His warmth against my back feels surprisingly intimate in the chilly night. I am suddenly conscious of every breath I take, because he can feel the movement. I can’t remember how to breathe at a natural pace.
If I breathe too fast, he’ll think I’m nervous. If I breathe too slowly, he’ll think I’m asleep, and I’ll have to pretend I am.
“Hey, Maddie,” Luke whispers.
“Yeah?”
“Are you scared?”
“Terrified,” I tell him. “You?”
“Yeah. Me too.”
I can feel his heart race through the back of his shirt, which makes me wonder whether he’s more scared of armed kidnappers ... or sharing a tent all night with me.
31.5 HOURS EARLIER
GENESIS
It feels like midnight as we finally trudge into the terrorists’ base camp, but the sun’s only been down for a couple of hours. It can’t be any later than eight or nine p.m.
The camp is lit by fire pits, torches strapped to poles, and gas camping lanterns—the kind trembling men carry into dark caves in scary movies. There are at least a dozen men standing around, drinking coffee from dented metal mugs, but most of them don’t wear military uniforms or carry rifles. Several are chatting in English with no obvious accent.
I can tell from the way Holden’s focus skips over the men that he’s counting. Trying to calculate our chance of an escape, now that we no longer outnumber our captors.
“Get back to work,” Sebastián shouts and most of the men dump their coffee on the ground and head into the jungle on a well-worn footpath opposite the direction we’ve come from.
Indiana studies what we can see of the path, even oncethe men are out of sight, and I realize he’s listening to their footsteps. Waiting to see how long it takes for them to fade.
Penelope groans as she looks around the camp. There are no showers. There is no electricity. No running water. No beds.
At the center of the clearing is a small hut with a thatched roof and no windows—the kind indigenous tribes have been building for centuries. An acoustic guitar hangs outside the hut from one of its posts. Several fire pits are spaced around the site, each surrounded by a carpet of large leaves and straw mats.
Two long, improvised, open-sided tents hold rows of hammocks stretched between the support posts, but the third tent is an anomaly. It’s a sturdy green military-style pavilion, enclosed on all four sides, so that we can’t see who or what is inside. That tent is obviously the headquarters of the terrorist organization.
“This issothird world,” Penelope whispers.
But what she sees as gritty, makeshift accommodations is actually a well-established and surprisingly functional base of operations. The terrorists have everything they need to live here indefinitely, and they’ve obviously been here for a while.
“¡Vamos!” Silvana shouts, and as we trudge behind her on a tour of the camp, Indiana nudges my shoulder with his.
“All the comforts of a prison camp,” he whispers.
“None of the hope of a rescue,” I shoot back, and Indiana laughs softly.
“Los baños.”Silvana pulls back the curtain hung in front of a hand-built bamboo stall on the far end of the clearing and shines her flashlight inside to reveal a plastic toilet seat nailed to a wooden platform. “After you go, sprinkle lime.” She points to an unlabeled bucket. “But don’t touch or inhale.”
“How very civilized,” Holden mumbles.
“You will bathe every other day,” she orders, pointing at a stream that defines one side of the clearing.
Penelope groans softly. “How long are we going tobehere?”
Silvana gestures to clothing hung from vines used as clotheslines over our heads. “Wash your clothes and hang them up to dry. If you don’t stay clean, you will get sick, and if you get sick out here, you will die.”
“She’s right,” Indiana whispers. “Fungi will grow in any dark, damp environment, including socks and underwear. That’s the whole reason commandos were known for ‘going commando’ during all those jungle wars.”
Penelope makes a disgusted face.
