Chapter 2: Running From Everything

The Time Machine was in a tree.

This made a certain unfortunate sense. It had tumbled through the air without its passengers, and the jungle here was dense enough that falling objects didn't fall so much as get caught, like leaves in a gutter. The machine had landed roughly forty feet up in a tree that had no interest in giving it back. The tree was the width of a house. It had been alive for two hundred years and it planned to be alive for two hundred more and it did not care about their travel arrangements.

"I can fly up to it," Doraemon said, "but the Takecopter batteries need an hour to recharge."

"An hour?" Suneo said.

"One hour."

"And in an hour, things with very large teeth could—"

"Possibly, yes."

They made a small camp at the base of the large tree. Doraemon found it in his pocket — a folded sheet of silver material labeled THERMAL SHELTER — TEMPORARY — NOT SUITABLE FOR EXTENDED GEOLOGICAL EPOCHS — which unfolded into something roughly the size of a large blanket and which, when draped over a low branch, made a credible impression of shelter. It was, Doraemon noted, a remaining stock item from an era when time travel was new enough that they still made emergency supplies for it.

The jungle moved around them. It was full of noise — the kind of noise that isn't random but isn't quite language either. Clicks and calls and the deep slow music of something enormous breathing somewhere nearby.

Shizuka sat quietly and watched the trees.

Gian sat with his arms on his knees and looked at the volcano, which was visible between two ridges as a dark shape against the sky.

Suneo checked his sleeve cuffs for mud. There was mud. He found this deeply upsetting.

Nobita sat with his back against the tree and tried to be very still, which was what he did when he was frightened.

He was, presently, very frightened.

"The big purple man," Gian said. "What's his name?"

"I looked him up," Doraemon said, from inside his own thoughts, where he'd been for several minutes. "In the future index. He is called Thanos."

"What does he want?"

"Everything, broadly speaking. The Stone specifically."

Gian was quiet for a moment. "Can we fight him?"

"No," Doraemon said.

"I could—"

"No."

Gian looked at his own hands. He was the strongest person in their school, and probably the strongest person in their neighborhood, and this usually made him confident in a way that other people sometimes found irritating. He did not look confident now. He looked like someone doing arithmetic and not liking the answer.

"Then what do we do?" he said.

"I don't know yet," Doraemon said. "I'm thinking."

This was when the tyrannosaur found them again.

---

It was, possibly, a different tyrannosaur. It was difficult to be certain. They were all very large and the distinguishing features that science textbooks mentioned — slightly different skull proportions, variations in posture — were not the things you noticed first when one was coming toward you through the jungle.

The things you noticed first were: the teeth, and then the sound, and then the ground shaking in that small, polite, deeply serious way.

Then Nobita ran.

He ran without deciding to run. His legs simply made the decision. They were experienced with this kind of situation, or rather, they were experienced with situations of this general emotional texture — being chased, mostly — and they activated without consultation.

The jungle went by in green flashes. A fern the size of a small bus. A log. Something that was not a log and moved. Another fern. Nobita ran.

Behind him: the sound of something very large and extremely interested.

"NOBITA!" Doraemon's voice, from above and to the left.

Nobita looked up. Doraemon was flying — the Takecopters had been recharged; or Doraemon had used his one that still had power — and he was reaching down, a rope of knotted belts hanging from his hand.

Nobita grabbed it.

He swung up. The tyrannosaur's jaw closed on the air where he had been with a sound like the world's largest pair of scissors.

They rose.

Below, the others had scattered. Gian had gone one direction, Suneo another, Shizuka a third. Doraemon circled, dropping Takecopters like a drone making deliveries, and one by one they rose out of the ferns, ungainly and relieved, until all five of them were above the treeline again.

The tyrannosaur looked up at them from the jungle floor. It made a sound.

"It's annoyed," Gian said.

"It was hungry," Shizuka said.

"Same thing," Gian said.

Nobita looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was aware, distantly, that he had run. That he had not stayed. That when the danger came he had simply turned and gone in the opposite direction as fast as his legs would carry him. He was aware that this was not especially brave.

It was just what he did.

It was what he always did.

---

They found a high branch — wide enough to sit on, stable enough to be safe — and settled there while Doraemon recharged the batteries again and thought. Below them, the jungle went about its business. A herd of something long-necked moved through the distant trees. The volcano smoked.

"All right," Doraemon said. "We need to find out more about what Thanos is doing. His soldiers — the Chitauri — they patrol the jungle. If we can get close without being seen—"

"Without being seen," Suneo repeated. "We're children in a Cretaceous jungle."

"Yes."

"We don't exactly blend in."

"That's true," Doraemon agreed. He reached into his four-dimensional pocket — a pocket that existed in a dimension orthogonal to the other three, which was why it could contain things larger than the pocket itself — and produced a small device that looked like a television remote control with a dial on the top. The label on the back read: CAMOUFLAGE CAPE — VISUAL MATCH — SURROUNDINGS — 15 MINUTES PER CHARGE — ONE USER ONLY.

"One cape," Suneo said.

"One cape."

"And there are five of us."

"Yes."

Doraemon put it back. He produced something else — a round, smooth stone about the size of an orange, with a soft glow at its center. SIZE ADJUSTER — ENLARGES OR REDUCES TARGET OBJECT — NO LIVING THINGS.

Not suitable for them, either.

He produced a compass. The compass spun uselessly, because sixty-five million years ago the magnetic poles were in different places and the compass had opinions about this.

He produced a small jar of something labeled SILENCE GUM — FOOTSTEPS ELIMINATED — CHEWING REQUIRED, which was promising until he noticed the expiration date had been set relative to the year 2100 and was therefore technically not expired yet. He distributed pieces. They chewed. It tasted like rubber and old rain.

Doraemon put on one piece and took a careful step on the branch.

No sound.

"Good," he said.

This solved one problem. There were several remaining.

---

They went closer to the volcano on foot, moving quietly through the undergrowth with the Silence Gum dampening their footsteps. Doraemon led. Shizuka was second. Gian behind her, which was reassuring. Then Suneo. Then Nobita, at the back, where every rustling in the ferns became something enormous and purposeful.

He ran twice more before they reached the ridge.

The first time: a bird. A large, very fast bird, the kind that hadn't decided it wanted to be small yet. It burst from the undergrowth directly at Nobita's face and he was thirty meters away before he was quite sure it wasn't a predator.

The second time: Gian tripped on a root and said something very loud, and Nobita ran in the direction of away before he processed that it was just Gian.

Each time he came back. Each time Doraemon looked at him with the patient expression of someone who had known him for a long time and had stopped being surprised by this particular pattern.

"You keep running," Shizuka said, the second time. Not unkindly. Just noting it.

"I know," Nobita said.

From the ridge, they could see the full scope of what Thanos had built on the volcano. The structures were larger than they'd seemed from the air — scaffolding and machinery sunk deep into the rock face, extractors that pulsed with a blue light, conveyors carrying rubble from deep within the mountain. The Chitauri moved in columns, purposeful as insects, following patterns laid down by whoever had designed this operation.

And at the center of it, on his platform of black rock, stood Thanos.

He was speaking.

They were too far away to hear words. But his gestures were clear enough: the slow pointing, the patient instruction. He was a man who knew exactly what he wanted and had simply arranged the universe to deliver it.

Gian watched this for a long time.

"He's going to get it," Gian said. "Isn't he."

"Not if we stop him," Doraemon said.

"You said we can't fight him."

"We can't fight him directly." Doraemon was quiet for a moment. "But fighting and stopping are not always the same thing."

"That's the kind of thing smart people say right before they get us into trouble," Suneo said.

"Probably," Doraemon admitted.

Then Thanos spoke, and although they were too far to hear the words, the wind shifted and some of it carried. A phrase. A direction. A timetable.

"Three days," Shizuka said. She had the best ears among them. "He said three days."

"The meteor," Doraemon said.

Nobita crouched at the ridge and watched the vast operations below and felt, for the first time since arriving here, something other than fear. Not courage exactly. More like the awareness of the shape of the problem. If Thanos had the Power Stone, it would not end here. Sixty-five million years ago was just the beginning. He would take it forward. He would take it everywhere.

Doraemon had said, back at the camp, that the future would not exist.

Nobita had not fully understood what he meant by that, not really. Not emotionally.

He understood it now, looking at Thanos from the ridge.

"If he gets it," Nobita said, "we won't go home."

"No," Doraemon said.

"Because there won't be a home."

"Not in any form we'd recognize."

Nobita thought about his room in Nerima Ward. The thin walls. The tatami smell in the evening. His desk with the terrible test scores stacked up on it like a monument to consistent failure. His mother's voice calling him for dinner.

He wanted all of it back. Even the test. Even the twelve.

"Okay," he said.

They all looked at him.

"We stop him," Nobita said. "Somehow."

Gian nodded. Shizuka nodded. Even Suneo, who would have preferred to be elsewhere, gave a small, reluctant, entirely genuine nod.

"I have an idea," Doraemon said. "But it requires someone very small and very brave."

He looked at Nobita.

Nobita, who had run three times that afternoon, who ran from tests and teachers and neighbors with loud voices, who ran from dinosaurs and anything that moved fast and anything that didn't, looked back at Doraemon.

"I'm not brave," Nobita said.

"I know," said Doraemon. "I didn't say brave. I said small."

Below them, the volcano rumbled. The Chitauri moved in their patient lines. The clock that existed in the rock and in the sky and in the trajectory of an incoming meteor continued to run.

Three days.