Chapter 8 Walk Behind the Water
Santi
"Why aren't we going now?" Nora demands, wrapped in nothing but my bedsheet and her indignant fury.
"W-we need to alert the park authority," Ryan stammers, averting his gaze from the bed.
"We need to rescue Mateo!"
"Ryan is right," I say gently. "It's pitch black out there. We're hotel executives who have never done a field extraction in our lives. We'd be creating more problems if we marched out into the jungle right now."
She huffs a breath. "Call Carmen."
"It's late—" Ryan starts.
"Call her!"
I'm already reaching for my phone.
Carmen answers on the second ring, voice rough with sleep but instantly alert the moment I say Mateo's name and the word camp in the same sentence.
I read her the coordinates off the photo's metadata while Nora holds my phone's flashlight steady over the screen, hands not quite as steady as the rest of her.
Carmen takes it all down, then puts me through to the park authority's after-hours line herself, staying on long enough to vouch for us.
The man who finally answers sounds like someone who has fielded a hundred calls like this and lost patience for most of them somewhere around the fortieth.
I put him on speakerphone, and he confirms the open file on Mateo.
Confirms a team is assembling. Then, when I ask how soon they can move on the coordinates, what he tells us empties the room of air.
"Tomorrow," he says. "Earliest light, not before. We do not send people into that terrain at night for a location we have not had eyes on ourselves. If your information is good, it will still be good in six hours."
"Mateo doesn't have six hours to spare," Nora says, loud enough that he hears her even with the phone nowhere near her mouth.
"Se?orita, I understand. But a rescue team walking into unfamiliar ground in the dark, searching for one missing man, becomes two missing men by morning.
I am not willing to make that trade." His voice softens slightly.
"Keep your group together. Keep your group safe. We will call the moment we are moving."
He hangs up, cutting off any further argument.
For a long moment, nobody says anything.
Ryan sets his phone down on the dresser, photograph still glowing on the screen—the jacket on the post, hung there like a flag, like a message addressed specifically to whoever came looking.
I've spent eight years reading risk patterns out of incident reports for a living, and I know what staging like that means.
Nobody loses a jacket that way. Somebody places it.
"So we wait," Nora says flatly. "All night. Knowing exactly where he might be."
"We don't have to just wait." Ryan picks the photo back up, frowning at it the way he frowns at a server log that won't resolve.
"Tomorrow's schedule already has us doing the Salto Hacha walk-behind in the morning.
The falls sit over a mile from this camp, as the bird flies.
If I can get a better vantage point during the activity—somewhere I can use the cover of being a tourist with a phone—I can refine the location fix by the time the authority's team even arrives. Give them less ground to search."
"And the kayaks," Erica adds, arms still crossed, voice quieter than I've ever heard it.
"Carmen offers them every morning as the gentle option.
Nobody questions two people who'd rather paddle than walk through a waterfall.
I can get a satellite window from out on the water, see if the lodge's other channels have picked up anything overnight. "
I look at Nora. The fury hasn't left her face, but there's a colder glint moving in under it now—the same calculating stillness I've watched her bring to a negotiation when the first offer falls through, and she's already three moves into the next one.
"We act normal," I say slowly, working it through out loud.
"No confrontations. No solo recon past what Ryan and Erica do under the cover of activities already on the schedule.
Nothing that tips off whoever's running that camp that a lodge full of tourists knows more than they should.
We do the walk-behind. We let Ryan and Erica take the kayaks.
We feed everything we learn to the authority the second they're moving, and we do not, under any circumstance, go further than the activities themselves. "
"That's it?" Nora's voice cracks on the word. "We go look at a waterfall while Mateo's out there?"
"That's how we help without getting someone else killed.
" I take her hand and thread my fingers through hers.
I need the contact as much as I think she does right now.
"Ryan gets a better fix. Erica gets a window for more information.
The authority moves at first light with better intelligence than they would otherwise have.
That's not nothing, Nora. That's the only useful thing four people with no field training can actually do tonight. "
She doesn't argue further, but I feel her fury settle into a harder and quieter reserve, riding under the surface long after Ryan and Erica leave and the light goes out.
It's still there in the morning, simmering under the easy chatter at breakfast, under Carmen's bright, determined normalcy as she walks the group toward the trailhead.
***
Everyone looks like they're at a corporate retreat again in their clean clothes with fresh bug spray applied. All around us are faces trying very hard to pretend that one of Waku's most experienced guides didn't vanish less than forty-eight hours ago.
Carmen briefed the group at breakfast: Mateo is still missing, the park authority has an active search underway, the lodge is in close contact with them, and the safest thing any of us can do today is exactly what was already planned.
No one needs to be a hero. No one needs to go looking. The professionals are handling it.
I watch Riley's eyes flick to Nora across the table when Carmen says that no one needs to go looking. Nora snuck out to Riley and Derrick's cabin this morning to fill them in on the plan. A glance around at Andrew, Alex, and Channelle confirms to me that everyone is on board with our plan.
Ryan and Erica aren't on the boat with the rest of us when we prepare to make our way to Salto Hacha.
"Headache," Erica tells Carmen at the dock, a hand pressed lightly to her temple, entirely too convincing for someone who is more likely to give people headaches than have one. "I think I'll skip the falls. Ryan said he'd keep me company on the water instead."
Soon, two kayaks paddle out toward the lagoon's far edge where the satellite signal apparently behaves itself, and that's the last I see of either of them as our boat pulls away from the dock.
The boat surges forward, slicing the dark water. Ahead, Salto Hacha rises from the far shoreline, a white curtain pouring off the tepuy lip and into the lagoon. From this angle, it looks like the edge of the world split open.
Riley sits up front, hair in a messy knot, one hand on the gunwale, talking with Channelle. Derrick's next to the pilot, listening to instructions, asking questions like a model guest. Alex is behind them, sunglasses on, scanning the shoreline with the expectant joy of a tourist.
Nora sits across from me, her ankles crossed delicately in front of her. I remember nibbling the arches of those dainty feet last night while buried balls deep in her... I breathe in air through my teeth and have to look away before I get a hard-on in the boat.
"Santi?" she purrs.
My nostrils flare. The way she said my name last night... the way she said all those dirty things...
Fuck.
She smirks as I shift my position and cover up my crotch with my hat. Amusement gleams in those dark eyes. She knows exactly what her voice does to me, the minx.
The sound of the falls hits first—deep, constant, a rolling roar that reaches out and catches in my chest. The air grows cooler as we approach, spray dusting the boat, beading on my arms. The captain angles us toward a narrow dock.
The entire rock wall is alive with water.
White, brown where it slams into ledges, rainbows forming and collapsing in the mist.
I’m not a person who cries at scenery. My brain is generally too occupied cataloging logistics: where’s the exit, what’s the timing, do we have enough battery?
But the first glimpse of the path—the faint dark line behind the waterfall, hugging the cliff—is enough to unsettle the tightness under my ribs.
"Riley wasn't exaggerating," Nora says softly over the roar.
I lean in. "Riley used the phrase 'religious experience' in a planning meeting."
My hand finds her waist as we climb out onto the dock, steady her when the wood shifts under her shoes.
My eyes go to the rock face above the falls involuntarily—toward the direction Ryan marked on his map last night, the mile of jungle between here and a camp neither of us has seen with our own eyes yet.
I'm aware, distantly, that I'm not looking at the waterfall the way everyone else is.
I'm looking at the terrain around it. An old habit, but a useful one, today.
The replacement guide today is older, lines carved deep around his eyes, Pemón beadwork bright against his shirt.
He repeats the same warning in Spanish and English, his voice so even it could almost bring anyone's pulse down.
"The path can be slippery. Use the rope.
Stay close to the wall. And don't rush. The water isn't going anywhere. "
We walk single file along a dirt track that turns to rock near the base of the fall. The closer we get, the louder the world becomes, until conversation stops being possible. Jacket zippers, boot scuffs, breath—that's all that's left.
Spray prickles my face. Water runs in sheets down the rock to our right, shallow streams cutting paths at our feet. The guide stops at the mouth of the path, where the waterfall folds away from the cliff barely enough to let human bodies slip behind.