“Okay, not that I’m agreeing, and I honestly can’t believe you’re even suggesting this after everything that happened, but what about your dad? I made a deal with him.”
“And do you really think he’s going to honor that deal?”
“I don’t think I want to find out the hard way that he won’t,” she said, raising her brows.
“I think the hard wayisyou honoring the deal, and then hescrews you over anyway. One thing my dad has demonstrated through all this is that he’ll do anything to get what he wants. He doesn’t care about people. He doesn’t care who he hurts.”
Miri thought back to the incident that had happened with Corrie and Ford. How Vautour had tried to extort them, and in the end, he still released those photos. And for what? To humiliate Corrie? To get back at her for standing up to him? Rafa was right. What would stop him here? What loyalty did he have to Miri? If he didn’t even care about his own son enough not to hurt him, what would stop him from hurting her?
“What makes you think we can beat him there?”
Rafa stood from the bed, still completely naked. Not that Miri minded at all. He walked over to her and put his arms around her. “He might have lidar, but you have this,” he said, pointing at her brain. “You’re brilliant. I believe in you. If anyone can figure it out, you can, I’m sure of it.”
He had so much faith in her. Nobody else had ever had that much faith in her. Not even Miri herself. She wanted to prove him right and to prove Dr. Quinn wrong. She wasn’t a joke.
And she wouldn’t be labeled a nobody.
Without another word, Miri got up on her tiptoes and planted a quick kiss on Rafa’s lips, then rushed to grab her shoes and her other belongings before running out the door.
“Where are you going?” he called out.
“To pack!” she yelled back.
The plan was set.
Anissa, Felix, and Logan had been briefed and directed: contact Corrie and see if they could arrange another crew on short notice, alert the Brazilian authorities—and anyone elsewho would listen—as to Pierre Vautour’s whereabouts and identity, and then stand by and await further instructions.
Because as soon as daylight crested the trees, Miri and Rafa set out for the Moon City.
Splitting up wasn’t ideal, but they needed to work fast. Once Miri and Rafa could confirm the landmarks, they would send the coordinates for Anissa, Felix, and Logan to follow. But the top priority was to get to the Moon City first. Stop Vautour from looting it. Document what was there. And hopefully, if Vautour had any love in his heart for Rafa and his late mother, plead with him to leave the city be.
It was a long shot, but they had to try.
They retraced their steps back to the stone table quickly, and shortly after that to the monkey-face rock. They’d been right. It was the spot that they had stopped at a few days before. Looking at it in this light, of course, they couldn’t have missed it. And there, embedded in the rock itself, was another indentation for the medallion, presumably pointing the temple symbol in the direction of the next landmark.
Hours passed as they trudged deeper and deeper into the jungle, bogged down by almost impassable tangles of vines and the muddy, saturated ground. Places that no human had likely been in hundreds of years. If the protectors existed, they weren’t out here. The canopy was so thick, it was almost as dark as night. But keeping with the direction on the compass, they pushed onward, climbing higher into the rainforest. However, after following the compass for miles and miles, Miri was starting to think they’d still somehow made a wrong turn when a rumbling sounded in the distance, the thunderous roar growing louder the farther they went.
“What is that sound?” Rafa asked.
A waterfall. “Lágrimas de jaguar,” Miri said.The tears of thejaguar. Miri knew before they even saw it. They were getting close and yet again, Miri was right.
“Come on, follow me,” she said.
They picked up their pace, heading toward the loud sounds. The closer they got, the surer they were that it was a waterfall, and soon they could barely even hear each other speaking if they were more than a few feet apart. They pushed through the sea of vines to an outcropping deep in the forest. There it was—river falling from a rock that looked like the head of a jaguar with water spilling out of holes that could be in the place of a jaguar’s eyes.
“This is it,” she said, calling out over the booming flow. “There.” She pointed to a boulder beside the edge of the waterfall with a circular depression the size of the medallion cut in the surface.
They crept to the edge of the outcropping to see what was below them, presumably the lake of giant water lilies, but as they reached the edge of the rock, movement below caught Rafa’s attention. He grabbed Miri and pulled her to the ground so the two of them were lying flat on the dirt.
“What are you—” she started to say, but he covered her mouth.
“Shh,” he hushed her, as if anyone could hear them over the rushing falls. Then he shimmied toward the edge of the rock to look down below and waved her over.
There. The other team, resting along the river. Campfire roaring. Men playing cards.
And there was his father, sitting on a camping chair outside of a rather luxurious tent and sipping from a mug. Examining what appeared to be a stack of images and comparing them to a map.
“Look at them,” she said. “They’re not even in a rush.” What a dick.
