Chapter 1 Canaima Landing #2
I settle back into my seat and flip open my journal to my most recent entry. Where was I?
She doesn't notice him, I write. That's the thing about Elena—she has never once in her professional life allowed herself to notice someone like him, and she is not about to start now just because he keeps looking at her like—
"I've been thinking," says Erica, from the seat beside me.
I keep writing. When Erica starts sentences with I've been thinking, the correct strategy is to let the thought arrive in its own time and not accidentally accelerate it with eye contact.
"About the story," she continues.
"What story?"
"The one I'm going to write about this trip."
I look up. Erica has the expression she gets when she's cooking—bright-eyed, slightly dangerous, the look of a woman who has identified a thread and is already three pulls in.
"You haven't been on the trip yet," I say. "We're still on the plane."
"Exactly. I have time to plan." She pulls out her own battered notebook, the one with the coffee ring on the cover, which she has had for at least three years and treats like a crime scene log.
"Working title: Into the Green: How Adler Hotels' Senior Leadership Team Learned That Nature Does Not Care About Q3 Projections. "
"That's a very long title."
"It's a working title. I'll tighten it." She uncaps her pen. "I'm going to need you to be a character. You're the prepared one. You've got the emergency kit and the—" she glances at my notebook "—work notes. Very serious. Very composed. You make an excellent foil."
"I'm not going to be a character in your story."
"You're already a character in my story. I've given you a name and everything."
"What name?"
She considers and then shoots me a wolfish grin that lets me know she's been reading my own story over my shoulder. "Elena."
I close my notebook and feel my cheeks redden.
"What?" she says, eyes round and innocent.
"I don't want to be Elena," I whisper furiously.
"Why not? Elena is great." She nods eagerly. "Elena has contingency plans about water filtration." She leans in and winks at me. "Plus, I noticed that Elena has fun!"
"Give Elena a different name." My knuckles are white from how tightly I'm gripping my notebook.
"Fine." Her eyes twinkle. "Eliza. No—Eliza is too formal. Nora." She points at me with her pen. "I'll call her Nora. Very avant-garde. Very meta."
"Erica."
"Okay, okay." She waves a hand. "Unnamed protagonist. Very literary." She writes something. "The protagonist is very prepared and has packed insect repellent in three formats, which becomes relevant in chapter four when the group is ambushed by the world's largest anaconda."
From the seat behind us, Ryan says, without looking up from his map: "The green anaconda is native to Venezuela. Average length thirteen to sixteen feet. They are not aggressive toward humans unprovoked."
"Thank you, Ryan," Erica says, writing something down.
"The largest recorded specimen was twenty-seven and a half feet," he adds.
"Even better." She underlines something with great satisfaction. "Twenty-seven-and-a-half-foot anaconda. Chapter four."
"That would be an exceptional specimen," Ryan says. "The probability of encountering one is extremely—"
"Ryan." Erica turns in her seat to look at him. "I'm trying to write a thriller." She waggles her eyebrows at me. "I'm suddenly feeling inspired to write fiction!"
My face burns. Erica is the worst person to know about my secret story writing. Damn it, I should have been more careful. I had this scene in my head, and I needed to get the bones on the page while it was still fresh, and I got distracted by this leadership retreat.
"The probability," Ryan says, "of encountering an eight-point-four-meter anaconda is roughly—"
"Vanishingly small," I say. I know the statistic, and if Ryan finishes that sentence, Erica is likely going to use the number in an article and call it "the official Adler risk assessment."
"Yes," Ryan says, returning to his map. "Vanishingly small."
Erica points at me. "The two of you. You take one look at the jungle and immediately calculate its threat matrix."
"That's not what—I don't have a threat matrix."
"You have a threat notebook."
"I have a—" I look at the notebook in my lap. "This is a personal document."
"With... sections," she says. "I noticed the sections. What are the sections?"
"Work," I say quietly.
"Both sections?"
I look at her, and she looks right back at me with those bright eyes of hers.
"The second one is." I swallow. "A project. Personal project."
Erica is quiet for a moment. Then her expression softens, just slightly, losing the journalist, teasing edge.
"You know," she says, almost conversationally, "the first piece of fiction I ever wrote was in a notebook exactly like that.
On a flight, actually. I was supposed to be drafting a feature for a newspaper, and I had this story in my head that wouldn't leave, and I—" she makes a small helpless gesture "—started writing it.
It was terrible. Truly, objectively terrible.
The protagonist had my exact haircut and kept making observations that were obviously just me complaining about my editor. " A pause. "I still have the notebook."
I nibble my lower lip. "Did you ever do anything with it?"
"God, no." She grins. "But it got the other stuff out of my system. And then the feature I wrote after was the best thing I'd done in two years." She shrugs. "Write the thing that wants to be written. The rest sorts itself out."
I look down at section two, where I've been scribbling my story.
"In chapter three," she continues, returning to her notes, "Ryan's color-coded map turns out to be accurate, which he will be unbearable about, and Derrick gets mildly inconvenienced by a bird."
"What kind of bird?" I ask automatically.
"I haven't decided yet." She taps her pen against her chin. "A macaw, maybe. They look like they could be vicious."
"They're territorial," Ryan says from behind us. "Particularly the scarlet macaw. I've noted their nesting locations in the—"
"Ryan, honey," Erica says with enormous patience.
"Yes."
"I love you. You are one of my favorite people."
"Thank you."
"Please stop giving me facts for the next ten minutes."
A pause. "The anaconda statistic was relevant."
"It was, and I'm using it. But ten minutes. K?"
Ryan goes quiet at last. I nibble the tip of my pen and examine the line I'd just written about Elena. I'm trying to think about what happens next when the plane drops into an air pocket, and we all jolt in our seats.
I look out the window and forget about Elena entirely because the lagoon has appeared below us, and my brain simply cannot do anything but stare at it.
Red-black water with white waterfalls in continuous, unbroken curtains.
The canopy stretches as far as the eye can see from horizon to horizon.
And the tepuyes are rising through mist above everything like monuments to something that predates the very concept of time.
"Oh," I hear myself say.
Erica, for the first time since Caracas, says nothing for three full seconds.
"Yeah," she finally says. Only that. And for Erica, three wordless seconds followed by yeah is basically a standing ovation.
We collectively stare at the lagoon until we land.
***
The floatplane settles onto the lagoon as if it belongs there, which nothing made of metal and rivets has any right to do in a place this old.
Through the window, the water is extraordinary up close—darker than it looked from altitude, the tannins turning it the color of strong tea, as if it has been steeping for centuries.
We disembark onto a floating dock that bobs gently under our weight.
The air hits me first—thick and green and warm, layered with rain and earth.
The sound comes second: the falls. I'd been told about the falls.
I didn't realize they would be everywhere, not a feature of the landscape but the landscape's underlying note, the constant below everything else, the sound that Canaima apparently simply runs on.
I stand on the dock, breathe it in, and feel slightly undone.
The lodge manager, Carmen, appears to collect us, a woman calm enough in this environment that she might have seen fifty groups of corporate professionals like ours step off floatplanes and stare, dumbfounded, at the scenery.
Derrick Adler, the CEO of the company we all work for, steps forward and shakes hands with the lodge manager. Derrick and Riley honeymooned here six months ago and apparently made enough of an impression that Waku Lodge knows exactly who they are.
Derrick built Adler Hotels from a regional chain into a thirty-three-property global luxury brand. He is a man who commands rooms without trying, and people seem to orient themselves toward him like he's a fixed point. Today, he looks like a man who is glad to be back.
He introduces his wife, Riley Mitchell, who steps forward to shake the manager's hand.
She looks like a goddess with her dark red hair that the humidity is already attempting to renegotiate.
Riley is one of the sharpest people I know.
She runs at a frequency that only we mere mortals can dream of.
A frequency that seemed to peak right after their wedding six months ago, but actually seems slightly off lately, now that I think about it.
Behind them, Andrew Baker steps off the dock, looking delighted to be in a jungle.
I suppress a smirk and wonder what his publicist would think of him here.
Andrew is extremely famous in the movie industry and is married to Aubrey Brennan, who manages communications for Adler, and who stayed home from this trip with their newborn baby.
"Are those actual macaws?" Andrew asks, looking at the roofline.
"Real," says a man from the top of the dock stairs.
I recognize him immediately: Mateo Gutiérrez. Third-generation Canaima guide, Pemón-descended, twenty-eight years old. I obviously read the brochure, the website, and everything I could find online about this retreat.