Excerpt: The Jungle Planet

“We’re taking a break,” he said. Aiko was on her haunches behind him and the tour guide was leaning against the trunk of a tree. “Where’s Sue Jin?”
“I don’t know,” Eve replied crossly. She wondered why he was rubbing in the fact that things were now weird, and sat down on a Lepidodendron root to rest from the hike. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead that she swiped away with the sleeve of her dress.
“We were walking pretty quickly,” Aiko said mournfully, “it’s probably hard for her to keep up.”
They all rested for a while and waited for Sue Jin to catch up with them. Something crawled over Eve’s hand and she had to shake it off, accidentally sending it in the direction of Aiko. She seemed too worried to notice it, though, and was chewing on her lip anxiously as time went by.
“Where is she?” she finally asked. “Maybe we should go look for her!”
“She just walks really slowly,” Eve said dryly.
“She might have gotten lost,” the tour guide said gravely. “You stay here; I’ll go back and look for her.” He got up, put his war face on and took some intimidating strides into the forest and out of sight. Then they just stood there, Aiko holding her waist looking afraid and Eve and Jianjun catching each others eyes. The forest seemed impossibly vast and threatening again, now that the five of them were all alone and there was no sound except for the occasionally buzzing mosquito and croaking of crickets far away.
“He’s taking a long time, maybe I should-” Jianjun’s words were cut off when a pair of scaly claws covered his mouth and buried into his shirt, pulling him back from the spot where Eve had been looking at him. At the same moment Aiko screamed loudly and Yuki’s head made a dull thud as it was smashed into the root of a tree. He then laid there, blood ebbing slowly down through the bark onto the forest floor. There was a frenzy of movement around them that paralyzed Eve for a moment, before she was grabbed roughly into a pair of strong, coarse arms and was half-carried and half-dragged through the forest. When she had regained control over her voice she cried out for help and at the pain that her aggressor was causing her. Her attempts to fight back and kick violently in all directions caused her to badly hurt her feet, which were being dragged along after her body and hit a thorny tree.
She heard Jianjun shouting out somewhere in front of her and fear gripped her heart. Where was the guide with his gun? Who were these monsters that carried them away to eat them? And where were they going? They were moving so quickly that she could only see a blur of green around her. Every now and then, a leaf or a branch would slap her in the face and her sobs would be caught in her throat. Finally Eve turned her tearstained face upwards to look at whoever was doing this to her, and when she saw who it was the blood rushed from her veins.
“Spotty?” She cried out, incredulous. It was the face of her own diapsid servant that was hovering above her, a look of determination in the usually so gently and wise eyes that she loved so much. There was no question about it, this was the Spotty that had taken care of her since birth and the one that had listened to all her stories with patience. “Why are you doing this to me? Put me down right now!” She commanded, her voice faltering. Spotty, whose snout had been pointed resolutely ahead of them and had not stopped to look at her, now let her eyes dart down to meet Eve’s.
“Be quiet, Eve,” she said softly. “Nobody is going to hurt you.”