I looked at her.
Of course. Her suite was three miles out. Her things were still inside a canvas tent with a bent fence for a neighbor. Half-packed, if Daniel had left anything exactly where she’d abandoned it.
Neither of us moved.
The road was open. The guests were safe. Juliette's luggage was still three miles away, inside a suite I no longer wanted treated as harmless.
"Was it random?"
The fence was intact. The cameras were being reset. The snare material had been photographed and logged.
None of it made the answer safer.
“No.”
Chapter 24
Please Keep All Limbs Inside the Vehicle
JULIETTE
Bythetimethefirst transfer rolled out, the lodge had gone quiet in the wrong way.
The frantic, high-decibel energy of a dozen guests being told they couldn’t leave had been replaced by a heavy, pressurized stillness. I stood on the veranda, the ceramic of my coffee cup long since drained but still clutched like a blunt object. Below me, the gravel was a scarred map of tire tracks. Sarah was moving among the remaining guests—the ones whose nerves had frayed into brittle compliance—using that specific, honeyed hospitality tone that was designed to sound like reassurance but functioned as a gag order.
“The second wave will be departing shortly,” she told two lodge guests from Brussels who were currently vibrating with the need to discuss their missed connection.
Comfort. Right. Nothing said luxury travel like being staged for evacuation beside a fruit platter.
Nick was at the center of the staging area, an axis around which the rangers and staff rotated. He was giving instructions in clipped bursts, his attention never settling on one person for more than a second. He looked less like staff and more like the only thing keeping the morning from breaking apart.
"Juliette."
One second the space beside me was empty, and the next, the air shifted with the faint bite of peppermint.
"You're in the second vehicle," Nick said. He didn't look at me; he was watching Daniel check the winch on the lead Land Rover. "We’re consolidating. I’m driving your vehicle."
“With what luggage?” I asked. “Unless you’ve taught the local baboons how to finish packing and check out a guest, my life is still sitting three miles that way.”
"I know where your things are." His gaze finally cut to mine. "The other two suites in your sector are occupied, too. We’re looping the western access to retrieve all the bags from the bush tents at once rather than sending three separate runners. I don't want any of you out there in a solo transfer."
The interior of the Land Rover was an oven. Nick sat behind the wheel, the radio at his hip crackling with short, staccato codes. Daniel was in the vehicle behind us, keeping a tight three-meter gap that felt more like a tether than a following distance.
I sat in the front passenger seat. To my left, Nick’s hands were steady on the wheel, his knuckles slightly pale. Alina sat in the row behind us with the Brussels couple, her presence a professional anchor in a cab that felt increasingly like a powder keg.
The lodge shrank in the rearview mirror, disappearing behind the thick, silver-green curtain of the thorn trees. The silence inside the cab was active—vigilant.
We were two miles from the tent sector when the air changed.
The birds that had been a constant, chittering background track since dawn simply stopped. Nick’s foot eased off the accelerator. The vehicle slowed, the engine dropping to a low, guttural hum. Behind us, Daniel’s vehicle stopped instantly.
"Nick?" the woman from Brussels started to say.
"Quiet," he said. It wasn't a request.
He wasn't looking at the road. He was looking at a patch of dense scrub where the drainage line intersected the track. A thin veil of dust was settling over the bushes—too much for the wind, too little for a vehicle.
He lifted the radio. "Daniel. Hold. Do not reverse."
