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was sticking out of the top of one of his close-fitting boots. The boots were still soaked with water; it was the faint squishing sound that had made me look down at them.
    In that same moment, everything around us erupted. Lou leaped back, yelping, Math’s hand flashed down and up, and the knife was flying through the air to bury itself, ahead, in something black and furry and snarling, blocking the path.
    Lou fell, and I grabbed him. Bryn and Annie were diving forward, past me: “Get back!” Annie hissed at me. “Keep him back!” And I saw they had knives too, and were striking like Math at the thing ahead, again and again, grunting, intent.
    The thing screamed, a horrible high shriek, and then it was silent and still.
    Math brought his knife down in one last violent slash, and a spray of liquid came flicking back at us. When I wiped it off my arm I saw that it was blood.
    The creature looked like a rat, the size of a dog. It had a pointed nose and a long hairless tail, and its body was sleek black. It lay there, filling the pathway. The jaws were stretched wide and menacing, full of huge sharp yellow teeth. There was blood everywhere. I held Lou close; I knew he must have been terrified.
    But Lou was wriggling out of my hands, not shaking, not trembling on the edge of a seizure, not even visibly afraid. He was looking ahead. He had his head up as if he was listening. He gave a little gurgle that was almost like his happy sound, and he kept on going, walking round the path and the twitching body of the giant rat.
    â€œLou!” I shouted.
    â€œJust follow him,” Annie said in my ear. “He can hear the tree.”
    â€œWhat tree?” I said unhappily.
    The others were passing us, following Lou. Annie held me back. “Listen to me,” she said. “In your world, Lou is nothing, but in ours, he is magical, he is predestined. We have been waiting for him. Only he can save this world, only now and only here.”
    I couldn’t make sense of any of this. “I have to look after him! I always have—he’s my little brother, it’s my job.”
    â€œIt’s still your job,” Annie said. “But it’s ours too.” She gave me a big warm smile, that lit up her face like sunlight, and tugged my hand so that we were running together to catch up with the rest. The shrieking in the trees grew suddenly louder, and in a great flapping flurry a big dark-colored bird swooped over our heads and away again, into a tree. I couldn’t see it clearly. It looked a bit like a golling, a bird we have in the islands that’s the size of a duck, and usually comes out only at night. But this one was far, far bigger.
    â€œIt’s harmless,” Annie said. “Keep going.”
    â€œThey’re all huge. Everything.”
    â€œMutants.” We’d caught up with the others; I could see Lou trotting purposefully ahead of them. “That’s why Government preserves the Wilderness—to study them. There’s a big research facility somewhere in here, and the whole area’s shut off, and guarded. It’s a bad place, the Wilderness. If it didn’t have some ofthe oldest trees on the planet, we’d have attacked it long ago.”
    With a swoosh, the dark bird flapped back across the path over our heads, and then into the trees again. It didn’t seem able to fly very high. Bryn and Math looked up uneasily, but little Lou paid no attention; he went on, without pausing. The forest seemed a bit brighter here, as if more light was filtering down through the thick crisscross of branches overhead. There were fewer trees too. Gradually, as we went on, the light grew, and I began to see a few chinks in the green ceiling, a few glimpses of hazy sky. We were beginning to come out of the forest.
    And then, in an instant, we were out of it, and all of us stopped, bumping into each other like a line of dominoes. We were standing on a slope, there