The Green Road

06:40 a.m. Somewhere in the Colombian jungle. Day two.

The fever broke at dawn, which Vega regarded as the first good news she'd had since Teterboro and decided to treat with deep suspicion.

She woke on the groundsheet with her face against his shoulder, a crick in her neck, and a creeping sense of having done something unprofessional. His skin was cool under her cheek. The terrible heat was gone. His breath came slow and even, the breath of a man who was asleep rather than dying.

She lay very still for a while, looking at the stone ceiling and counting the seconds.

Don't make it weird, she told herself.

She sat up and made it weird by checking his pulse twice.

"It is rude," said a voice, quite clearly, "to take a man's pulse without introducing yourself."

She froze.

Roman had not opened his eyes. He lay on his back in the amber light, his face bruised and unshaven, a dark stubble along the jaw that made him look like a stranger. His lips were dry. But around the corner of the left eye there was the faintest crease, and she realized, with a rush of relief so violent it made her ears ring, that he was awake. And that he was making a joke.

"You're alive," she said.

"I am under the impression that it was optional."

"It wasn't."

"Then I regret to say that I am in your debt." He opened his eyes. They were clear. Tired, bloodshot, but clear, the old flat gray with no glass over them. "You have an interesting taste in beds."

"It's a rock."

"I am aware. I have been looking at the ceiling for approximately ten minutes, assembling a case that it is not a hospital." His gaze moved to her face. "Your cheek is bleeding."

"It's fine."

"It is not. Come here."

"You can't even sit up."

"I did not say I could." His mouth twitched. "I said come here."

She came. He lifted a hand, and the hand shook, and he put it back down with an expression of such offended dignity that she almost laughed. Then he took the corner of her sleeve and pulled her gently toward him, and with the pad of his thumb, he touched the cut on her cheek.

"I remember very little," he said. "A noise. White. A hand on my arm. I have the impression that I was dragged."

"You were dragged."

"By you."

"By me."

"At what distance?"

"Sixty yards, give or take. You weigh a ton."

"I am a hundred and eighty-six pounds."

"You're a hundred and eighty-six pounds of very solid inconvenience."

He looked at her for a long moment. His thumb didn't move. It rested against her cheekbone, light and warm.

"You could have left," said Roman.

"Yes."

"Why did you not?"

Because you asked me not to, she thought. In the dark. In a boy's voice. And I couldn't.

"You owe me a two-hour apology," said Vega. "I'm not leaving till I get it."

He didn't answer.

But his thumb moved, once, an inch, across the line of her cheek.

…

They left the rock at nine.

He insisted on walking, and she insisted that he was an idiot, and they compromised on a course of action that neither of them enjoyed: he would walk until he fell, and she would catch him.

She made a crutch from a forked branch and a strip of torn seat cover. She bound his thigh again with the last of the gauze and shoved two energy bars and a bottle of water into his hand. She slung the duffel across her chest and the Glock into her belt, and she took the machete, which she'd found at dawn lying in the ferns near the crash, miraculously unburned.

The path was not a path. It was a suggestion. The jungle floor was a tangle of roots and fallen trunks and razor-edged palms, all draped in a dripping veil of vines. The air was solid. It sat on her chest like a wet towel. Sweat ran into her eyes and down her spine, and within an hour her shirt clung to her ribs like a second skin, which was agonizing.

Roman said nothing. He moved with grim, rigid, mechanical purpose, planting the crutch and swinging the leg, his jaw clenched so tightly that she could see the muscle jump. Twice he stumbled. Twice she was under his arm before he went down. Neither of them referred to it.

By noon he'd fallen four times.

By one, five.

"Stop," said Vega.

"I am fine."

"You're gray."

"I am a naturally pale man."

"You're the color of a gravestone." She stepped in front of him. "Sit. There. On the log. That's an order."

"I do not take orders."

"You take them from me. I've got the gun."

He looked at her.

It was a strange look, and she did not quite know what to do with it. It held exhaustion, and pain, and an enormous slow-dawning wonder, like a man who has been told his whole life that the sea is dangerous and has just been handed a boat.

He sat.

She knelt in front of him in the leaf mold, unwrapped the bandage, and checked the wound. It was red at the margin but not hot. No smell. No pus. The stitches had held. She exhaled, and sat back.

"Good," she said. "It's not infected."

"You sound surprised."

"I sewed it with a sewing kit and a prayer."

"The prayer was evidently more skillful than the kit." He leaned his head back against the trunk of a tree and closed his eyes. "Where did you learn to do that?"

"My dad. Army medic training, back in the day. He made me practice on a chicken."

"A chicken."

"A dead one. From the store." She smiled faintly. "It was a long winter."

"Did the chicken recover?"

"It became soup."

He laughed.

She had never heard it before. It was a low, startled, rusty sound, as if a rusted hinge had given way and found, to its great surprise, that it could still swing. It lasted three seconds. Then he stopped, and put a hand to his ribs, and said "Ah," in a thin voice, and they looked at each other with identical expressions of delighted horror.

"Don't do that," said Vega.

"I did not do it on purpose."

"I know. It's worse."

…

They found the river in the afternoon.

It wasn't large. It lay in a green cleft between two ridges, twenty yards wide, slow and brown and slightly sinister, with sandbars like the backs of sleeping animals. On the far side the bank rose in a wall of tangled roots. Overhead the canopy had thinned, and for the first time since the crash they could see the sky: a hot hammered bowl of blue, burning at the edges.

"Water," Roman said.

"And a hazard. Look at the logs."

He looked. There were three of them lying on the sandbar, long and brown and motionless, with a faint shimmer of heat over their backs. One of them opened a yellow eye.

"Those are not logs," said Roman.

"Nope."

"They are caimans."

"They're about ten feet. I'd say they're having a nice day."

"Is there another crossing?"

"Not for six miles. And you won't last six miles." She pulled the machete from her belt. "We go across here. At the shallows, by the rocks, where the current's quick. They don't like fast water. They like to wait."

"For us."

"For everything. That's the whole business model."

He regarded the river. He regarded the log with the yellow eye. His expression was one she could only describe as polite resignation, like a man being invited to a dinner party whose host he suspected of poisoning the soup.

"I would like to register an objection," he said.

"Noted."

"I have a leg. I have a rib. I have a shoulder, a head, and a general lack of enthusiasm."

"Noted."

"I would prefer the six miles."

"I know you would." She slid her arm around his waist and settled his weight on her shoulder. "But here's the thing, Roman. I've been through a lot of rivers. I know how to cross them. I'm not going to let you drown."

"I would not mind drowning."

"You'd mind the caimans."

"I would mind the caimans," he agreed.

They went in.

It was colder than she'd expected. The brown water closed around her thighs, and she planted her feet on the stone and took the first step, and then the next. The current tugged at her legs. The bottom was slippery with algae. She had one arm around his ribs and the other out for balance, and she counted every step aloud, because if she stopped she would lose her place.

"Seven. Eight. Nine."

"You are talking to yourself."

"I'm talking to you. You're not listening."

"I am listening very hard."

"Ten. Eleven."

"Vega."

"What?"

"Behind you."

She looked.

On the sandbar, one of the logs had risen. It stood on four stubby legs, lifting its massive blunt head, and the yellow eyes turned slowly toward them across the water. A tremor ran down its long back. It slid into the river without a ripple.

"That," said Vega, "is not good."

"No."

"Don't run."

"I have never been able to run."

"I know. Hold on to me." She tightened her arm. "Don't look at it. Look at the bank. Look at the roots. We're doing fine. Fourteen. Fifteen."

She felt the water shiver against her knees.

"Sixteen."

Something huge brushed her calf.

She did not scream. She did not jerk. She kept her eyes on the far bank, on a particular fork of root exactly twelve feet away, and she put one boot in front of the other with the cold, flat, fanatical precision of a woman who has stopped being afraid because there isn't room for it. The thing in the water moved past her. A hard ridged back slid by under the surface, dark and heavy. Its tail brushed his boot.

"Seventeen," she whispered.

"I am going to say something," said Roman, through his teeth. "In case I do not get another chance."

"Not now."

"I would like it known that I find this extremely—"

"Eighteen."

"—unpleasant."

"Nineteen."

The bank came up under her hand: wet roots, solid mud. She shoved him up it first, with both arms, with her shoulder, with the last drop of strength in her body. He clawed at the roots and hauled himself over the lip with a grunt. She scrambled after him, and her boot slipped, and for a second the whole world was a tilting green blur and a mouth of yellow teeth.

A hand closed around her wrist.

It was his. It was strong, and steady, and it hauled her up out of the river as if she weighed nothing, and she landed on top of him on the bank, in a heap of mud and wet clothes and gasping breath.

Behind them, the water closed over the caiman.

She lay with her face on his chest, her heart hammering. His chest rose and fell. The arm around her back was shaking, very slightly.

"Twenty," said Roman, hoarsely.

She began to laugh.

She couldn't help it. It came up from somewhere deep and cracked, and she lay there on top of the most dangerous man in the northern hemisphere, giggling like a schoolgirl, and a moment later, to her astonishment, she felt the rumble of his own laugh against her cheek, low and helpless and thoroughly unbecoming.

They lay there like that for a long time, in the mud, in the green light, with the river sliding by and the sun beating down. The sound of the jungle rose around them. Neither of them moved to break it.

…

By dusk the shadows had gone long and blue.

They had made it three miles from the river, along a ridge, through a stand of tall straight trees with trunks like the pillars of a drowned cathedral. Roman leaned on her more heavily now. His breath came in short, labored drags. She had stopped counting the falls.

"We stop here," she said.

"We could go farther."

"We could. We won't." She lowered him to the ground beside an enormous buttress root, in a sort of natural alcove, screened from three sides by hanging vines. "I'll make a fire."

"The smoke will be seen."

"By whom?"

"By whoever shot us down."

She looked at him. He was right. She hated it when he was right.

"Cold camp," she said. "Then."

"Cold camp."

She laid out the groundsheet. She poured the last of the water into the cap of the bottle and held it to his lips, and he drank without argument, which told her more about his condition than any pulse. She sat beside him with her back against the root and the Glock on her lap and ate half an energy bar, and the other half she gave to him.

Neither of them spoke.

The light left the sky by degrees. First the gold, then the rose, then the deep and spreading purple. Out of the trees, one by one, the frogs began to sing. The air cooled. She hugged her knees.

"Vega," said Roman, quietly.

"Yeah?"

"There is something I wish to say. I may not say it well."

"Say it badly."

A pause. Then, slowly, in a voice she'd never heard him use, a bare, dry, tentative voice, like a man holding something that might break:

"Thank you. For the river."

"It's fine."

"It is not. It is the most extraordinary thing that has been done for me in my life." He drew a breath. "I have been rescued before. I have been protected before. I have been paid to be rescued. No one has ever done it because they would not leave."

She stared at the dark.

"I haven't told you what I am," he said. "I intend to. When I can. I would like you to hear it from me, and not from the files."

"You don't have to."

"I do."

"Roman—"

"Not tonight. But I will." His hand found hers on the groundsheet. It was cool and dry and slightly unsteady. "Will you wait?"

She turned her palm up and let it close.

"I'm not going anywhere," said Vega.

She meant it.

It was only after a long silence, long after the stars had come out, that she became aware of something at the edge of her hearing. A twig, snapping. A rustle in the ferns, too deliberate to be wind. A faint, careful, stealthy displacement of air.

She tightened her hand on his.

Somewhere in the dark, not far off, someone was watching them.