Chapter 15

They waited through the night in shifts, two hours each, the jungle around them settling into the dense weave of sound that came after dark in that country — insects, distant artillery flashing silent against low clouds miles off, the occasional call of something neither Marisol nor Mai could identify and had both agreed, without needing to discuss it, not to ask about.

Dawn came gray and slow, the ridge across the draw resolving out of mist in stages, and it was an hour into full daylight, the sun not yet high enough to burn off the low haze sitting in the valley floor, that Mai went still beside her.

“There,” Mai breathed, binoculars steady against her face. “Tree line, upper left. Movement.”

Marisol found the position through her scope without needing further direction, the Winchester already settled into the notch she’d built for it hours earlier out of packed earth and a forked branch, her body arranged into the same stillness her father had spent three weeks teaching her before he’d ever let her hold a rifle at all. A figure moved at the edge of the tree line, careful, unhurried, wrapped in the loose dark clothing of a farmer rather than a soldier, and disappeared again into cover before Marisol could confirm anything beyond the fact of a person existing there at all.

“Confirm sex,” Mai murmured, eyes still on the binoculars.

“Not yet.”

They held their positions through the better part of the morning, the sun climbing, sweat gathering at Marisol’s collar in the way it always did on a long watch, her breathing settling into the old metronome her father had taught her before she could recite her own address in English — in, out, and the small dead room in between where the body learned to trust itself. Mai fed her water without being asked, without either of them breaking the discipline of stillness that both had learned, in different countries, from different teachers, for exactly this kind of morning.