The gunshot was the last sound from the city that mattered. Now, there was only the sputtering cough of the two-stroke engine and the slap of murky water against the hull. The adrenaline had left a bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, and every nerve ending screamed from a combination of exhaustion and remembered terror. My hands, scraped raw from the rusty ladder, throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pain. We were adrift, a stolen speck on an indifferent river, leaving a life of quiet research for a new one as hunted fugitives. And it was all my fault.
I watched Luzia. She sat ramrod straight at the tiller, her profile carved from stone, her eyes fixed on the jungle-choked shoreline. The cold fury I’d seen on the docks hadn’t lessened. It had solidified, becoming a terrifying, brittle thing that seemed to radiate a chill, even in the oppressive humidity. The silence between us was a third passenger in the boat, heavier and more dangerous than any of Silva’s men.
As the last smudge of Leticia’s sprawl vanished behind a bend in the river, her posture finally broke. Her shoulders slumped, just a fraction, but it was like watching a mountain crumble. Her gaze lifted to the sun, already beginning its descent. Her voice, when it came, was raw and hollow—a sound I had never heard from her before.
“It’s over,” she whispered, not to me, but to the river. “We lost a day. We’re too late.”
Her meaning hit me with the force of a physical blow. The flower. The deadline.
“My sister…” she started, her voice cracking on the word, and she couldn’t finish. She didn’t have to. The unspoken agony was absolute.
A desperate, foolish part of me needed to fix it, to say something that could possibly matter. “Luzia,” I said, my voice hoarse. “We are alive. That’s not nothing. Being dead doesn’t help her.”
She didn’t even turn.
I pushed on, the words feeling like sand in my mouth. “We have to be smart about this. We can still get theSussuronback. We can still find a way. There’s still a chance.”
For the first time since the chase began, she looked at me. There was no fury left in her eyes, only a vast, desolate emptiness that swallowed my pathetic optimism whole. She gave a single, bitter shake of her head and turned back to the river, leaving me with my useless words and the sickening realization that I hadn’t just failed a mission, I had destroyed a hope she had carried all this way, and I had absolutely no idea how to get it back.
Her silence was an accusation, and her hopelessness was a verdict. I was guilty. My words died on my lips, useless and insulting. Reality asserted itself with a cough and a sputter from the outboard motor. The engine, which had been our salvation, was now a liability, its unsteady rhythm a clear countdown towhen we would be dead in the water. We were exposed, a slow-moving target on a river that offered no cover. The setting sun painted the water in streaks of orange and blood, a beautiful, mocking backdrop to our desperation.
My mind, usually a sanctuary of historical data and academic theories, became a frantic map of this unforgiving region. We couldn’t go back. We couldn’t stay on the river. The jungle on either side was a green wall, impenetrable and filled with its own dangers. We needed a destination. We needed a ghost.
And then, a memory surfaced, sharp and clear. A man with a face like a dried riverbed and eyes that held a deep distrust of all humanity. Zé. A riverboat driver but also a trader who dealt in artifacts, information, and above all else, solitude. He lived in a stilt house tucked so deep into a forgotten tributary that the river itself seemed to want to keep him hidden. And he owed me.
Two years ago, I had identified a shipment of fake pre-Columbian pottery he was about to purchase, a mistake that would have cost him a fortune and his reputation with a very dangerous client. He had grunted his thanks and said if I ever needed to disappear for a night, he would be the man to forget he ever saw me.
It was a long shot. It was our only shot.
I leaned forward, trying to break through the wall of her grief with the sheer force of my will. “Luzia. Listen to me.”
She didn’t move.
“There’s a man,” I said, my voice low and urgent. “A contact. His name is Zé. He lives a few kilometers downriver from here, off the main channel. We can get there before the fuel runs out. He owes me a favor. He’ll hide us.”
I waited, my breath held tight in my chest. The plan felt thin, a fragile thread stretched over a canyon of failure, but it was the only one I had. For a long moment, she just stared atthe churning wake behind us, as if watching our last chance at success disappear into the brown water.
Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she gave a single, terse nod. The weary consent of someone with nothing left to lose, allowing the current to carry her to the next rock. But it was enough.
Finding the tributary Zé called home was more instinct than science. I scanned the endless wall of green, searching for a landmark I’d only seen once on a faded map—a trio of kapok trees that stood taller than the rest of the canopy.
When I finally spotted them, I pointed, and Luzia, without a word, angled the boat toward the shore. The engine’s sputtering was getting worse, a death rattle we couldn’t afford for anyone to hear. We couldn’t just pull up to Zé’s dock in a stolen skiff—the man valued plausible deniability above all else. The boat had to vanish.
I directed her toward a dense, dark patch of mangroves whose roots clawed at the riverbank like skeletal fingers. She cut the engine a few feet out, the chirr and buzz of the jungle replaced the sudden, overwhelming silence. It was a living sound, and it felt like it was watching us. We drifted into the tangled mess of roots, the hull scraping against wood.
“We sink it here,” I said, my voice a low whisper.
Moving with a grim, unspoken purpose, I sloshed through the knee-deep water to the muddy bank. Luzia followed, her movements fluid and silent. There was a drain plug in the stern, and while she worked to pull it free, I wrestled a heavy, slime-coated rock from the riverbed. It took our combined strength to heave it over the side. It landed with a dull thud on the metal floor.
The boat didn’t sink with a dramatic crash. It died with a gurgling sigh. Water poured in through the open plug, and the skiff listed, then settled, its nose dipping below the surface. Afinal bubble of air escaped, leaving a faint, oily sheen on the dark water. And then it was gone, swallowed by the river as if it had never existed.
I stared at the spot, an ache in my chest that had nothing to do with my exhaustion. That boat was our last connection to the city, to the plan, to the world we knew. Sinking it felt like a burial. We weren’t just hiding evidence, we were severing our last tie to who we were yesterday.
Luzia was already turning away, her back to the river. She pushed aside a curtain of thick leaves and stepped into the oppressive gloom of the jungle fringe, a ghost melting into the shadows. There was no other choice. I took a deep breath of the hot, cloying air, thick with the smell of wet earth and decay, and followed her into the green. We were on foot now, swallowed by a wilderness that didn’t know our names and wouldn’t care if we ever found our way out.
The trek was about a half mile of humid misery. Mud sucked at our boots, and unseen things rustled in the undergrowth just beyond the narrow beam of my small flashlight. The air was so thick it felt like we were wading through it. Luzia moved ahead of me, a silent wraith navigating the darkness with an unnerving confidence while I stumbled behind, my city-soft senses completely overwhelmed. Just when I began to fear I had missed the turn, a faint, acrid smell of woodsmoke cut through the scent of decay. A few steps later, the jungle opened into a small, man-made clearing, and we saw it.
Zé’s house was less a building and more a part of the landscape. It stood on thick wooden stilts that lifted it about nine feet above the damp ground, a dark, angular shape against the last vestiges of twilight. A single, low-wattage yellow bulb burned over a narrow wooden staircase, attracting a frantic cloud of moths. Before my foot even touched the bottom step, a voice rasped from the shadows of the veranda above.
