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  Julie gave Ben that look that said, this is going to be good.

  Ben sighed. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I just disagreed with you.”

  Julie’s face opened, mouth and eyes widening in unison. Ben could almost feel the impending verbal onslaught that was about to ensue. “No, wait. That’s not what I meant.”

  “You disagreed with me? About what? About coming down here to look for your mysterious company you’ve been chasing for months? About skipping a vacation so that you could traipse into the jungle and try to get us both killed? Did you disagree about those things?”

  Ben knew he had to stop the onslaught of questions before they escalated into a high-pitched maelstrom of estrogen-laden fury. He quickly said the first thing that came to mind. “Well, yeah, I disagreed with you about those things, and that’s why we’re here. But no — I was actually talking about, uh, specifically —“

  “Are you stupid? Do you even listen to yourself when you talk? I can’t believe I fell for this. I can’t believe I fell for you.”

  Ben struggled to find the words. He stared blankly at Julie, feeling more and more like a bear caught in a trap. He’d seen more than a few bears caught in traps — idiotic hunters sometimes thought they were still a reasonable way to haul in a large catch. The bears would struggle at first, reacting and recoiling against the immense pain and shock of being ensnared in a bear trap. After a moment of struggle, they would grow quiet, as if contemplating their next move. Then, after some deliberation, the bear would inevitably react explosively, trying in vain to free itself.

  As a park ranger, he’d seen a video of the entire process, recorded by some sick cameramen who had for some reason refused to help the poor creature.

  “Ben? Are you even listening?”

  Crap. “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

  Julie shook her head. “I don’t even know why I keep trying with you.”

  “Wait, what? What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to explain it, Ben. If you can’t figure out what we’re talking about, that just proves my point.” Julie turned around and stomped out of the room.

  Ben stood there for a second, watching the door swing shut behind her. He had obviously done something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. She was mad at him for — what? Had he said something that had pissed her off? He shrugged, ignoring the fact that he was the only person in the room.

  This was part of the reason he had focused so much attention and energy on completely ignoring the opposite sex for most of his life. His last girlfriend, if he could call it that, had been in third grade. While most of his friends had grown up to be hopeless romantics, he had merely grown up to be hopeless. His buddies at the park often tried to remind him that Julie was way out of his league, but any rebuttals he could come up with were weak — even he knew it was true.

  This woman had crashed into his life almost as abruptly as the explosions and ensuing action at Yellowstone had, only months before. Their relationship was one of necessity — they were forced together.

  So why did he care so much? Why was he struggling with the words to simply tell the girl how he felt? Ben knew he loved Julie, he just couldn’t seem to put the three words together in the correct order out loud, and certainly not in front of her.

  He walked out of the room and up to the winding staircase to the top deck. Some fresh air would be nice, he thought. Back home, fresh air was always in season, and it was always useful to combat whatever he was going through.

  The top deck opened to him with a gust of humid, hot air. Not the same as home, but it will do. Ben breathed deeply and took it in, walking to the edge of the boat. They’d been traveling upriver nonstop for almost two days now, and he wondered how much longer they’d need to travel before reaching their destination.

  Or how much longer we’ll need to travel before they find us…

  He had a sneaking suspicion “they” knew exactly where they were. Rhett, Archie, Paulinho — all of the others seemed to sense it as well. Why would they leave us alone for a few days, after trying to stop us from leaving Manaus?

  He didn’t want to think about it, but he knew the answer.

  They need to know where we’re going.

  He sucked in another breath of jungle air. Yes, this is good for me. He closed his eyes and tried to let the air wash the strange thoughts and feelings out of his system. He opened his eyes, turned toward the back of the boat, and saw Amanda standing on the deck.

  Or, rather, he saw the backside of Amanda standing near the stern of the boat.

  Her legs, long for her short stature and starkly pale against the deep greenish-brown of the jungle backdrop, were the first thing he noticed. He followed the woman’s form up to her back, loosely hidden behind a tank top that she had been wearing since they left the city. The shirt did its best to hide her back, but Ben immediately noticed her soft shoulder blades, perfectly shaded by the overhead sun. Her hair blew gently in the wind, each time lifting from its station and floating, then settling back down right where it needed to be.

  He walked toward her.

  He stepped up next to her at the end of the deck and leaned against the railing. The boat’s wake cut a perfect “V” through the water, reminding Ben how quickly they were moving upstream.

  “Hey Ben,” Amanda said.

  “Dr. Meron,” he replied.

  “Please, call me Amanda.

  “Right, sorry.” Ben wasn’t sure what to say, so he did what he did best — he stood there awkwardly, pretending to be interested in a small flock of birds that were squawking at each other from opposite sides of the river. He had the sudden urge to skip a rock, or at least to chuck one as far as he could. His mind wandered back in time to when he was much younger, when his father would take him out to the lake that had freshly thawed after winter to teach him how to skip rocks.

  ‘It all starts with the best rock,’ his father would tell him. ‘It’s worth spending half a day looking for the perfect rock, even though you’ll only get one throw from it.’ Ben always wondered if there was a deeper meaning in those statements. There seemed to be multiple layers of meaning in everything his father told him growing up.

  After his father died, Ben made it a point to stop trying to decipher everything anyone ever told him and just take things at face value. He assumed that people meant what they said and said what they meant, and he did his best to do the same. He was never very good with people anyway, so he used the philosophy as an excuse to grow more and more reclusive as he got older. Still in his early thirties, Ben was fit and well-built and could take on most kids a decade younger. His job as a ranger helped him stay in shape, but every now and then he felt the creeping effects of time slowly wearing him down.

  “So,” Amanda said, breaking the ice. Ben snapped out of the past and looked over at her. “How you doing?”

  “Good, I guess. Been a while since I’ve been shot at.”

  “Yeah, I read about all that Yellowstone stuff. You’re pretty much a national hero.”

  “Not in this nation,” Ben said. He wasn’t sure if that was cocky or humble. “Besides, they got the story wrong. Reporters, you know?”

  “Well, Paulinho filled me in on some of the details, but I’d love to hear the story sometime.” Ben couldn’t be sure, but he thought Amanda inched a little bit closer to him.

  “Yeah, definitely.” He flicked his head back and forth, still apparently looking for a rock he knew didn’t exist. “How are you doing?”

  “With what? My entire business falling apart, or my employees being murdered?”

  “Sorry, I —“

  “No, it’s fine,” Amanda said. “I’m not trying to be harsh. It’s just… fresh on my mind.”

  Ben felt embarrassed for some reason, but Amanda continued, saving him the awkward silence.

  “You know, I’ve always been pretty independent. That’s part of the reason I moved down here. I’d always wanted to start something of my own, but people though
t I was naïve.”

  “What people?”

  “Parents, mostly. My dad and mom owned a restaurant for a little while, back home. They never came out and said it, but I always knew they thought I wasn’t cut out for entrepreneurship. Truth be told, I’m not. I just wanted to do research on my own terms. NARATech was a perfect fit — investors that want to turn the management burden over to someone else, a dedicated facility that was ready to go, and in a place that I’ve always wanted to visit.”

  “Well, from what I’ve seen, you’re doing a pretty good job.”

  “From what I’ve seen, we are all one small mistake away from death. And it’s all my fault.”

  “It’s really not,” Ben said. “No one could have predicted this, and no one could have prevented it. This ‘investor’ you have is the same company that I’ve been trying to track down for months. They’re extremely powerful, very well-funded, and are able to stay well under the radar when they want to.”

  Ben heard Amanda clear her throat, then she wiped her eyes. “What if this doesn’t lead anywhere? What if we’re chasing something that doesn’t exist, and we end up in the middle of nowhere with no way to call for help?”

  Ben knew the questions were rhetorical, but he answered anyway. “Well, Reggie’s here. He seems to have a lot of experience with, uh, this type of thing.” He paused. “And, you know, we’re all here, for whatever it’s worth. Archie, Rhett, Paulinho. And me.” He glanced at her again, and she was staring at him. He quickly looked away.

  “And Julie,” she said. It was more a question than a statement.

  “Yeah, Julie.”

  “She’s great, you know.”

  Ben nodded. “I know.”

  “I wish —“ Amanda couldn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was going to be. She sobbed, covering her face with her hands. Ben immediately felt himself leaning in toward her, unsure why he was reacting this way.

  He hesitated a moment, then reached out and put his arm around her. Amanda leaned in harder, pressing her body into Ben’s side before he could react. Her sobs became stuttered and she nearly forced him to hold her. She was smaller than he realized, and he had to stoop a bit to allow her head to fit in the nook under his chin. He wasn’t sure what to do next, and found himself stunned into inaction.

  He heard a noise, a creaking stair, and lifted his head to see Julie standing at the top of the staircase. She turned her head slightly to the side, as if trying to decipher what she was seeing. She stared for a moment, neither of them speaking.

  Then, slowly and deliberately, she turned and headed back down the stairs.

  32

  JULIE IGNORED BEN FOR THE remainder of the day, even choosing to eat out on the deck on her own. Ben tried approaching her a couple times, but whenever she saw him coming she darted back the other direction. The boat was large, but it was far too small to hide from him forever, and Ben made it a point to continue tracking her down whenever he could, hoping to talk. Most of his day was spent outside on the deck, waiting for Julie to pass by so that he could follow her until she walked the other way.

  That evening, the boat turned again and headed down another offshoot of the river, an even smaller feeder river. The canopy of trees combined above their head and closed out the sun, causing the night to set in far earlier than anyone had expected it would. They were now far away from the cities dotting the main Amazon tributaries, and the jungle had woken up.

  Both sides of the river featured life forms Ben had only dreamed of. Monkeys chattered and hollered at one another, and birds of every color screamed overhead as they searched for food. He caught a glimpse of a snake, larger than any he’d ever seen, wound around the entire trunk of a tree as it slid onto a branch. The flora and fauna seemed otherworldly to him as well. Bright greens, yellows, and blues with hints of red every now and then could be seen poking out around the large backdrop of blacks and browns. The visibility was no more than a few feet into the jungle, though Archie and Reggie had come out earlier and taken their turns trying to spot water trails used by animals.

  At one point the captain himself came out to the deck and pointed at a mound of sticks and vines, piled high above the water at the edge of the river. He whispered something and Archie’s eyes grew wide.

  “Anaconda,” he said. “They live inside those fortresses of sticks, sliding out into the water directly to stay hidden. That one is a big nest. Could be a 15-footer in there.”

  Ben shuddered. He hated snakes, and only dealt with them if he absolutely had to. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could like the slithering, scaly creatures, especially ones that were as wide around the waist as he was.

  “They’re mostly harmless,” Reggie said, as if that made the anacondas seem like warm, fuzzy teddy bears. “They eat mammals, but if you stay out of their way they’ll focus their attention on smaller game. Plenty of other monsters around here to worry about, but honestly it’s the small stuff that scares the crap out of me.”

  “Like what?” Ben almost kicked himself for asking the question. He knew he didn’t want to know the answer. Back home the only things to really worry about were bears, wolves, careless hunters, and the cold.

  Reggie turned to Ben and grinned. “Bugs, mostly. The kind that fight in packs, working together to bring down animals a thousand times their size. Species of ants you can only dream about, and specialized insects designed by the devil himself.”

  “Do not listen too closely to him,” Archie said. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic. He’s not wrong, but most of the life in the jungle is harmless to humans, as long as you are careful and watch your step. The rainforest doesn’t need to be anything more mystical and magical than any other place. Sure, there is more life per square foot here than anywhere on the planet, but that’s all it is — life. It wants to survive and thrive, just like you and me. Not everything wants to kill you, and even the lifeforms that can will only do so if they feel their own is threatened.”

  Ben listened along as they all stared out at the tree line. Both of the other men seemed to have a profound respect for the natural world, a fact he found admirable. Many people he knew had no appreciation — no concept, even — that the world they were living in had existed far longer than they had, and had thrived without their meddling and help. The Amazon rainforest was no different, and in many ways more intense and more self-sufficient than any other place he had been.

  The men swapped stories for a few more minutes until the sounds of the jungle took over. Ben left to take another walk around the deck, hoping Julie would pop up somewhere. He had completed an entire lap around and ended up at the same spot, only Reggie and Archie had gone down below. He was alone on the deck, and he stared silently into the trees for a minute. It seemed as if the jungle was pressing in on them, growing ever closer to the edges of the boat. He couldn’t believe a boat this size could travel so far up the narrowing river, but he did remember that Archie had explained that they were traveling during the flood season, meaning the river would be wider and deeper than normal.

  Still, there would come a time when the boat would no longer fit through the tunnel carved out by the jungle canopy. He didn’t want to know what the plan was then, and he had not asked. He assumed, though, since there were no smaller canoes or boats of any kind on board, they would be walking the rest of the way. No one knew their final destination, which made the trip even more insane.

  Ben just hoped they would find answers, wherever the clues led. He wanted — needed — to know what Drache Global was all about, and if it meant he had to travel completely up the Amazon River into an area of the world no one had seen in thousands of years, so be it.

  The darkness of the jungle spooked him, and it didn’t help that the animals and critters had gone silent. He could now hear the lapping of the waves against the boat’s hull, but the night air, thick as it was, carried no other sounds.

  He frowned. He knew enough about wildlife to know that animals became eerily quiet wh
en they sensed danger. The jungle, over the last days, had seemed to grow comfortable with the boat’s travel, so he knew it wasn’t their presence that had alerted it.

  He looked left and right, examining the top deck to see if someone else had entered. Seeing no one, he decided to make one final sweep of the top deck before heading back inside for the night.

  He reached the second level and was about to continue down to the bottom when he heard a small noise. It was a gentle scrape, the sound amplified by the boat’s hollow interior. He stepped off onto the second level and began walking toward the noise at the stern.

  Night had fully reached this area of the world, and the jungle, silent as it was, was based in almost complete darkness. Ben considered going back down to see if there was a flashlight in his pack, but decided against it. It’s nothing. He wanted to believe the noise was just something random, a squirrel or something of the sort landing on the deck and scurrying into a hole somewhere.

  But his instincts were on high alert, and he began to feel the adrenaline pounding. The scraping sound, quiet as it was, was deliberate. That much he knew.

  He reached the stern and turned to the right. The scraping sound came back, this time even fainter. But it sounded close.

  Just below him.

  He flung his upper body far over the edge of the railing, trying to get a decent look at the lowest deck of the boat. Maybe someone was walking around for a nighttime stroll before bed.

  Ben knew it wasn’t the truth, somehow. The noise was human-caused, but someone walking around would not have been in the same spot for that long. Someone was sneaking around, and he intended to catch them.

  He wondered if he could jump to the bottom deck from here, or if he would miss and simply land in the water, alerting whoever it was that they had been caught and allowing them time to get away.

  He stretched even farther over the railing, and saw a black boot. He could see just the sole of the shoe, thick and deeply ridged. Another instant passed and the boot disappeared.

  A moment later, he heard the splash.