Chapter 3 The Canopy Split
Nora
The air is a wall, even at this early hour of the day. Heat clings to my skin the second we leave the last stretch of sand and step into the real jungle. This is not the carefully edged trail loops behind the lodge, but the deep canopy hike that Mateo promised with that small, disarming half-smile.
As we move into the deep forest, the canopy closes over us in layers, each dimmer than the last, until we find ourselves moving through a cathedral of green, roots, and ancient bark.
There are no walls around us that aren't alive.
The light that reaches the trail floor is filtered through so many layers of leaf and branch that it arrives golden, diffuse, and slightly unreal, like the light in old photographs.
I feel completely in my element. Nothing but excitement and wonder pours through me; there's no room for worry or concern or anxiety. It feels... liberating.
"You look like you're enjoying yourself," Erica says from beside me.
"I'm observing the terrain."
"You're smiling at a tree."
I shoot her a grin, noting how uncomfortable she looks in this heat. "I bet you don't have trees like this in London."
"No, we certainly do not."
Erica has her phone in her hand and is documenting everything, ever the journalist at heart.
She points out a strangler fig, and we both lean in.
It is, genuinely, extraordinary—the original host tree long gone, the fig's roots forming the shape of a ghost around the space where it used to be.
"The host tree has been completely absorbed," she says, her nose wrinkled as she photographs it.
"The terrain is interesting," I say.
"The terrain," she says with a sideways glance, "and something else."
I look at the trail ahead.
Mateo is leading the group at a pace that feels both unhurried and efficient, reading the path without effort.
He moves through root systems and low growth without adjusting his stride.
The rest of us are adjusting constantly.
Ryan has a trekking pole he took out of his daypack, looking satisfied with himself.
Derrick and Riley are behind him, Riley photographing a bird she cannot identify and doesn't care that she can't. Andrew is at the back, video-calling Aubrey on the satellite connection Mateo arranged for the first hour of the trail, when the signal still holds, holding his phone up so she can see the canopy.
Santi is three people ahead of me.
"So," Erica says, in a different register. Lower. Pointed.
I look at the strangler fig again.
"Did you," she says, with the delicacy of a journalist asking a question she already knows the answer to, "at any point last night—"
"No."
"—do anything interesting—"
"No."
"—with our new friend up ahead—"
"Erica."
"I'm asking as a friend."
I snort. "You're asking as someone writing a story."
She steps over a root with very little grace. "I saw the way he was looking at you. And how you were looking at him yesterday in the water."
I turn away and try my best to look disinterested. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Nora." She stops walking long enough to look at me with complete directness. "Did you or did you not nearly combust on that rock shelf yesterday?"
Heat rises in my cheeks, and not the sweaty jungle kind of heat. "I'm going to walk faster now."
"That's a yes," she says, falling back into step beside me. "Excellent. Very good. This is going in chapter two." She makes a note on her phone. "Did he—"
"We are in a jungle, Erica."
"Ideal setting, actually. Very atmospheric. Did he—"
"Look at this orchid," I say, pointing desperately.
"Great," she says dryly. "Looks just like the last one."
"The trail is getting steep, huh?" I try again.
Erica rolls her eyes. "Yup. And so is your bullshit. But fine! You keep ignoring Mr. Tall, Handsome, and Broody. See where that gets you!" Then she links her arm with mine and drags me back to the group.
***
Santi
I chance a glance back at Nora under the guise of sipping from my canteen.
She's smiling at a tree with Erica, having stopped mid-stride to examine the root system to the left of the trail.
Whatever she's found has produced a private, unguarded smile that I'm fairly certain she would stifle if she thought anyone was watching her.
But I can't help but watch her.
The way she briefly touches bark as she passes with her fingertips, like she's confirming it's real.
The way she tilts her head back at the canopy gaps where the light comes through, golden and diffuse, and stays there for as long as she thinks she can without it being noticed.
The way her lips move slightly as she silently identifies things in her head—a bird, a formation, a root system—filing it, storing it, running the language until she finds the right word.
This woman was made for the jungle.
I take another sip from my canteen and face forward before she catches me, which has become a reflex—the constant small management of where my eyes are and how long they stay there.
In the office, there are always other things to look at: projections, whiteboards, the middle distance.
Here, there is the canopy, and a root, and light, and Nora.
Mostly Nora.
Mateo is still leading the group up ahead.
He hasn't looked back at the group in twenty minutes, which means he trusts the trail to hold us.
I have been watching him almost as much as I've been watching Nora.
His body language seems distracted today, and I find myself wondering about our little chat on the dock last night.
The trail forks at a wide, flat section where two enormous roots have grown together, forming a natural bench. Mateo stops us and looks up through a gap in the canopy at the sky.
"Five minutes," he says. "Drink water." He looks at the forward trail. "I want to check the path ahead. I'll be thirty seconds."
He goes around the bend.
Andrew drops onto the root bench and immediately gets his phone out, but it looks like he's lost the signal now from the way he starts waving it around above his head.
Ryan is adding to his field notes, and Erica is eyeing the canopy as if it's highly suspicious and about to commit one of the crimes she so gloriously reports on.
Riley and Derrick are standing slightly apart from the group. Their body language looks all wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Riley is looking at the canopy. Derrick is looking at Riley with the expression of a man who knows he has missed something and hasn't yet worked out what.
"So," Andrew says, to no one in particular. "Does anyone else feel like Mateo is the only person here who actually knows where we're going?"
Erica snorts, but Riley's expression doesn't change. It's like a light has gone out in her.
Ryan looks up from his map. "Didn't he say he'd be back in thirty seconds?"
The group quiets down one by one, sharing glances the way groups do when a feeling at the edge of awareness starts to pull at it.
Andrew puts his phone away. Alex stops talking.
The canopy runs its usual noise above us, birdsong, wind in the high branches, the distant constant of the falls, but underneath it, where Mateo's footsteps should be, there is nothing.
We wait another full minute.
"Mateo?" Ryan calls, trying to sound casual.
The jungle swallows his shout, and nothing comes back.
Riley shoots Derrick a worried glance; it's the first time she's looked directly at him in twenty minutes. "He would have called back," she says.
I am already moving.
I find sixty feet of empty trail and a curve around the root system the size of a small building, but no Mateo.
There's no movement and no sound that doesn't belong to the jungle.
On the ground in the center of the path is his radio, and beside it, upright and sealed as though someone set it there carefully, is his water bottle.
I stare at it.
There is something about the water bottle that is worse than anything else.
The radio could have fallen. Could have been dropped in a hurry, knocked loose, or slipped from a pocket.
But the water bottle is standing. Perfectly upright.
Sealed. In the center of the trail like it was placed by a person who had a reason to place it, who had a moment to think, and who made a choice about what to leave behind and where.
"Mateo." Nora's voice comes, sharp and carrying, and then again: "MATEO."
Nothing.
Nora crouches beside the water bottle, examining it the way I've seen her examine a financial report. "He had time to put this down here."
"Yes."
"Which means he knew." She looks up at me. "He knew someone was coming. Or he decided to leave us."
We stare at each other over Mateo's water bottle in the middle of a jungle trail, and I watch the full weight of it land in her face.
The debate among the group that follows gets heated pretty quickly.
"We go back," Alex says. He says it with a flat certainty as if it's the only rational conclusion. "We go back to the lodge, we raise the alarm, we let the people who know this park handle it. That is what you do when a guide goes missing. You don't go after him with a group of hotel executives."
"He's been gone three minutes," Erica says, adventure glittering in her eyes. "We can easily catch up."
"He's been gone three minutes in a restricted zone adjacent to a known unauthorized access operation," I say. "Which is different."
Alex looks at me. "What are you talking about? A 'restricted zone?'"
I sigh and rub sweat from the back of my neck. "Mateo told me something last night."
"What?" Nora asks, perplexed.
"I'll explain later."
"You'll explain now," she says, still level.
"We're burning time," Ryan says. "Time to make a decision, kids."
I take a deep breath. "He's been documenting Cumbre Verde. Unauthorized tepuy access routes inside the restricted zone. He needed forty-eight hours to collect the last piece of evidence before he filed with the park authority." I look at the group. "He asked me to keep it quiet until then."
Silence.