The Sensory Deception (51 page)

Gloria works another vine around and between the logs. She hands the vine to Iara, stands, and stretches her back. It’s warm and wet and she’s had enough of the mosquitoes. Back in California, mosquitoes are tiny things that zip around. Here, they’re an inch long and lumber through the air like tiny storks. She grabs one and closes her fist. It leaves a red mark—
great, another bite.

A spark of light catches her attention. She steps up on a low branch and opens a window in the leaves. It wasn’t a spark. It was sunlight reflecting from the rifle slung across Chopper’s back. There he is, dropping from a tree.

She lets the leaf window close as gently as she can, not sure if he’s seen her, but certain that they need to move right now.

If she and Iara try to ride a log downstream, it will roll and they won’t be able to hang on. On the other hand, there isn’t time to configure the raft that Iara, bless her industrious little heart, has designed. The three logs are at least woven together, though the ends of the weave need to be tied or the whole thing will unravel.

She pulls the vines tight and tries to tie them. They’re not like string, though. They have to be wound. Iara steps in front of
Gloria and demonstrates how to braid the fine ends into a long knot. The two of them tug and tie, twist and weave vine after vine. The vines are now secure if not tight. Gloria has worked with engineers since she graduated from college. She’s not an engineer, of course, but she likes this design. The logs won’t separate, and they each have some freedom in how they respond to currents. She’s convinced that the raft will stay together.

She drags the contraption down the bank. With one end floating in the water—it floats! this is the first good news of the day—Iara climbs on. Gloria pushes off and jumps on behind her.

F
arley works his way around another outcropping, half swimming, half walking.

There she is
.

Twenty feet from shore, a good hundred feet from Farley, the sight takes his breath away. Sunlight glints from her hair, making those black locks look like a fire-tinted orange halo.

She’s alive. She’s fine and she’s getting away from the fire. But that raft looks bad
. He calls her name at the top of his lungs. She turns, but he’s hidden in the shade of the bank. She looks frightened. Horrified.

The raft floats, but that’s the extent of its stability. Gloria can’t control its direction and it’s slowly spinning. He sees the child Ringo told him about.

He sprints farther up the bank, waving and calling. He maps out the course of the river in his mind. He remembers the dogleg and its rapids. The current is pulling her away faster than he can run.

He takes one arm out of the backpack shoulder strap—but stops. It will slow him down, but he’ll only get one chance. Tahir’s words come back to him as though they were spoken by a ghost standing at his shoulder: “We must assure that we are going to the right place with the right tools or we might as well stay here.” In addition to the useless satellite phone and
dubious rifle, the pack holds a coil of rope, a hatchet, and some medical supplies. As for time, the raft will drift no faster than the current. With or without the pack, Farley can swim faster than the current.

He tightens the backpack straps. The rifle is firm along his spine. He takes a mental snapshot of the distance between the raft and himself and dives in.

Tahir hears Farley yell Gloria’s name. He’s behind and inland from the sound. He ducks a branch, jumps over another, and hacks aside a mess of vines with the machete. Then he stops to listen again. Nothing. Near the base of a tree, the underbrush rises four feet from the ground, another dark tunnel. He ducks and runs. As he zips through the jungle, heedless to anything but progress, something demands his attention.

It sounds like a roar. For an instant he expects a lion or tiger. But this roar doesn’t stop for breath. Then he recognizes it. This is not a foreign sound. It is the raging anger of a napalm firestorm. He throws himself to the ground just as the blast consumes the brush above him.

Tahir is accustomed to the feeling that all is lost, that this time he won’t be able to survive. But every time he’s had this feeling, a way has appeared before him. Though he doesn’t trust this appeal to fortune, it encourages the irrational belief that he will find his daughter right now.

He rolls under the flames, expecting the gasoline taste of napalm. Instead it’s just heat, a single, immediate, foreboding jet of heat. He senses a cool spot, emerges to his feet, and sprints toward the riverbank where he heard Farley’s voice a minute or two before.

He collides with a wall of leaves wrapped tight by vines and moss. Instead of cutting it with the machete, he rams in his shoulder and works his way through. It’s like being caught in a web. He drops to the ground, but it’s even denser here. He’s trapped.

Chopper emerges from the river. Behind him, the fire is about to jump the riverbank and take the island. Also behind him, he sees something floating. He can make out the red T-shirt on the kid.

He sprints along the riverbank and works through a few meters of foliage to the long granite slab that causes the dogleg. He climbs up and runs along its edge. It’s like running along the rim of a dam. At the end of the rock, he jumps down to the blown-over copse of trees. The trunks are nearly horizontal, and every one of them trails dead vines. The vines and upward-pointing branches snap off, thoroughly dried by the hot winds.

The fire has now worked all the way down the riverbank where he sprinted seconds ago. He breaks off a long, thin branch to use as a giant match. He runs back along the granite slab, inland toward the encroaching flames. He dips the branch into the fire. It lights like a well-oiled torch.

Gloria pins little Iara to the raft with her body, holding on with one hand and cupping water over her skin with the other.

Flames leap across the river. First one and then several, the same way that they lick the sky. Gloria can sense the explosion that’s coming. It feels like the air itself is going to combust. It’s been a few days since she last smelled burning hair and felt the immediacy of blistering skin.

The river carries them spinning downstream. The flames walk, step by step, closing on them. Tumbling spheres of fire dance in the canopy of the island next to them, racing downstream to the eastern edge.

The island explodes.

She pulls Iara into the gap between two logs. Iara takes a breath and buries herself underwater in the basket of vines that hold the logs together. Every exposed inch of Gloria’s skin demands that she immerse herself, too. But if she moves to the unoccupied second gap between the three logs, she won’t be able to protect Iara.

She endures the pain by rotating herself back and forth. The river water dampens the blisters just slightly faster than they form.

The raft clears the eastern edge of the island.

The river is calm right here. She can see whirlpools where the two forks of the river combine, but right here, a few feet upstream, it’s calm. Iara takes a breath.

Gloria raises her head and looks around. She sees something behind them, swimming in their direction. It’s long enough to be a crocodile. She tries to paddle but her effort makes the raft spin faster.

Farley uses the river currents to accelerate. They vary at different depths. It feels like he’s being carried by a wave, like body surfing. He’s already had to surface twice to breathe, so he knows that about three minutes have passed. He kicks up again and, as his face breaks the surface, he sees her.

Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A. Gloria
.

She’s paddling away from him. He knows better than to try to talk but takes a mouthful of water anyway.

Then her eyes meet his and they get even bigger. She stops paddling.

The little raft is bearing down on the vortices caused by the impedance mismatch in the connection of the two river forks.

He spits out the water and, as he takes a breath, he can see that Gloria recognizes the danger. She’s paddling downstream.

Farley kicks back underwater and drives himself after the raft.

When Gloria sees Farley, her first reaction is disbelief. Her second is a hope-fueled burst of desire to survive. She sees the little water tornadoes in front of the raft. Iara is hanging on tight. She lowers her legs farther into the water and grips the center log. She kicks for all she’s worth. The raft stops spinning and she maneuvers it downstream.