It was like a target, daring artillery to take it down.Swell.
They climbed the narrow wooden stairs, the entire structure swaying with each step. Another artillery round exploded somewhere beyond the western tree line, close enough to make the place shiver.
Yeah, him too. “Okay, seriously,” Skeet said, checking his watch. “This is officially the worst vacation spot I’ve ever visited. Let’s go.”
“Five minutes,” Chloe said. “I promised him I’d try the plants.”
She pushed into the room. “Oh no, he’s worse.”
Skeet didn’t know whatbetterhad looked like, but indeed, the man looked as if he was on death’s door. He lay under a mosquito net on a pancake mattress, his dark skin a grayishpallor and his entire body shaking. An older woman knelt beside his bed, trying to bathe his sweaty head, but he kept twitching so hard, she couldn’t keep her hand on his head.
“Dr. Tobias.” Chloe dropped to her knees beside him, pulling the plants from her rucksack. “I found them. The plants Mrs. Nu Paw mentioned.”
He seemed to struggle to focus on her face. “Chloe.” The word came out slurred, barely recognizable. “Too late.”
“No.” She turned to Mrs. Nu Paw. “How do we prepare them? Tea? Poultice?”
The older woman’s expression answered before her words. “Miss Chloe. Plants help early sickness. Not this far.”
Skeet studied the dying man. He’d seen alkaloid poisoning before—usually from soldiers who’d eaten the wrong berries or drunk contaminated water. This was advanced. Way beyond what jungle medicine could fix.
Tobias’s hand moved weakly toward his phone, still propped against the water bottle. “Voice notes,” he whispered. “Everything... documented. Take them.”
The booms echoed across the valley. Closer than before.
“We need to go,” Chai said from the doorway. “Now.”
“I’m not leaving him,” Chloe said softly.
“Well, that’s noble and all,” Skeet said, moving into the room, “but dead journalists don’t write very good stories.”
Her blue eyes blazed at him. “He’s still alive.”
“Barely. Andwe’reall going to be significantly less alive if we don’t move. Right now.”
The frustration of eighteen hours of hiking through hostile territory finally bubbled over. Here he was, operating on negative sleep, living on protein bars, dodging Tatmadaw patrols and Karenni checkpoints, all to pull her stubborn hide out of a war zone she had no business being in.
And she was arguing with him about it.
“Listen, Chloe.” He kept his voice level, tried to remember what talking to his own sister had sounded like when she’d been beyond reason. “I know you want to help. I get it. But staying here isn’t going to save him, and it’s definitely going to get us killed.”
“So we justabandonhim?”
He ignored the look she gave him. “We take what he’s giving us, and we make sure his story gets told. That’s what he wants.”
Dr. Tobias pressed his phone into Chloe’s hands. “Take this. Don’t let this story die.”
The sound of automatic weapons fire bulleted the southern edge of the village.
“That’s not just artillery anymore,” Chai said. “That’s ground troops.”
“Chloe,” Skeet said softly. “Decision time. We leave now, or we don’t leave at all.”
She looked between Dr. Tobias—pale and shaking but still conscious, still fighting—and the phone. Shook her head.
Another tank round hit, and the house shuddered. A picture fell from the wall, crashed into a thousand shards of glass.
“Go, Chloe.” Dr. Tobias’s voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t make me guilty of your death.”