“That’s far enough.”
A figure detached itself from the darkness. He was wiry and old, his skin tanned and wrinkled like cured leather. He held a rusty, single-barreled shotgun, and he held it with the casual ease of a man for whom it was a third hand. It was Zé. His eyes, small and dark, narrowed as he recognized me. The surprise was quickly replaced by a deep, profound annoyance.
“You know not to come here,” he grunted.
“I know, Zé,” I said, keeping my hands visible. “We’re in trouble with Silva. We need a place for the night. No one knows we’re here.”
“Trouble that finds you will find me,” he shot back, his gaze flicking to Luzia, who remained perfectly still in the shadows behind me. “I’m an old man. I want to die of boredom, not bullets. The river is wide. Keep moving.”
He was about to turn away. This was it. I had to play the card. “Zé. The pottery. The shipment from Manaus two years ago.”
He stopped. His shoulders tensed. He didn’t turn around, but I knew I had his attention.
“You told me it was a bad investment,” he said, his voice low.
“It was a fake,” I corrected him gently. “A very good one. It would have cost you everything. You said if I ever needed to disappear for a night, you would forget you ever saw me.”
The silence stretched, thick and heavy. The jungle’s chorus seemed to amplify around us. Finally, he let out a long, weary sigh and turned, the shotgun now pointing at the floorboards. “One night,” he growled. “You and the woman. There’s a room in the back. Don’t touch anything. Don’t make a sound. When the sun comes up, you are gone. My debt is paid.”
He led us through his single, cluttered main room—a chaotic museum of strange artifacts, drying herbs, and stacks of books—to a small, windowless chamber at the back. The air inside was stuffy and smelled of dust and smoked meat. A single hammockwas strung between two walls. He pushed a clay jug of water and two strips of dark, leathery jerky into my hands.
“Be gone by sunrise,” he repeated, his eyes like chips of flint. Then he pulled the door shut.
I placed the water jug and the dried meat on a small, dusty crate, the only furniture besides the hammock. The small sounds echoed in the oppressive quiet. In the boat, the silence had been a weapon, a wall of anger she had aimed directly at me. Here, in this suffocating black box, it transformed into something far more volatile.
The immediate threat of pursuit was gone, leaving a vacuum. And into that vacuum rushed the full, crushing weight of our failure.
I watched her, my exhaustion a distant hum beneath a new, sharp anxiety. The cold fury that had sustained her, that had steered the boat and navigated the jungle, was gone. It didn’t fade—it was extinguished, as if a switch had been flipped. In its place was a terrifying emptiness. She didn’t pace or weep. She didn’t even look at me. She simply stood in the middle of the small room, her back to me, staring at the planks of the far wall as if she could see through them to a future that had just been erased.
Her stillness was the most unnerving thing I had ever witnessed. It was absolute, unnatural. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the cracks in the door, I saw it. Her hands, clenched into tight fists at her sides, were trembling. It was a fine, violent tremor, the only outward sign of the monumental pressure building inside her. The dam of her composure, which had held against fear and flight, was beginning to crack under the silent, relentless pressure of despair.
The air grew thin, fragile. I felt that a single word, a single movement from me, would be enough to shatter the delicatesurface tension of the moment. I stood frozen, a prisoner not of Zé’s lock, but of the awful, impending collapse I was powerless to prevent. The silence was no longer angry. It was the breathtaking quiet in the second before an explosion.
The silence in the small, dark room stretched until it was a physical thing, a pressure against my ears. I had to break it. I uncorked the clay jug. “Luzia,” I said, my voice quiet. “You should drink some water. Try to rest.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She spun around, and the emptiness in her eyes had been replaced by a raging fire. “Rest?” she hissed, the word a shard of glass. “My sister is dying, and you want me torest?” She took a step toward me, her whole body vibrating with a furious energy. “This is your fault. All of it. Your hesitation on the docks, your fumbling… you cost us everything.”
“That’s not fair,” I shot back, stung. “We were ambushed. There was nothing we could do.”
“I could have done something!” she yelled, jabbing a finger toward me. “TheSussuronwas our only possible link to the flower! I could have had it if I weren’t trying to protectyou!” Her voice broke. “The full moon was tonight. We missed it.” A raw sob escaped her lips. “It’s over. She’s going to die because of me.”
The accusation, twisted into self-loathing, hit me harder than any physical blow. My usual logic felt like a pathetic shield against her grief. But I couldn’t let her collapse. I couldn’t let myself collapse.
“No,” I said, my voice harder than I intended. “Listen to me. It is not over.”
“Don’t you dare offer me more of your useless optimism!” she spat. “There is no other way. We don’t have time.”
“Yes, we missed the full moon,” I said, stepping toward her, closing the space between us, forcing her to meet my eyes. “You are right. We missed the deadline for the ritual. But that doesn’t mean we give up. It means we find another option.”
“And what other way is there?”
The insult was the opening I needed. I saw the defiance flare in her eyes and played the only card I had left. “No. I’m going to treat her.” I let that sink in before delivering the final blow. “I’m training to be a doctor. With or without the ritual, I can help her. But you have to trust me.”
She stared at me, her chest heaving. The fury in her face faltered, replaced by a wave of confusion and disbelief.
I pressed the advantage, my voice dropping but losing none of its intensity. “You saved our lives on that river. That was your world. You got us here. But this…” I gestured to the oppressive jungle walls around us, “… dealing with men like Zé, navigating the politics of who has theSussuronand how to get it back… this is my territory. Now, you have to listen to me.”
The fight drained out of her, leaving her looking hollowed out and fragile in the dim light. Her eyes searched my face, looking for the lie, for the false hope, but found only a desperate, unyielding certainty.
