The river fog-burst hit like a cold hand and shoved Zella sideways off her flight path. Tumble, tumble — her wings snagged a branch. CRACK. Twigs rained down around her. She hit the moss below with a wet, squelching thud and lay there staring up through the green canopy at a sky she couldn't find.
She sat up, cupped her hands around her eyes, and peered through the mist. White-nothing. Every direction was the same thick, breathless white. The grove of lantern-berries — her grove, the one with the old twisty trunks and the golden hum — was gone. She thought: I don't know which way is home. I don't know which way is anything.
Deep in a bramble thicket, a fawn was wedged — thorn-antlers biting its neck, its little body thrashing, kicking up red dirt. Zella pressed her tiny hands against the brambles and reached in. She pulled one thorn free, then another, her fingers tearing on the rough bark. The fawn went still.
The fawn stamped its hooves on the red dirt. Tap. Tap. TAP. It leaned down and breathed warm, grassy air against Zella's upturned face. She followed the stamped direction, three steps — but the mist folded the trail back on itself, and she was walking in a tight white circle. In her hand, the cut thorns still dripped golden sap.
A macaw thrashed overhead, tangled in its own spread wings, vine-sap gluing every feather to every other feather. Squawk-squawk-SQUAWK. Zella climbed the dripping vine and worked the goo away feather by feather, her fingers going green and sticky. The bird twisted, beak flailing, slapping the mist with wet, gluey wings.
The macaw shoved its beak into Zella's hair and barked. "LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!" Blue-green feathers flung out in a spray, swirling through the fog and landing in a neat little pile at a gap between two flat trees. Zella looked. She looked again. The gap was just wide enough — and the feathers were pointing through it.
She squeezed between the two flat trees, her wings scraping both sides, scraping, scraping. On the other side, the mist was thicker than before — a solid white wall. Her wings dragged on fern fronds and stopped moving. She stood very still in the nothing-white, listening for something, anything.
Then the dirt exploded. A blind mole burst up through the mud, whiskers swinging wide, and grabbed Zella's finger with its clawed hand. It pulled. She fell forward, hand-over-hand, being dragged through the thickest white wall while the mole read the roots under its paws. The fog smelled of lantern-berry. The mole knew the way.
The mist broke. The grove pulsed gold, all those twisty trunks glowing like lit candles. The mole dropped her finger and sank into a soft puff of brown dirt, gone. Zella stepped onto the known soil and pressed her bare palms flat against it. She plucked a single lantern-berry from a low-hanging branch.
The berry's light stretched thin and blue across the remaining mist, and somewhere deep in the jungle a parrot squawked, "LEFT!" Zella laughed — a real, bright laugh. She tucked the berry in her pocket, sat down on a fat root, and let the golden glow wash over her. Her wings still smelled of green sap.
