Chapter 1: Into the Abyss (7)
The heat woke her.
Jungle heat—thick, wet, oppressive, pressing down on her like a hand. She was drenched in sweat within seconds of opening her eyes, her thin shirt plastered to her back. Near her, the river glittered in midday sunlight, having shrunk to a sluggish trickle over rocks during the dry season.
Elyse drank sparingly from her water bottle, rinsed her face, and lay still, listening. The jungle was alive with sounds—bird calls, insect drone, the rustle of unseen animals in the underbrush. No human voices. No engines. No barking dogs.
Yet.
She counted herself lucky to have survived the first night. Luck, however, was not a strategy. She needed a plan, and she needed to keep moving.
She waited until late afternoon, when the sun's angle began to shift and shadows lengthened across the forest floor. Then she emerged from her hiding spot and continued downstream, picking her way along the riverbank with more caution than speed.
The terrain was hostile. The vegetation was so dense that she often had to detour around impassable thickets, losing the river and then finding it again. Insect bites covered her arms and legs, and she'd already picked up a leech on her ankle that she had to pry off with trembling fingers, leaving a wound that bled freely and wouldn't clot.
She tried not to think about infection. She tried not to think about the fact that she had no means of navigation beyond following the river, no food beyond what wild fruit she could identify—and she didn't dare eat anything she couldn't be certain was safe. She tried not to think about how long it had been since her escape, whether D-Zone had discovered her absence yet, how many men they might have sent to hunt her.
By the second night, she was feverish. The welts on her back had become inflamed, and the gash on her hand from scrambling over rocks was oozing. She pressed forward anyway, one foot in front of the other, following the river downstream because it was the only direction she knew.
On the third day, she fell.
It was stupid—a simple misstep on a muddy slope near the river's edge. Her foot slipped on wet clay, and she tumbled down a steep embankment, rolling and sliding, branches and stones tearing at her skin. She hit the bottom hard, the impact driving the air from her lungs, and lay in a heap of mud and dead leaves, gasping.
Something was wrong with her ankle. It had twisted beneath her during the fall, and now it throbbed with a sickening deep ache that made her nauseous just to look at. She tried to stand, and a bolt of white-hot pain shot up her leg, dropping her back to the ground.
For a long time, she lay there, staring up at the canopy of trees overhead. Light filtered through in beautiful, dappled patterns, falling on her face like the hands of a clock she couldn't read. She felt far away from her own body, as though observing herself from above—a thin, battered girl in a torn shirt, lying at the bottom of a ravine in a jungle on the other side of the border, alone, injured, and utterly without hope.
Something inside her went very quiet.
Then, slowly, it began to speak again. Not in words, exactly, but in a pulse—a stubborn, unreasonable rhythm that refused to stop. She'd felt it before, in the compound. It was the part of her that had survived the beatings, the part that had memorized guard rotations and counted steps in the dark, the part that had screamed "Prove it" when every rational part of her brain said to give up.
Get up.
She got up.
Her ankle screamed, but she got up. She found a fallen branch that could serve as a crutch, and she started walking again—forced, limping, slow, but walking. The river was still there, still running downstream. She followed it.
That evening, she came upon a small clearing near the water where someone—hunters, perhaps, or smugglers—had made a campfire at some point. The ring of stones was old, the ash long cold, but the clearing meant the terrain was traversable. She curled up beside the fire ring, too exhausted to consider lighting a fire even if she'd had the means, and slept.
She dreamed of Sylvie.
In the dream, Sylvie was standing in the drainage tunnel, her face half in shadow, half lit by a distant glow. She looked at Elyse and said, "Follow the river. Don't stop."
Elyse woke to rain.
It poured down in sheets, transforming the ground to mud and the river to a churning torrent. She couldn't travel in this—not with her ankle, not with the risk of flash flooding. She huddled against a tree, arms wrapped around her knees, and shivered.
The rain lasted most of the day. By the time it stopped, Elyse was drenched, freezing, and her fever had climbed to the point where the trees seemed to sway and pulse even when she stood still.
She needed medicine. She needed food. She needed a dry place to rest.
She needed a miracle.
And then, just as dusk was settling over the jungle, she heard something that made her blood run cold.
An engine.
A vehicle, somewhere in the distance, moving along what sounded like a dirt road.
Her first instinct was to hide—to throw herself into the underbrush and not come out until the sound had passed. But her second instinct was louder: if it was a road, it was a way out. And if she could flag down the right kind of help...
She hobbled toward the sound, each step agonizing, until she found the road—a narrow, deeply rutted dirt track that wound through the jungle. The vehicle had already passed, its taillights barely visible through the trees.
But the road meant something. It meant people. It meant civilization—of a sort.
She started walking along the road, limping on her crutch, hoping with a desperation that bordered on madness that the next vehicle she encountered wouldn't be carrying men with guns.