Chapter 9 Terms Rewritten
Santi
The park authority's truck is older than I expected, the suspension working overtime on a road that's barely a road, mud the color of rust thrown up in sheets behind us.
Ryan sits across from me with his map spread flat across his knees despite the jolting, one hand braced on the door frame, the other tracing our position along the ridgeline we marked from behind the falls two hours ago.
"Eleven minutes," he says, mostly to himself, the way he narrates server outages at two in the morning. "If the road holds."
The team lead, a woman named Beltrán, doesn't look up from her radio. "The road will hold. Whether anything at the other end of it does is a different question."
We see the smoke first, then voices, then the shape of tents through a gap in the canopy that Ryan's photograph rendered as a smear of dark green and shadow.
In person, it's smaller than I built it up to be in my head, four tents and a supply lean-to and a man standing at the center of it with his arms crossed, watching our truck pull into the clearing like he's been expecting exactly this for a while now and has already decided how he's going to play it.
Rodrigo Vidal looks like every operations director I've ever sat across a table from during due diligence. Practical boots, sun-creased face, the calm of a man who has talked his way out of worse rooms than this one.
"Officers." He doesn't move from where he's standing. "I assume there's been some kind of miscommunication."
"There's a missing man," Beltrán says, already past him, already scanning the camp with the flat, methodical focus of someone who has stopped listening to whatever comes out of his mouth next. "Where is he?"
"If you mean the lodge guide—" Vidal's smile doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes.
"He wandered into our operating area yesterday.
Disoriented, I think. We've been giving him food and shelter while we waited for someone to come collect him.
We weren't aware there was a search underway. Communication out here is—"
"Mateo!" Ryan's already moving past him toward the second tent, ignoring every protocol Beltrán's team has about civilians not entering an active scene, and I'm moving right behind him, unwilling to let him do that alone.
The tent flap is zip-tied from the outside.
I have it open by the time anyone can tell me not to. Mateo is sitting against the far wall, wrists bound with the same kind of cable tie, looking furious.
"Disoriented," I bark incredulously, my rage boiling.
"Mateo." Beltrán's there now too, already cutting the tie with a folding knife, her voice gone gentle in a way it wasn't a second ago. "Can you walk?"
"I can walk. I can talk. I have a great deal to say.
" He gets to his feet slower than he wants to, jaw tight, and looks straight at Vidal through the open tent flap.
"I was photographing your operation on the restricted side of the boundary marker.
Your man caught me doing it. I did not wander anywhere. I was taken."
"That's not—" Vidal starts.
"I have it on a memory card sewn into the lining of my jacket, which your men took off me and hung on a post like a trophy, which means you have it too, now, somewhere in this camp.
" Mateo's voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to.
"Three groups. Six dates. Your clients are on an unmaintained trail past the boundary, the tepuy base clearly visible behind every one of them.
I've been building that file for months. "
Beltrán's expression has gone very still and very official. "Mr. Vidal. I'd like to see your operating permits. All of them. Current."
"This is a misunderstanding that's escalating unnecessarily," Vidal says, and his calm cracks ever so slightly, just enough to notice. "If your guide felt threatened, I apologize for that. But holding someone against their will is a serious accusation, and I'd be careful about—"
"I have an eight-month-old risk assessment with your company's name in it.
" I step forward without quite deciding to.
"Licensing irregularities. Incident write-ups that don't match your public safety filings.
No environmental compliance audit on record despite operating inside a buffer zone for a UNESCO-adjacent site.
I filed that report through Adler's regional risk office in good faith, expecting someone to act on it.
" My voice comes out steadier than I feel, the same register I'd use presenting a board document, as some habits hold even with my hands not entirely steady.
"Nobody did. I'm regretting that more than I can tell you right now.
But the file exists, dated, and it predicted almost exactly this. "
"And I have the GPS coordinates and the time-stamped photograph that brought us here in the first place," Ryan adds, phone already out, turning the screen toward Beltrán. "Jacket on the post. Same jacket Mateo's missing right now."
Vidal looks between the three of us—me, Ryan, Mateo—and I watch him do the math, watch him realize there's no way to bluff his way through a documented evidence chain this clean. His jaw works once.
"I want to speak to a lawyer," he says, finally, which is the first true thing he's said since we arrived.
"You'll get the chance." Beltrán's already reaching for her radio, voice gone crisp and procedural.
"Rodrigo Vidal, you're being detained pending formal investigation into unlawful restraint and operating violations within a restricted conservation zone.
" She nods at two of her team, who move in without ceremony.
"Cumbre Verde's permits are suspended as of right now.
Every site, every operation, until this is sorted. "
It happens faster than I expect, after that—faster than eight months of an ignored report, faster than the entire night I spent unable to sleep next to Nora with that photograph burned into the back of my eyes. Vidal goes quiet; his only move left is silence.
Mateo gets water, a blanket someone produces from the truck, and a long look at the camp he was held in like he's cataloging it for later.
"Thank you," he says to me, once Beltrán's team has things in hand, and there's a strange, exhausted lull where nobody quite knows what to do with their hands. "For the report. Even though nobody listened. At least someone was already looking."
"I should have made more noise about it eight months ago."
"Maybe." He shrugs, wincing slightly at the motion. "But there is no use in living in the past. Should have. Could have. We live in the now. In what we have now."
I nod slowly, but I'm no longer thinking about that report. I'm thinking about Nora.
***
Riley
When the call comes through announcing that Mateo's rescue was a success, a celebratory chaos breaks out, making everyone briefly forget how close the last forty-eight hours came to going a different way.
"I'm not saying I told you so," Ryan says once they all make it back to Waku.
"I'm saying that the satellite hotspot, the topographical cross-reference, and the GPS metadata extraction were all things I built into my pack before this trip, specifically since I thought, statistically, something like this might happen. "
"You packed for a kidnapping," Andrew says, delighted.
"I packed for several categories of low-probability, high-impact events. This happened to be one of them."
Erica's curled into the corner of a wicker chair with her laptop already open, fingers moving fast, her face pinched with the focus she gets when a story's found her instead of the other way around.
Channelle's beside her, phone in one hand, scrolling through her screen calmly with Erica's guidance.
It takes Erica and Channelle less than ninety minutes to have something ready.
Erica writes it clean and fast, citing Santi's risk report by name with his permission, citing Mateo's photographs, citing the permit suspension on record with the park authority.
Channelle confirms, through three calls and one extremely satisfying voicemail left for a Cumbre Verde board member at his home number, that the company's other regional partners are already distancing themselves even though the story isn't live yet.
"Cumbre Verde's permits are suspended as of an hour ago," Erica says, not looking up.
"Their parent holding company is privately owned, which means no public shareholders to spook, which means they were probably hoping this stays quiet and dies in a regional incident report nobody outside this lodge ever reads. "
"It's not going to stay quiet," I say, my voice sounding deadly.
Erica looks up at that, the corner of her mouth twitching. "No. It really isn't, thanks to you, Riley."
"It's not going out tonight." Derrick's voice comes from behind me, flat in a way I haven't heard from him in a long time.
I turn. He's still got his phone in his hand, clearly having been on a call with someone in legal for the last ten minutes, and has already decided how this conversation is going to go.
My brows narrow and my temper flares. "What?"
"I just got off with our counsel. Adler's exposure here is significant if we put out anything that names a company before a formal finding.
Defamation risk, business interference risk, and that's without even getting into how it looks if a story citing an internal Adler risk report goes out within hours of a hostage situation we were involved in.
" He says it the way he says everything in a boardroom—reasonable, careful, entirely sure he's the only person in the room thinking about consequences.
"We loop in PR properly. We draft a measured response.
It goes out once it's been reviewed, in a day, two at the most, and it's airtight instead of a release a lawyer can pick apart by Thursday. "