“I mean, lidar isn’t some guarantee or anything,” she said, like it was no big deal. “You still need to have a general sense of where to look. Corrie told me about it before we left. So long as we find the Moon City first, it shouldn’t matter.”
“Shouldn’t matter?” He laughed as if saying,You’ve got to be kidding me.“We’re racing against someone who’s using lidar to pinpoint the Moon City’s location. Someone who has a team of men with knives scouring the jungle, probably looking for us as we speak. A guy who has areputationfor being a notorious criminal, but you think we’ll be fine so long as we get there first?” Rafa peppered her with facts she couldn’t rebuke.
“They’re down one knife, at least,” Miri said with a smile.
“I’m serious, Pringles,” he said, his tone firm and solemn. “This is…this is dangerous. I don’t think we want to be messing with this guy. You need to call whoever it is that’s in charge of this expedition and tell them we need to call the whole thing off.”
“What?!” she said, shooting up. “No. We can’t!”
“This isn’t a game,” he responded, still from his seated position on the boat deck and staring at her. “We had a knife pointed at us earlier.Ipointed a knife at someone. If we don’t call it now, someone could end up getting hurt. Or worse.”
“I doubt they would have actually hurt us. It was only a knife. And it wasn’t even that big.”
Even as the words came out of her mouth, she wasn’t sure she believed them. But give up? On day two? She doubted her boss’s ultimatum included a bad-guys-and-knife-fights exception. The archaeological world had plenty of crooks and criminals hoping to score their next priceless find. If all archaeologistsquit at the first whiff of trouble, countless artifacts would have likely succumbed to illicit trading.
See Corrie, case in point. WWCMD? Well, she certainly wouldn’t back down because of a measly three inches of steel. In fact, shedidn’tback off when placed in a similar situation.
Miri couldn’t be a wuss.
“And you know that how?” Rafa asked. “Look, this was a perilous job already with just the environmental factors, but sorry, I’m not going to risk my life out here running from bad guys and con men, too.”
“Rafa, no. We can’t let Vautour get there first.”
“Why not? Who cares?”
“I care! Do you know what he’ll do to it? He’ll loot it. Take what he wants. Discard—and destroy—anything andanyonein his way. And then he’ll sell those things on illegal markets, keeping a few special pieces for himself in his private collection. And no one will know who the Moon City people were.”
Rafa eyed her curiously. “And what about you? What would you do ifyouwere to find it first? Protect it? Because it seems to me that the very act of finding the city will undermine any attempts to do so.”
“No, I want to preserve it. Study it. Find out what happened to the people who lived there. Find out why they left.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because we can learn so much from the people who came before us. And we can do that by honoring them, not leaving them to fade away in history.”
His gaze fixed on her, studying her face. There was no telling what was going on in his head, but his attention was starting to make Miri uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to men looking ather for so long. Examining every feature. She bit the inside of her mouth, impatiently awaiting something—anything—from him. Any indication that he was on her side.
They couldn’t give up. Not now.
“Fine,” he finally said. “If you’re not going to call it off, then I’m going to call my boss atGloGeoand tell him what’s been going on. Maybe he can knock some sense into whoever is paying for this expedition.”
Rafa snatched the satellite phone that had been sticking out of the side pocket in Miri’s—or rather, Logan’s—cargo shorts, and started dialing, but Miri lunged to stop him, snagging the phone from his hands and quickly hitting the end button.
“Give that back,” Rafa demanded. He grabbed for her arms, which she had raised above her head.
“No,” Miri said. “I’m not going to have you telling your boss and then writing some article about the ridiculous Dr. Jacobs who fumbled her way through the Amazon.”
Rafa narrowed his eyes at her. “Don’t presume to know what I’m going to write.”
“Don’t presume to think I’m an idiot,” she said, glaring right back at him. “You leave now, you write a story about the Moon City fuck-up brigade.”
“So, what? You’re holding me hostage now?”
“If it stops you from going back to the States before we’ve found the Moon City, then yes!”
He let out a full-throated laugh. A teasing laugh that said,Try me.
They stared at each other for three solid beats before launching into a full-on wrestling match for the phone on the deck of the boat, their hands whirling around each other with franticenergy, twisting and turning until she was able to brace herself with one leg on either side of his body.
