Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,103

of the hybrid’s throat, severed vertebrae, and exited through the back of its neck. The creature fell back, convulsed, and then laid still. Queen pulled her spear from the hybrid’s mouth as Rook stood from his hiding place behind the bush. He retrieved his spear from the hybrid’s back, twisting and turning it to loosen the body’s grip.

Without a word shared between them, they dragged the body behind the bush and covered it with leaves. The job done, they picked up their spears and began climbing. Queen went up quickly, stopping every now and then to give Rook a hand. After two minutes of hard climbing, they were in the canopy, invisible to the world below, but facing a new group of dangers.

Moving through the trees was slow and nerve-racking. A misstep might mean falling fifty feet to a very quick end or, at the least, a painful debilitation. They were also in unfamiliar territory. Fighting in the trees. Hiding in the trees. Queen had some experience, but given Rook’s size, he hadn’t spent much time climbing trees since he was a kid. They had considered going separate ways, but decided against it. They fought better together. They had also considered staying on the ground where they would have been more mobile, yet easier to spot. But recon was their goal at this point, not infiltration, so they opted for a high perch that would allow them a bird’s-eye view. Perhaps they were too used to satellite imagery, but both could more easily assess a situation when seeing it from above.

They made their way, without incident, to the edge of the forest, where the hybrid settlement began. After working their way into the branches of a tree whose bark most closely matched the drying mud on their bodies, they turned their attention to the community below. Rook summed up his assessment in one word. “Shit.”

They looked down on a large clearing at the base of the mountain. Perhaps fifty large huts filled the area. A line of caves pocked the side of the mountain. Fires glowed and cast off streams of smoke that billowed up and dispersed into the ominous rain clouds above. Animals paced in cages built from stone and wood—two tigers and four bears—and two crocodiles were fenced inside a small pond. But it wasn’t the collection of predators that surprised Rook, it was the Neanderthal population.

“There must be more than a thousand of them,” Rook said.

Queen nodded. She wouldn’t bother counting. As the population moved about, some building, some foraging, some gathering, the total number would be impossible to discern. “You said Weston was here for only fifteen years, right?”

“Yeah . . . ,” Rook said. “But he also said these guys matured and had kids by age three.”

“So these . . . things . . . are all fifteen years old and under? A bunch of kids?”

Rook shook his head. “In our years they’re kids. But they’re not human. They’re not kids. They’re as adult as you and me, and much more deadly.”

They watched in silence for several minutes as two elephants entered the camp, pulling fallen trees behind them. The trees were quickly cleared of limbs and then, using stone blades and raw strength, a group of large males began splitting the wood into long planks. Within fifteen minutes, the trees had been split into ten planks each. The elephants returned to the jungle with their keepers, and the hybrid males who had cut the wood carried it away. Two men carried each long stack of ten planks, nearly the equivalent weight of the trees they had been hacked from, one on each end.

“They’re not even exerting themselves,” he said.

“Look where they’re going,” she said. The male hybrids headed into the largest cave and disappeared into the darkness. “Why would they need all that wood inside a mountain?”

“I’m telling you,” he said, looking at the mountain. “As many as we see out here, we’ll find more in there. They’re like ants. If they have King and Pawn, they’ll be in there.”

“If they’re not dead already.”

Rook cast a serious glance in Queen’s direction. “Don’t even think it.”

She looked away from him and nodded. She could be a ruthless and efficient killer, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care about her teammates. It was hard to stay positive when the odds of survival, let alone rescue, seemed so insurmountable. Queen forced herself to look on the bright side; she’d already killed two of them. She could kill