“No,” she said, folding her arms around herself, clamping down despite the boom of the mortar in the distance. “I brought him here. I’m not abandoning him now.”
Mrs. Nu Paw looked between them, wearing a stricken expression. “Thehtawbyuplant,” she said quietly. “If it helps him, we must try.”
Tobias struggled to speak, his voice barely audible. “Go. Get the plant. Document everything.” His eyes met Chloe’s. “Someone needs to understand what’s happening here.”
Another explosion. Close enough to rattle the bamboo walls.
“Time is running out,” Wong said.
“No. Somewhere out there, there’s a plant that might hold the key to saving not just Tobias but countless other victims—I’m going.” She turned to Mrs. Nu Paw. “I’ll go—tell me where.”
The woman nodded and pointed out the window. “Follow the path to the waterfall. It grows at the base. Small leaves, silver.”
“This is... not advisable,” the captain said, but Chloe pushed past him.
“I’ll hurry.” She stepped out onto the narrow wooden walkway that connected the stilted homes. The village spread below her in the growing daylight—a cluster of traditional teak houses—and she ducked into the house where she was staying to grab her rucksack, checking that her camera equipment was secure. Her phone caught her eye—still no signal, but she packed it anyway.
She threw the rucksack over her shoulders as she made her way down the wooden stairs.
Smoke drifted from cooking fires, where women prepared morning rice over charcoal braziers. The scent mixed with incense from the small Buddhist shrine at the village center. A rooster crowed from somewhere behind a bamboo fence, answered by another from across the narrow lane.
Captain Wong had followed her out. Now he stood, a radio pressed to his ear, expression grim. He caught her eye and nodded toward the northern path—the route Mrs. Nu Paw haddescribed. Two kilometers through jungle to reach the waterfall and the medicinal plants that might save Tobias.
Or might do nothing at all.
Please, God, protect us all.
Behind her, more shelling. It seemed closer, but she didn’t look back as she took off toward the path that wound between houses where laundry hung limp in the humid air.
The jungle began abruptly where the village ended. Green walls rising on either side of a trail that had been carved by generations of feet. Within ten steps, the sounds of the village faded behind curtains of vegetation.
And then the jungle simply swallowed her up.
Chloe pushed through swaths of green that dripped with yesterday’s rain, her boots squelching in mud that clung like wet concrete.
Two kilometers felt like twenty in this heat.
Vines thick as her wrist dangled from towering dipterocarp trees, whose canopy blocked most of the morning sun. What light filtered through came in cathedral shafts that illuminated clouds of gnats and the occasional flash of a hornbill’s yellow beak. The air tasted of decomposition and new growth—that particular jungle soup redolent of so many places in the world.
Her shirt stuck to her back within minutes. Sweat stung her eyes as she navigated fallen logs slick with moss and fungus. The stream gurgled somewhere to her left, hidden behind walls of wild ginger and bamboo clusters that grew in impenetrable tangles.
She should call Selah.
The thought swept through her. As soon as she returned to Chiang Mai—if she returned—she’d find a way to reach her sister. Selah needed to know she was okay.
If something happened to her out here, if the Myanmar military found her before she made it back?—
Focus.
Tobias needed this plant. Whateverhtawbyuwas, it might be his only chance.
The sound of falling water hissed through the jungle. She pushed through a curtain of spiderwebs that clung to her face and arms, their silk strands catching the light before breaking. A blue-winged butterfly the size of her palm spiraled away, disappearing into shadows that seemed to move.
Oh, she was an idiot, tromping around in the jungle?—
There. The waterfall.
It wasn’t impressive—maybe twenty feet of water cascading over limestone rocks worn smooth by centuries of flow. But the pool at its base looked deep and clear, and for a crazy second, she was back in Minnesota, at her parents’ home, splashing in the lake. Cool. Refreshing.