Luzia was awake instantly, her body tensing, the warrior snapping back into place. Our eyes met, and in that shared glance, the entire world came rushing back in—the locked room, Silva’s men, the impossible task ahead. A frantic, silent scramble followed.
“One moment,” I called out as I scrambled to pull on my clothes, the intimacy of the night lost to the urgency as I threwLuzia her bra and top, hoping she could quickly get herself respectable. I was still fumbling with the buttons on my shirt when the door flew open.
Zé stood in the doorway, a tin plate of bread and fruit in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. His scowl was a permanent fixture, but today it seemed deeper, etched with a new layer of suspicion. His gaze dissected the room before glaring at me. I was putting him at risk by being here. We needed to leave.
“Coffee,” he grunted, shoving the mug into my hands. He set the plate on the small crate that served as our table. “You should’ve left by now.”
“We need more time,” I said. The terror that had been my constant companion increased. Luzia stood beside me, her expression unreadable, but I felt her trust like a shield at my back.
“Time is the one thing no one has on this river. Silva will be back. He’ll take the woman, and he’ll kill you. You want to live, then get out of here and get running.”
“Every man has a price, Zé,” I countered, keeping my tone even, academic. A negotiation. A transaction. This was a language I understood. “You’re helping us because you dislike Silva and you see an opportunity. Let’s define the terms of that opportunity.”
His eyes, small and shrewd, bored into me. He was listening.
I took a breath and slid my hand into my pocket, my fingers closing around the last true artifact of my old life. I pulled it out. It was my field watch. Not just any watch, but a Bremont military issue. Matte black casing forged from hardened steel, sapphire crystal, waterproof to three hundred feet. The luminous hands still glowed faintly in the dim room. It was a masterpiece of engineering, a testament to a world of order andprecision. To a man like Zé, who lived by the whims of the river and the sun, it was a piece of magic.
I held it out to him, letting it rest on my palm. “This is worth more than whatever Silva is paying you for a day’s work,” I said. “It never needs winding. It’s waterproof. It will keep perfect time for the rest of your life.”
He stared at the watch, his greed warring with his caution. He licked his lips. “What do you want?” he rasped.
“Two days,” I said. “That’s all we ask.”
Luzia’s hand found mine, her fingers lacing through my own. A silent surge of strength, a shared promise in the face of the impossible task ahead.
Zé grunted, a low, guttural sound. “You can have until tonight,” he conceded, his eyes still fixed on the watch. He reached out a calloused hand, not for the watch, but to stop me from giving it to him. “But not just for the watch.”
“What do you want?” I held my breath, my hand instinctively squeezing Luzia’s as I prayed he wouldn’t ask for the one thing I couldn’t give.
He drew himself up, his expression turning from merely sour to grimly serious. “You want my sanctuary, then I need more than the watch. There is something I need. My legs…” He slapped his thigh with his free hand. “They are not what they were. The swamp rot is deep in the joints.”
He described it then. A specific type of medicinal fungus, a tough, woody bracket fungus that the locals calledOrelha-de-pau-do-pântano—the Swamp’s Wooden Ear. It only grew on the decaying trunks of submerged ironwood trees in the most treacherous part of the nearby swamp, a place of deep mud and tangled, thorny vines. He needed a fresh supply to make a poultice for his pain.
“You want extra time?” Zé’s voice was a low growl. “You get me theOrelha. You bring it back here to me. Then you can have your time.”
He stared at us, his challenge laid bare. It was an impossible errand, a journey into a place designed to kill the unwary. It was also our only path forward.
I looked at Luzia. Her eyes were alight with a fire I hadn’t seen since before the ambush. This was a language she understood better than I ever could.
She gave a single, sharp nod.
I turned back to Zé, my resolve hardening into steel. “Draw us a map.”
Zé sketched a crude but effective map on a piece of dried palm leaf, jabbing a finger at a dark, tangled section he marked with a skull. “Here,” he grunted. “Deep mud. Snakes that will bite you for looking at them. The ironwoods are there. Be back before the second sunset.” He tossed the leaf onto the crate. A new fear surfaced—that this was all a trick, and he would simply take the watch and abandon us.
“You’ll be here,” I said, the words coming out harder than I intended.
Zé stopped, his eyes narrowing. He looked at the watch still in my hand, then back at me. He gave a single, curt nod, a gesture that promised nothing but acknowledged the deal. “There’s a machete and a pole by the dock. Don’t lose them.” He pointed a thick finger at me. “If you’re not back by sunset with theOrelha, I’m telling Silva where he can find you.”
Then he left, the door slamming, sending my mind choking on his words. Zé had just presented us with a logic problem where every answer was failure. We could plunge into the swamp for his fungus, and why not, since we failed to find theFlor da Lua. But if we didn’t find theOrelha, then why not wait for Zé to hand us over to Silva? It was a closed loop, a perfecttrap. We were out of time before we had even begun. But I wasn’t one to give up. Just because I didn’t have the answers now, didn’t mean I couldn’t find them in time to get out of this mess.
I needed Luzia to understand. Not just the danger but thewhy. I found a small piece of charcoal near the dead embers of Zé’s morning fire. Kneeling on the dusty floorboards, the wood cool against my knees, I beckoned her over.
“This is the problem,” I said, my voice low. I drew a hexagon on the wood, the charcoal leaving a crisp, black line. “This is the core compound of the Orchid. It’s beautiful, perfectly structured, but it’s wildly unstable.” I drew another, linking them. “Think of it like a chain made of smoke. The moment you touch it, it breaks apart. It loses its properties within minutes of being picked.”
Luzia kneeled beside me, her hip brushing mine. She watched my hands, her focus absolute.
“Your shaman’s ritual…” I continued, sketching arrows and smaller molecules around the core structure, “…it’s not magic, Luzia. It’s chemistry. The chanting, the heat, the other plants he adds act as a catalyst. They force this unstable chain to lock onto itself, to become solid.” I looked up, meeting her gaze. “But it’s a temporary fix. A chemical patch. That’s why the effect fades. That’s why Silva needs a new flower every year.”
