Chapter 26
Luzia
The roar of their engines was an obscenity in the sacred quiet of the night. The dogs were a chorus of mindless aggression. The jungle felt different with the beams of their searchlights slicing through the canopy like the angry eyes of false gods. They were turning my home into a cage.
Every snapped twig under my feet, every rustle of leaves, was a language I knew. But now, the sounds behind us—heavy, clumsy boot falls and shouted commands in Portuguese—were a crude interruption—a desecration.
I scrambled up a rocky incline, the sounds of the hunt funneling into the gully behind us, Caio moved close to me, but I knew he was struggling.
They were close. Too close. I could hear one man cursing as he slipped.
I found a ledge and flattened myself against the rock, pulling Caio down beside me.
Below, maybe fifty steps away, two figures crashed through the undergrowth, their rifles held ready.
And the fury in my chest boiled over.
This was my home. I knew how to make a deadfall trap from a fallen log, how to use hanging vines to choke a path.
These men were loud, blind intruders. They deserved to be swallowed by the jungle they so clearly disrespected.
My eyes scanned the ledge above them. A large, precariously balanced rock sat there, loosened by the recent rains.
It would be so easy—a hard shove, a moment of satisfying justice.
My muscles tensed. I was already moving, my hand reaching for a smaller stone to hurl at the bigger one, when Caio’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong.
“Luzia, no,” he hissed, his eyes wide with alarm. “We run. We don’t fight them. We can’t win that way.”
“They are hunting us like animals!” I whispered back, my voice shaking with rage. “We are not animals. We fight back!”
“It’s suicide!” he insisted, pulling me away from the ledge, back from the precipice of my anger. “We escape. We survive. That is how we win.”
He was dragging me away from the edge when the shot rang out.
It wasn’t a targeted shot. It was a wild, suppressing fire, a bullet fired blindly into the darkness to flush out its prey. It was a sound of pure chaos, an ugly crack that didn’t belong here.
The sounds of pursuit seemed to fade, replaced by the drumming of my heart and his pained, ragged breathing in my ear.
My mind raced, searching for an advantage, a way to use the land against them—the dogs.
We had to break our scent trail. I scanned the darkness, my eyes searching for a sign, and then I heard it—the faint but steady sound of falling water.
Water washes away scent. It masks sound.
Driven by that single, desperate thought, I changed our direction, dragging Caio toward the sound.
It led us to a wall of rock slick with moisture, almost completely hidden behind a curtain of thick, hanging moss that thrives in perpetual damp. A small fissure came into sight.
I pushed him inside, into the damp, earthy darkness, before collapsing at the entrance, listening.
My whole body trembled, not from cold but from the adrenaline that had nowhere left to go.
I held my breath, straining to hear past the drumming of the nearby waterfall.
For a full minute, there was nothing but water and the frantic thumping of my blood in my ears.
Then, faintly, I heard them—the shouts of the men, farther away now, moving past our position.
The dogs sounded confused, their barks receding down the ravine. They had missed us.
Only then did I allow myself a single, shuddering breath. The immediate danger had passed, but the silence it left behind was somehow heavier.
I crawled back into the cramped space. In the gloom, I could just make out his face, pale and slick with sweat.
“We did it,” Caio whispered, his voice hoarse with a mixture of disbelief and triumph. “Luzia, we actually did it.”
His words, meant to be a comfort, were a spark on dry tinder. I stared at the Sussuron, its ornate carvings mocking me.
“No,” I said, the word hollow. “We failed.”
“What are you talking about? We have the Sussuron!”
“The full moon,” I choked out, the reality crashing down on me with the force of a physical blow. “It’s gone. We missed it. The flower… the ritual… it’s useless now.”
The failure was absolute. I could never go home. I was an exile. In a single night, I had lost my sister’s only hope and my entire world.
All of this had been for nothing. I looked at the useless wooden box. It didn’t feel like a prize. It felt like a tombstone, marking the death of all my hope. And it was the heaviest thing I had ever carried.