Max watched, eyes wide, as the many pods hanging in the tree above him began to ascend into the upper branches, reeled in by their thin green tendrils. He had hoped whatever he might find inside would blunt his hunger, but now, as he turned to run, his only thought was to get out of range before they exploded and began raining sharp little missiles down on his unprotected backside.

He stepped carefully at first because the wound in his thigh hurt and he didn’t want to drive one of those wooden caltrops into his foot with his full weight, but he abandoned all caution when a second pod detonated behind him and pain exploded into the small of his back. He staggered and instinctively clapped one palm over the spot. His hand came away wet with blood.

Run, he thought. Run. Run.

As more of the pods began to burst, the sound of their popping began blending together into an ominous staccato. Max wondered how one tree could have so many pods, but when he was halfway across the valley he turned to look back and realized that the pods in the surrounding trees had begun bursting as well. The reaction was spreading through the orchard in a wave as the bursting pods in each tree disturbed its neighbors.

“Why,” Max said, looking down at the blood trickling down his leg and smeared along his side. “Why would anyone have an orchard full of these things?”

Carefully, he felt the small of his back again. He felt two parallel points of pain as he probed gingerly with one hand.

I got lucky, he realized.

He hadn’t been hit with a single spike straight on, so the cruel thing hadn’t lodged in his back the way one of the first two had lodged in his thigh. This last one hurt, but it was just a pair of shallow, scraping punctures. For a moment, and only a moment, he imagined what might have happened if one of those missiles had struck him in the eye, or the throat, or between the legs. He would have been on the ground before he knew what had happened to him and he’d still be in the middle of that storm of wooden shrapnel, struck from above over and over and over again.

He could have died.

Max tried to push the thought away. It was true, but it wasn’t helpful. It would slow him down. And being slow, apparently, could mean death.

But there was another thought he couldn’t banish and he glared at the grove of exploding trees. “Why would anyone cultivate these?”

A trap, maybe, for poachers or trespassers. Or maybe some kind of special pest control, for a particular kind of vermin who might be attracted to the pods. Or a particularly cruel form of hunting, where prey were driven into the orchard so the trees could do their work while the hunters prevented escape.

Clenching his teeth, Max looked down at the grass and considered its length again. It may be that someone came to cut it, and it may be that it just grew to this length and stopped. He couldn’t be sure unless he waited to find out, but he could no longer imagine wanting to meet the people who managed this beautiful, macabre orchard. He could only hope they weren’t the same people who had stolen his memories and subjected him to this experience in the first place.

Because someone had to be responsible. Whether it was the watchers, the people of Orliat, the people who planted this orchard or someone else, someone had to be responsible. This couldn't have just…happened to him.

Max turned in a slow circle, searching the rim of the valley along the stone wall to see whether there might be another exit. As much as he wanted to leave, he didn’t want to return the way he had come. He still wanted to push forward, away from the place where he’d landed, and he didn’t want to push his way through the underbrush along the outside of the valley’s wall. It was dense, and if he encountered something as sinister as these trees while shouldering through the underbrush, he was afraid he wouldn’t notice before it threw something at him.

Ah, he thought. There.

On the far side of the valley, a second arch stood in the wall at the top of a slope spotted with pink blooms.

Max circled around the orchard toward the second arch, glaring at the beautiful, blood colored leaves of the murderous trees as the wave of bursting pods continued to work its way from branch to branch. By the time he reached the opposite side of the valley the disturbance had worked its way through two thirds of the orchard. He turned his back on them and began climbing toward the stone arch. He went slowly, since the puncture wound in his thigh had begun to throb.

He had only taken a few steps when a shriek rose up out of the orchard. Chilled by the sound, Max turned just in time to see a shape erupt from the crown of one of the trees closest to him. It flew up into the air, fluttered and jerked, stalled, then began to fall. In the moment before it crashed back into the orchard, it stretched its wings and recovered.

A bird.

It let out another shrill scream as it began to climb back up into the air over the orchard.

Max stood leaning on his better leg and watched as the creature continued to climb into the air. It had only put a few yards between itself and the top of the nearest trees when it screamed again and lurched crazily to the side. A few shreds of something–feathers, Max realized–floated down after it as it fell.

“No, no,” Max moaned.

The only creature he’d encountered so far, the only sign that he wasn’t entirely alone in this jungle, and his blundering into that death trap of an orchard may have gotten it killed.

He took an involuntary step back the way he had come, not sure where the bird might fall. Maybe if it fell beyond the range of the pods, if it wasn’t dead by the time it hit the ground, he could do something to help. Or, at the very least, he could examine its body and begin to build some understanding of the jungle’s apparently reclusive creatures. But he wanted it to live.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The bird dropped quickly, but it didn’t hit the ground. It fell in a fluttering arc away from the trees, then spread its wings and began to glide a few feet above the ground. It wobbled as it coasted, but Max began to relax as it became clear that the bird had moved beyond the range of the exploding pods. And, to his delight, it was coming almost straight at him.

Max squinted at the bird as it approached. From tip to tip, he estimated that its wingspan was about as long as one of his arms. It was sleek and black, so far he could tell, with a sharp beak and a squat head. Its left wing seemed less steady as it flew, and a few of its feathers stuck out at odd angles.

“Got you in the wing, didn’t it...”

Max sympathized with the creature. It must have been in pain, but he figured it was better to have been struck by a glancing blow on the wing than a direct hit to the body. The poor thing would have been torn apart. Apparently they’d both gotten lucky.

The bird was only a few dozen feet away when it shrieked and banked sharply upward.

Max jumped, startled by the sheer volume of the call, but then he tried to stand very still. The bird must have just seen him and been startled. He didn’t want to scare it away before he could get a better look at it.

The underside of its wings were a vibrant blue, and its tail was actually two long feathers of the same color, each the length of its full wingspan. As it circled Max, the two tail feathers streamed behind it, rippling like ribbons.

“Beautiful,” Max whispered.

As if in response, the bird shrieked, circled him once more, then dove directly at him. It threw both wings wide again when it was about five feet away and snapped its tail feathers forward like twin whips. Both feathers would have been pointing directly at Max’s chest if the creature’s damaged wing hadn’t crumbled under the stress at the last moment and tilted its body to the side.

Max was hurled several feet to his right as an invisible ball of force struck the grass to his left and exploded. He would have screamed, from the wound in his legs and the shock of the attack, but the wind had been driven from his lungs.

Rolling onto his back, then his side, he ignored the stabbing pain in his leg and scrambled on hands and knees as he tried to get back on his feet. The bird was fluttering in the grass about a dozen feet away, croaking and cawing as it struggled to get back into the air.

Max didn’t wait to see if it succeeded. Running on all fours, then finally getting both feet under him as he heaved air back into his lungs, he raced up the hill toward the stone arch. He was halfway up the slope when a screech from somewhere behind and above told him that the bird was airborne again. Still running, he looked over his shoulder. The bird was still climbing into the air, but its tight circles kept it almost directly overhead.

Gritting his teeth, Max sprinted for the arch. He hoped that the dense undergrowth of the jungle would keep the bird from following him. It had to. He knew the leaves of a few bushes wouldn’t protect him from whatever the bird had thrown at him with its tail.

His heart leapt in his chest when he heard the bird scream somewhere above him. The arch was only a few dozen feet away. Gasping for air, he chanced one more look over his shoulder and saw the bird tuck its wings close and fall into a dive.

A moment later Max reached the gate, passed through, and threw himself sideways into the undergrowth. As he fell, he hoped the stone wall would protect him from the blast he knew was coming. Immediately after a stone drove itself hard against his hip, the bird shrieked and its second attack struck the top of the stone arch.

Missed. It missed.

Max lay perfectly still as the bird passed over the wall and into the jungle. Seconds later, when a third blast of force struck the wall just above him, and sent a shower of dust and stone shards down onto his hiding place, Max realized the bird knew exactly where he was.

Max scrambled back to his feet and fell into a run. Branches and vines clawed at him as he hurtled through the jungle, slapping at the gouge in this thigh scratching new wounds into his bare skin. Twice a blast of force surged by him. The first exploded off to his left and sent earth and torn vegetation raining down on him. The second stripped the bark from the base of a tree directly ahead of him. When he crashed through a knot of undergrowth and found himself teetering on the edge of a ravine, he expected a third blast to take him in the back and send him down onto the rocks below.

But he felt nothing. Long seconds sped by as he looked for a way down the side of the ravine, but he heard nothing. No calls from the bird, no sounds of thunder as its invisible attacks rushed by him.

Panting, Max turned and scanned the jungle behind him. No bird. He held his breath for a moment and listened. No flapping, no predatory shrieks.

Max collapsed, wincing as the wound in his thigh protested. He lay on his back gasping for air.. After he finally caught his breath, he didn’t get up. He lay there at the edge of the ravine, staring up into the forest canopy.

He knew now that the jungle wasn’t completely devoid of life. There were beautiful, treacherous birds. If there was anything else, would those things be just as hostile?

It occurred to him that possibly the bird may have been maddened by pain, that it had lashed out at him in fear. And maybe its condition had been his fault. If he hadn’t gone into that orchard, it could have remained hidden, unharmed.

But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t know. Couldn’t know anything, with his memories, his experiences, his entire sense of self, taken from him.

A burst of anger drove Max to his aching, shredded feet, and he turned his face to the sky. A scream tore out of him. “Who are you?”

He reached down and dug a rock out of the earth. He hurled it up into the air.

“Why are you doing this?”

He turned and hurled another rock into the forest.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

A shriek, of anger or of pain, echoed out of the forest in response. Max’s own anger drained away in an instant as the sound was followed by the noise of something crashing through the undergrowth in his direction. He froze, unsure whether to flee in the direction of the orchard or up along the ravine in the opposite direction.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The thing was fast, and as the monster emerged from a bush directly in front of him, he knew that even if pain and fatigue hadn’t made him sluggish, he wouldn’t have gotten far on his wounded leg before the thing caught up with him.

Unlike with the bird, proximity didn’t help him make sense of what he was seeing as the thing reared up in front of him. It had no head, no legs, no body, just a nest of leathery, green leaves, rounded almost like tentacles, that each ended in a barbed point. The leaves at the top of the mass writhed, whip-like, while those below thrust into the ground, one after another, so the thing could drag itself forward.

Max stared at it, frozen with fear, as one of the thing’s upper leaves swept forward to point in his direction. It became as hard and straight as a sword, then punched through his stomach.