And inside it all, Dr. Tobias’s voice echoed in her memory: Don’t let this story die. His phone sat like a stone in her pocket.
At the fire, Skeet scraped steel against his flint. The sparks caught tinder, and he cupped it in his palms—dry bark shavings and pocket lint—breathing onto the tiny glow. Patient but determined.
She still couldn’t land on how she felt about him pulling her away from the house. Grateful? Angry?
Maybe he’d made the decision she couldn’t.
The fire caught, and he set it on the ground, feeding microscopic twigs to flames no bigger than his thumbnail, building heat grain by grain until larger kindling caught.
“There we go,” he said as the fire crackled to life, casting light across his mud-streaked face. “Nothing like a little ambience to improve the accommodations.”
She took a look at him over the flames. Sure, she’d seen him before—usually at her family’s home whenever Jake wanted to host a cookout. But she could count those times on one hand, and frankly, it had been a hot minute.
Besides, this man was far, far from the tanned guy wearing a T-shirt and board shorts and throwing a frisbee.
This man bore all the marks of the Navy SEAL he’d been. Fierce cheekbones emerged from beneath the grime, and when he glanced up, his green eyes held depths that reminded her of North—that same intensity, that same quiet strength that drew her sister Selah like a magnet.
And suddenly, she got it. The memory of his arm around her waist as he hid her from the Burmese army found her. Maybe she hadn’t hated that.
So right now she’d go with grateful.
“You seem to know this area pretty well.” She pulled her jacket tighter as the temperature dropped with the failing light.
“Nah, I’m just really good at pretending I know what I’m doing.” He fed another stick to the flames, sparks spiraling up into the humid air. “Though I have been in Myanmar before.Different circumstances, but the jungle’s pretty much the same everywhere. Wet, hostile, and full of things that want to kill you.”
He’d been in Myanmar before? She nearly asked, but he stared at the flame, a faraway look in his eyes, and maybe... maybe that wasn’t any of her business.
She didn’t have to be an investigative journalist every minute of the day.
Chai emerged from the jungle carrying an armload of bamboo, water dripping from his dark hair. “Perimeter’s secure. No movement for the last hour.”
“Oh good,” Skeet said with a grin, suddenly back from where he’d been. “We’re officially the only crazy people wandering around the jungle in a monsoon.”
“How bad is the situation?” Chloe gestured toward the darkness beyond their small circle of firelight. “I mean, really?”
Chai set down the bamboo and crouched beside the fire, his weathered face grim in the flickering light. “The government’s been cracking down on ethnic minorities for decades. Karen, Shan, Kachin—anyone who doesn’t fall in line with central authority.” He pulled out a field knife and began splitting bamboo. “The village you were in today harbors the Karenni. That makes everyone a target.”
“Even civilians?”
“Especially civilians.” Skeet’s voice lost its usual lightness. “Easier to control a population when they’re too terrified to resist.”
Her chest went tight, thinking of Mrs. Nu Paw.
“Okay, so now that we’re all nice and cozy,” Skeet said, arranging larger pieces of wood around the fire’s perimeter, “mind telling me what you were actually doing in that village? Because Jake’s message, passed on from Selah, was pretty light on details. Something about investigating sick kids?”
Chloe pulled out her notebook, pages damp but still legible. “It started six months ago in Chiang Mai. I was covering refugee stories for various publications when this aid worker approached me. Said families were reporting strange illnesses in border villages—children developing tremors, then respiratory disease, and finally, heart conditions.”
“Okay, so far this sounds like a tragic but normal third-world medical story. What made you think it was worth risking your neck over?”
She pulled her jacket tight. What she wouldn’t give for her sultry apartment. “It was Tobias, really. He kept seeing kids brought in with the same neurological issues. He decided it had to be something they were ingesting, but their parents weren’t getting the same severe symptoms. Some complained of headaches, fatigue—but they chalked it up to the heat or hard labor. It was the children who were developing tremors, losing cognitive function. Tobias thought it was a dosage issue—children’s bodies can’t process even small amounts of certain alkaloids the way adults can. We traced it to a pattern—free medical supplies would arrive in a village, families would use them for a few weeks, then children would start getting sick.”
Skeet paused in his fire tending. “What kind of medical supplies?”
“We thought it might have been malaria powder, but that didn’t make sense. And then we wondered if it might be some candy they gave the children. But none of the children reported any candy. Frankly, we even thought it might be the curry seasoning.”
The fire popped, sending sparks into the humid air. Chai looked up sharply from his bamboo preparation. “Curry seasoning?”
“Yeah. It came in packets with rice and other foodstuffs. But even that wasn’t right, because everyone ate that.”