
"What time is it?" Hichy asked after a while.
"How should I know? We don't have a watch."
"I feel like we've been going down for hours, and I'm starting to get hungry."
"We've been going for barely five minutes. Keep moving and shut up."
They went on like that for a long time, which could have been minutes, hours, or even days, so badly are temporal landmarks shaken by the absence of light. They could hardly see anything anymore; their night vision was no longer enough at such depth.
"Ow! Why are you stopping so suddenly?" Inata snapped as she crashed into her brother's back.
"Shh! I heard a meow."
"Good! That means we're getting closer to your cat."
"Don't you find it strange underfoot? I feel like I'm slipping."
"It's true that it's felt odd for a while now."
The cat's meows became more and more frequent and louder and louder. The poor little animal sounded completely panicked. His cries echoed as though he were very close.
"Damn, I can't find the step below anymore!" Inata exclaimed.
"Ow! I hit my head," Hichy groaned.
"I'm starting to float..."
"Melio! I can feel him. He's there, right in front of me. He's weightless!"
"So am I," his sister replied, clinging to her brother's fur coat. "Feel with your hand. The ceiling above us is shaped like stairs too."
Hichy caught his little cat in his arms, and it immediately began to purr. There was no longer any up or down, and if his sister had not been behind him, he would no longer have known which way to go.
"Let's move along by holding onto the walls," he said.
As they advanced like that, pushing off the walls with their hands and feet, they felt the ceiling drawing them more and more strongly toward it.
"I've got it!" Hichy cried. "Gravity is reversing. We absolutely have to turn ourselves around. It isn't easy with how narrow this is, but by doing a somersault in place and a twist..."
"You're right. I'm starting to be able to touch the floor a little with my feet. This underground thing is completely crazy!"