The Reckoning

Kleat gave her an owlish blink. He called across to the fire. “Tell us what you found, Sam.”

“He went this way into the forest,” Samnang said. “Then his footprints disappear.”

“He’s still here,” said Duncan.

“Isn’t that the direction of the gate?” Kleat asked.

“Yes. The gate is that way,” Samnang said.

“He’s not finished with us,” Duncan insisted.

“He’s harmless,” said Kleat. “You’re making monsters.”

“He could be hiding twenty feet away and we wouldn’t know it.”

“Do you want this or not?”

“Maybe you want it too much,” said Duncan. “Think back to last night when we saw him in the restaurant, your own words. You said he must be hunting us.”

Kleat set his knuckles on the map. “Not anymore. Look around. We’re the ones with all the guns.”

“He brought us here for a reason,” Duncan said.

“The reason of a seriously disturbed mind. He brought us here to unload a secret. A big secret. A secret that freaked him out. He found something here and needed to hand it off. Don’t ask me why he chose us. What counts is that now he’s freed. In his mind, he’s released from his burden. We freed him.” Kleat grabbed at the wood smoke and opened his hand to the air. “He’s gone.”

How could she have missed his absence? It seemed ungrateful and wrong to forget someone so easily.

“This was all he had,” she said. “Wouldn’t he hang on to it for dear life? Why leave?”

“For that, Molly,” Kleat said, “you’d need to ask your mother.”

Her mother, again. He was relentless, like a jackal after meat. “What on God’s earth does she have to do with it?”

“You were all she had,” Kleat said, “but she still left you. This place was Luke’s baby. Now he’s thrown it away. You think love heals all. But we’re talking about the damned here. Love is a horror to people like them.”

Molly slapped him. The damned. She slapped him so hard it hurt her hand. His glasses flew off. Coffee spilled across the map.

The brothers halted their low drone.

Molly pulled her hand back. She didn’t know what to say. For better or worse, she wasn’t wired for conflict, much less a lightning bolt like this. She shouldn’t have let him get to her. She shouldn’t have slapped him. Then she thought, The hell with it, maybe she should have slapped him a long time ago.

Kleat nodded his head, thinking, making up his mind. The bared pouches under his eyes were even darker in the daylight. After a minute, he bent to retrieve his glasses. He fit them onto his face.

“Don’t apologize,” Duncan said to her. “If you do, I’ll have to hit him myself.”

“I’m not.” She’d hit Kleat too hard for that. He would take any apology as patronizing, and besides, she wasn’t sorry. “You know,” she said to him, “we could work together here. We came for the same reason.”

Kleat looked at Duncan’s scarf around her neck, red and white checkered like the KR—and millions of other Khmer people—used to wear. She couldn’t tell if he distrusted the scarf or the giving of it to her, again, by Duncan. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he said. “I know why I came. But there seem to be other temptations in the air.”

That quickly, Molly’s anger dissipated. She owed Kleat nothing, not one more emotion, not another thought, and least of all her little flight of fancy about Duncan.

One of them had emptied two MRE packets on the stone top. Molly made a show of pocketing the energy bar. She ripped open the scrambled-egg packet with her teeth and squeezed pieces of it cold into her mouth, wolfing the food down. It took sixty seconds flat. “There, done.” She wiped her mouth. “Later.” She started off into the mist.

“Where are you going?” Kleat said. She looked back at them. Duncan was rearranging his pebbles and twigs on the map. Kleat stood rooted in place with his hands on his hips. The Khmers seemed content hanging by the fire, waiting for the mist.

“I’m getting my socks and shoes out of the truck. Then I’m going up the stairs,” she said. “The light’s too fine to waste.”

16.

By the time she finished tying her shoelaces, the rest were ready to go. They left Samnang and his leg by the fire to watch over the vehicles, and started off in a bunch.

The three brothers soon sprinted ahead, the slaps of their flip-flops fading into the mist above. Molly wanted to go bounding up the stairs with them, but curbed her excitement and stuck with Duncan and, by default, Kleat.

“There will be one hundred and four steps,” Duncan told them. He seemed very certain of it.

“You’ve been here before?” Kleat said, mocking him.

“I could be wrong, of course,” Duncan said. “But the place is monumental, and the statues are like half-breeds, part Buddhist, part animal. My guess is that they built it to a blueprint, one dictated by their gods. They would have dedicated a stair to each of the Buddha’s hundred and four manifestations.”

They were tall, steep, narrow steps, like those found on Mayan pyramids, the kind that take confidence to climb upright without hands. Greasy with fluorescent green and blue moss, they would need special care coming down. Tourists, someday, would require a handrail or a chain to hold on to. Vendors would sell them warm Cokes from the stone terraces.

“You could bleed the ecotourists white with something like this,” Kleat said. “There’s room down there for a parking lot and a lodge. Put it on the water’s edge. Spray the pools for mosquitoes. Clear out the trees.” He pretended only to be tormenting Duncan, the purist. He accused them of giving in to the temptations of the place, and to each other, but Molly heard him warring with himself, the dutiful brother versus the building contractor, the bones versus his visions of development.

“That would destroy everything,” Duncan said.

“Do you seriously think you can hold on to this for yourself? The jack is out of the box. There’s no stuffing him back in again.”

“We’ll have to keep it secret until we can get the proper protections in place,” Duncan said. “You don’t rush something like this. The restoration will take years, even decades.”

“First thing,” Kleat said, “I’d clear the trees. The quickest way would be explosives. Give me a few pounds of C4, I could open up the sky. Better yet, bring in the loggers. Let the development pay for itself.”

Duncan stopped on the stairs. “Kill the trees and you kill the city. Without the trees, it would fall to pieces.”

What city? It was all conjecture. But like them, Molly was eager. She craved whatever waited above, in the mist. The stairs were building to a climax. Something was up there, she could feel it.

“After the destruction we saw coming in last night?” she said. “It looked like the forest is ripping the place to shreds.”

“I know that’s how it looks. But the trees are the only thing binding it together,” Duncan said. “It’s true, the trees have invaded the architecture, but they’re also locking it in place. I’ve seen this at other sites. The forest is like a living glue.”

He started pointing out the phantoms of trees in the mist. “Banyan trees. Giant strangler figs. And that one there, the most common invader, a form of ficus. ‘Spong,’ the Cambodians call it, Tetrameles nudiflora. They can live for up to two hundred years, and all the while birds are scattering more seeds, spreading the forest’s skeleton.”

Kleat lost interest in his game. “We didn’t come for this. The ruins are a distraction. Ignore the city, if that’s what it is. Our mission is to find the remains of the Eleventh Cavalry men.”

“You need to be prepared to find nothing,” Duncan said.

“We know now they were here.”

“Were. It’s entirely possible they left the names of their women and headed on.”

“On to where?”

“I don’t know. But there’s no sign they stayed. Did you see any of their tracks in the clearing?”

Kleat was quiet for a minute. His boots methodically slugged at the steps. “Our gang of mercenaries will have the place looted to the ground before we even see it,” he growled. He accelerated, stumping upward, leaving them behind.

Molly held to Duncan’s leisurely pace. They were going to be the last ones up. It wasn’t a race, she told herself. If this proved to be half as big as it promised, Duncan was going to be the crux of her story. Let the others disperse into the ruins, out of frame. She would make him a hero. And herself a name. Kleat could find his bones. There could be something here for everyone.

As they passed the ledges leading off to the tents, she could see how the brothers had spaced them apart last night. Knowing the Americans liked privacy, they’d pitched each tent on a separate terrace. She began counting the steps from her ledge to the top so that she could find her own shelter even in the dark, but gave up. She let go. She was not alone. She was with Duncan. The two of them could manage somehow.

“How does it feel?” she asked Duncan. This could be his triumph. If only he would climb a little faster. Then she realized that he was lagging on purpose.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “What if it’s not what we think?”

“What do you think it is?” In her head the tape recorder was running. She had her camera out.

“I don’t know. Have you ever had a dream that wouldn’t let go of you? I don’t know how to put it. These stairs, it’s like I’ve climbed them before. But I’ve got no idea what comes next.”

“You deserve this, Duncan.” And so do I, whatever comes.

She’d paid her dues. She’d turned her sweat and blood into black ink, and made her eye the camera’s eye, thinking to make the world a little better through her witnessing. But over the years, for one reason or another, she had squandered herself on trivial events and prideful men and women who tried to manipulate her pen and camera. She’d become a cynical hack. A hireling with no faith. That was about to change. The stairs were leading to something larger than life. Every writer should have that.

They worked higher into that netherworld of green mist, and when she looked down, the abyss seemed bottomless. At last she could make out the shape of cobra hoods, poised along the crest like gargoyles. The stairs reached their apex. One final step, and the ruins heaved up before them.

17.

There was no transition from below to above, no sense of arrival. They took a few steps and the architecture seemed to hurry around, enclosing them.

It was a city, a phantom city of buildings and statuary and the tangled network of the forest, a city of hints. If anything, the mist was thicker here, lush and aquamarine. Molly took a deep breath, and the air was so dense she could taste the smell of vegetation growing from its own rich compost, and flowers that were as invisible as ideas. The mist deformed the ancient metropolis. It softened the squared corners, revealing and devouring hints of towering spires, and washing against vast stone heads like a tide.

“God,” said Duncan.

She got his astonishment on camera, his blank, plain daze. Every square in the red and white scarf around his neck jumped out from the mist. The background was pure Seurat, tiny dots of color flooding the air. The suggestion of a massive stone head peered over his right shoulder.

That would be the cover photo. This was a book, not an article. Done right, it might stand as a classic. She took a step and it felt like planting a footprint on the moon. They were the first, it seemed, to discover this place.

“How can this be?” she said. “A lost city in this day and age?”

“Why not?” said Duncan. “They’re still finding Mayan cities and Incan tombs. There are species in these mountains that scientists thought were just myths. And look at the forest canopy. The ruins have been buried for centuries, not forgotten, just lost.”

She was too stunned to arrange her thoughts. Shoot, she commanded herself. Sort it out later.

“Where did the others go?” Duncan said.

“Who cares?” For the time being, the two of them owned the ruins.

Working left to right for a digital panorama, she shot immense stacks of pyramids and squared monuments with ornately carved doorways. The mist seemed to breathe, blossoming then paling. But she realized it was her own heartbeat she was seeing through the lens, the rhythm of blood through the capillaries of her eyes.

“We need a plan,” he said. “We could lose ourselves in here.”

“You’re driving the bus,” she said.

“A basic assessment,” he decided. “Yes. Describe the circle’s edge, then spiral in.”

They returned—with difficulty, a few steps and they were already twisted around—to the head of the staircase. The stairs plunged down into the mist. Somewhere down there Samnang was sitting by his fire.

Duncan set off along the perimeter of the chasm, following a walkway bordered by a fence with nagas facing outward. The walkway curved in a great semicircle along the very edge of the plateau. On their left, the architecture seemed to rush at them like a flood ready to spill over a waterfall. The nagas’ sandstone mantles flared like pink spray.

They came to a fortress wall like the one they had passed through the night before. Standing twenty feet high, it was built of fired bricks. Some of the bricks had loosened and spilled from the top of the wall. Duncan hefted one and noticed a symbol baked into its top. “These are names,” he said.

“You can read that?”

“No.” He picked up a second and third brick, and they were inscribed, too. “But certain Chinese emperors had a quality-control system like this. These are possibly the names of the brick makers. That way, any defects could be traced to its creator and corrected, or the creator punished.”

As they moved on, Molly could practically feel the weight of the names holding up the wall and declaring the inside from the outside. It was like an army of magical symbols, containing the citizens and repelling outsiders.

Where the hillside rose, the wall stepped higher. A deep streambed lined with bricks and bedrock served as drainage, or possibly a moat. A curious moat, thought Molly. This one ran along the inside of the fortress. It was dry just now, but during the rainy season, Molly could imagine water coursing down the channel. In the slickrock country of Utah, she’d seen for herself how a small rain shower could turn the arroyos into deadly flood chutes.

The moat ascended in stages, the stone edges polished and worn by centuries of runoff. From the windows of nearby buildings, the sound of water must have been, by turns, sweet or thunderous. She wanted to veer off into the city and look out through those windows. She wanted to wander among the spires and floating heads.

But Duncan stuck to the path beneath the wall, stopping repeatedly to examine flowers and insects or animal prints and scat. They heard dogs barking in the far distance, and Molly thought there must be a village nearby, even within the ruins. Duncan explained that they were rare barking deer. He could tell the difference between one invisible bird and another by its song or even the sound of its wings. They spent ten minutes studying a spiderweb pattern, and another half hour counting the growth rings on the shells of two different species of snails.

It was maddening, almost as if he were avoiding the city. She didn’t complain out loud as the wall went on and the minutes turned to hours. It took an effort not to direct his story. It would be a labyrinth in there. She had learned from the recovery team the primacy of the grid. The founding event of every dig is the driving of the first stake, traditionally at the southwest extremity. From that benchmark emanated all the squares spreading to the north and east. That had to explain Duncan’s uncertainty. He was hunting for an edge to dub southwest, a corner to the circle from which to begin.

Leaves stirred in the mist. They sounded almost like a child crying very softly. As the sound drew closer, the crying became a little singsong rhyme coming from the trees, and Molly decided it could only be the birds. The sound mushroomed, rushing between the buildings with a blizzard howl. The mist churned open. A great gust of wind broke against them, nearly toppling them into the dry moat. Molly heard shouts and the clash of metal, and screams, an entire battle, all within that blast of wind. Just as suddenly the air was still again.

Molly straightened. “What was that?”

Duncan chewed at his lip, staring at the mist-bound city. “The weather’s changing,” he said.

But there was no more wind, not even a breeze. They went on.

Molly kept looking for a breach in the wall. Surely the forest had broken it open somewhere, and they would be able to see the far side. But the wall loomed intact except along the very upper sections, where the masonry had come undone in fractions. The path and the wall went on twisting with the hill’s contours.

Eventually, a gateway surfaced in the mist ahead. Like the one they had entered through the night before, it had a multiheaded turret with eyes that seemed to watch their approach. In her mind, the shapeless citadel became symmetrical. They’d entered the front door, and here was the back, and this road logically pierced the city from side to side. On the other hand, there could be a dozen more gates, with roads leading into some center like spokes.

The tunnel mouth was guarded—or had been, once upon a time—by a host of terra-cotta statues. They were life-size replicas of ancient warriors, dozens of them. “They have to be based on the sculpture army at Xi’an, in China,” he said. “Or, what if the Xi’an army is based on this? Who knows how old it is?”

He kept a curious distance from the terra-cotta warriors, afraid, she thought, of disturbing the artifacts. That didn’t stop her. “I’ll be careful,” she assured him, and moved among them with her camera. “They’re so beautiful.”

Extraordinary, she meant. Exquisite. But not beautiful. Each had his own distinct face, round or lean, vicious or youthful, some with little shocks of beards or delicate Fu Manchu mustaches. But their eyes destroyed the realism. They were primitive round holes, sockets, some still holding bulging, round jade pebbles.

The crudeness of the stone eyes confused her. Every other detail was so refined and lifelike, and these eyes were horrible. Was that the intent, to cow the beholder? Some still had paint remaining on them. As if the bulbous pebbles weren’t frightening enough, the artists had added shocked black circles around each eye. It reminded her of war paint, or a child’s drawing of a nightmare.

“Are these supposed to be like glass eyes?” she asked Duncan. “Sight for clay men?”

“Maybe. Or reminders.”

“Yes?”

“That we come from the earth. I don’t know. Stones for eyes in a city of stone. They could symbolize the all-seeing city. Or the forest.”

Guardians at the gate, she thought. Many had shattered, and their shards still bore bits of colored paint. Others lay unbroken, on their backs or chests like store mannequins toppled by the wind.

Some still stood at attention, though these had all sunk to differing degrees into the earth. They looked like quicksand victims, dragged under to their knees or hips, some to their necks, but still vigilant. A few showed only the tops of their heads. Whatever siege—or exodus—they were designed to guard against, here they waited. They seemed ready to spring into action. Some even wore their original armor of jade plates stitched together with what looked like wire spun of gold. Gold, though? Surely thieves would have taken it long ago. Elsewhere, the wire had failed and jade plates lay scattered like pale green dragon scales. Their fists clenched empty holes where the wood shafts of spears or bows had rotted.

“There’s a fortune lying here,” she said.

“They came this way,” Duncan said. He had stopped and was staring at the tunnel.

“Kleat and the brothers?”

“No, our soldiers, Molly. They were here.”

“They went through the tunnel?”

“Not through,” he said. “But they were here.”

She looked into the dark maw. “How do you know?”

He opened and closed his mouth without a word. The answer man had no answer.

Molly stepped closer. The tunnel looked impassable, choked with vegetation. Ugly with it, to be honest. It disgusted her in a strange way, the messy, clenched chaos in there. She felt physically sick, and thought it might be that compressed cold egg she’d eaten for breakfast.

But as she went nearer, her uneasiness—her sense of outright disease—grew. The walls pressed down at her. The tunnel, this awful hole, made her dizzy. She remembered her repulsion as they’d entered last night, and this was worse. She was on foot. Dread and nausea shackled her. A sudden despair washed over her. What did it take to leave this place?

But she forced herself to the tunnel mouth. Vines and roots clotted its bowels. She reached to part the leaves and something bit her. She yanked her hand back, blood beading on her wrist.

“Molly,” said Duncan. “Leave it alone.”

Peering inside, she saw the culprit. She took a careful grip and tugged at it, dragging it into view.

“Is that barbed wire?”

“What do you think?” she snapped. Clearly this was what he’d seen.

“Molly?”

A wave of anger rocked her. “You could have warned me.”

“I didn’t see it.”

She yanked at the rusted coil. There was a whole Slinky of concertina wire inside, bound in place by years of undergrowth. “We’ll never get out,” she said. Fear seized her. Despair. They were prisoners.

“Come away from there,” Duncan said.

She let loose of the wire and it drew back into the tunnel like a snake. She stared into the devouring pit.

“Molly.” A command.

She turned from the tunnel.

“Come here.”

She started toward him, and with each step her terrible emotions faded.

“Are you all right?” He took her arm and drew her farther away from the tunnel.

“I must be hungry,” she said. “Or yesterday’s still catching up with me.” She sat down, emptied out.

“Drink.” He gave her a water bottle.

“They closed themselves in,” she said. “Why didn’t they just leave?” She glanced at the tunnel, and it was just a tunnel now. But she felt scarred by it, not just scratched by the wire, but wounded by the tunnel. She wanted nothing more to do with it.

“Maybe they felt safer in the ruins,” Duncan said. “One thing’s certain, they didn’t exit this way.”

“You really didn’t see the wire?”

“From here? You didn’t see it until it cut you.”

“Then how did you know they’d been here?”

He frowned. “It’s logical. If they had time to carve names in trees down below, then they would have had time to explore up here. They would have examined the walls, don’t you think, secured their perimeter, whatever soldiers do?”

Her watch read just eight-thirty. They’d left camp at eight-fifteen. The second hand was barely crawling. She pressed the stem and the little night-light glowed. The battery was working, but something was wrong with the mechanism. “The humidity,” she said. So much for “water-resistant to fifty meters.” “What time do you have?”

She’d forgotten that Duncan didn’t wear a watch. And yet he carried an antique compass in his briefcase. She’d have to ask about the contradiction another time, one more quirk to slip into her book.

“We left camp hours ago,” she said. “We should think about getting back. Don’t you want to take a look at the city?” In her mind, the road leading from the tunnel would be a direct shortcut to the head of the stairs.

Duncan eyed the ruins drifting in the mist, and then the path continuing along the wall. She cut off his thinking. “The wall could go on for miles,” she said. Let him connect his circle another day. The mist was thinning. She wanted to see.

“You’re right.” He nodded, then stepped back. She led them away from the sealed exit, in from the wall and toward the ruins they enclosed.

Only now did she discern that there was a road underfoot. Roots burst up through the ground, as high as their shoulders. The paving stones had buckled in waves, or split open in grassy zigzags. They passed between pyramids and terraced buildings. Strangler figs occupied rooftops and walls, like sea monsters with waxy brown tentacles. The careful architecture looked squashed.

Corridors branched off the main avenue, impassable, colonized from side to side with primordial trees. They crossed a bridge over a dried-out canal with little landing porches leading up to dark holes of doorways. “Like Venice,” she said, “a city of water.”

Every bend promised a secret. She had to discipline her photography. The Nikon would hold only so many images, and it was a battery hog. She got Duncan clambering across the wreckage of another bridge, this one pierced by a mahogany giant. She shot spires soaring like delicate, baroque rocket ships, their needles pricking the lower canopy and disappearing from view. She took six shots of a Buddha the length of two whales, lying on his side, head pillowed on one hand like a child lazing away a summer day. She could spend a whole week with him alone.

Everywhere she turned, the city offered itself to her, a prehistoric vision. Her wide-angle lens was not wide enough. The place defied her.

Baby steps, she reminded herself. She was intensely aware of the sum of the place, the notion of a grand design. Duncan was right, it would take years to decode. A lifetime.

He found a coin woven into the belly of a discarded bird’s nest. Only Duncan, in the midst of a lost city, would have thought to look in a nest that had fallen from the branches.

“Do you know who this is?” He handed the coin to Molly. One side was scaled with verdigris, the other bore a crude profile. “I’ve seen one other like it, in a book. It’s Antoninus Pius, the second-century Roman emperor.” He was awestruck. “Whoever they were, these people were part of a trade network going all the way to the heart of the Roman Empire.”

They entered a canyon of carved panels. Red, gray, and blue lichen plastered the bas-relief in neon blotches. It was like falling into myth. Monkey gods and human warriors waged war with exotic weapons. Concubines lounged, children played. Dancers’ fingers curved like currents of water. A majestic peacock was oblivious of two crocodiles stalking it with wide-open jaws.

She and Duncan moved slowly, like lovers in an art gallery, occasionally admiring a find, then drifting apart to continue their separate investigations. The canyon seemed to contain the germs of every kind of fable and myth. The carving was peculiar in its style and demanded her concentration.

Here was a dragon rising from the sea. Here was a great fire set by invaders with spears, and a murderer stabbing his brother. She tried connecting the stories in order, and realized that every arrangement could be disconnected and rearranged to tell other tales. Was the dragon a storm? Were the invaders possibly saviors? Was the fire renewal, not destruction? Was the killer actually a hero? It went on like that.

Molly gave up with her camera. She touched the carvings. They touched her. It was hard to explain. It went beyond seduction. The walls contained her. They invited her to read herself among the carvings. It was as if she inhabited the stone.

Here was a woman exploring a garden. Here was an infant adrift on a river. Here was a woman about to stab herself. Reverse the order: Here was her mother, here the orphan, here the searcher.

She didn’t know she was crying until Duncan laid one hand on her shoulder. He saw what she was looking at. It embarrassed her, and he saw that, too.

“Ancestors,” he said. “The place is full with them.”

“I don’t know why I bother with her,” said Molly. “Kleat’s right. She was just a hippie chick. A suicide. One more lost child.”

“It’s not that easy with ghosts,” he said.

“I found her, though. That should be enough.”

He ran his fingers above the stone, not touching the lichen, only isolating the story. “You still have questions. What else is a ghost but a question?”

“I know everything I need to know,” said Molly. “She showed up in Breckenridge with a baby in her arms. The old mining towns were going through this Neil Young After the Gold Rush kick, kids—hippies—settling into shacks, you know, letting their freak flags fly. She knitted hats and made candles with flowers in them. She sold them from a cardboard box. She didn’t have the sense to get food stamps, so neighbors brought her meals. People stacked firewood by our trailer in the winter.”

“And your father?”

“Which one? It was the Age of Aquarius. I doubt he ever knew I existed. And what would I do with him anyway?”

“You’re probably right.”

Molly brushed at the lichen, and if she was destroying a priceless carving, Duncan didn’t reprimand her. “She would sing sad songs on the streets,” she said. “An old priest told me that. She had a beautiful voice. Ballads. Hymns. Dirge music.”

“Yes?”

“She died of a broken heart, he said. My poor, crazy mother.”

“And so you’re crazy, too?”

She looked at him, and he was not Kleat taunting her. He was Duncan. “On bad days, I wonder,” she said.

“And the good days?”

“On the good days I sing.”

“Sad songs?”

He had her. She could not help but smile. “Maybe.”

“Then maybe, if I’m quiet, I’ll hear you,” he said.

“So you’re counting on good days ahead, Mr. O’Brian?”

“Days?” He opened his arms to the city. “I’m counting on years. I could spend the rest of my life in here. I was born for this.”

A single gunshot broke their reverie.

18.

At the crack of the bullet, as if the skin of the place had been punctured, the mist drew off in a sudden rush. It didn’t burn away; the sun could not penetrate the triple canopy. It simply lifted and was gone.

They were surrounded—dwarfed—by those god heads and demon faces and the dreams of architects raised in stone and by this complicated forest. The canopy stretched overhead like an umbrella with veins. Molly felt made up, as if the giant stone heads among the trees were dreaming them all into existence.

She had forgotten about the others. Hours had passed. She could not read the green twilight. It seemed lighter without the mist, and yet dark for her sense of the time. Could it be late afternoon so soon?

Suddenly she was starving.

They followed the echo of the gunshot out of the canyon. It took some searching to locate the head of the stairs. Molly could barely distinguish between one building and another. She was in sensory overload, drained from too little sleep and too much emotion, way too much. She hadn’t experienced so many raw feelings in years, all packed into the space of a single day. The city was like a fuse. One sensation seemed to trigger another in a chain reaction of old fears and repressed memories and anger and wild hope.

Luckily, Duncan had an instinct for the ruins. After a few false turns, he brought them to the rim with its pink sandstone nagas and the staircase. With the mist cleared, the terminus sprawled beneath them, a grand cul-de-sac in a bowl of steeply terraced walls. Trees and vines clung to the most precipitous walls.

From this height, the white Land Cruiser looked as delicate as an eggshell. The big Mercedes truck could have been a toy. The rest of them were down there, and when Kleat saw her and Duncan, he gave a big wave with his gun hand, which only made him look more miniature. The expedition suddenly seemed fragile and overreaching. Their discovery was vastly bigger than they were.

As they descended the stairs, Molly saw that Samnang had not been idle during their absence. A bright green rectangle of a hut made of leaves and poles now occupied the lowest terrace, with one side open to his little spark of a fire. The fire gave her a clue to the time. It glittered too brightly for day. Night was nearing.

They reached the ground. As she wove through the trees, Molly kept an eye out for the names of women carved in the bark, but the light had changed or she was among the wrong trees. She couldn’t find the marks.

Even before entering the camp area, she saw Kleat grinning, and his reason for it. He was wearing a GI helmet with most of the canvas eaten away. Closer still, she could see fading tally marks along one side where a soldier had been counting down his days.

The brothers were in high spirits, too. A row of green bronze and jade vessels and geometrically painted jars stood along one ledge. She expected Duncan to start in about the plundering, but he only sighed.

“We’re on their trail now,” Kleat said. He opened his hand carefully, as if it might hold precious jewels, and three empty brass cartridges lay on his palm.

“You found those in the city?” asked Duncan.

“No, right here in the clearing. Sam found them lying over there.” He knocked on the helmet. “We almost drove over it last night.”

“That’s all you have?”

“It’s a start. Now we know where to look. Down here. Forget the city.”

Molly glanced around at the forest enclosing them. You couldn’t see the reservoirs from here, or their tire marks in the leaves. When it came time to leave, they would have to search just to find their way back to the causeway.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing at saplings bent into O shapes. They appeared at various distances among the trees, like animal snares.

“That’s Sam’s work. Landmarks. I sent him to look for the ACAVs. They have to be around here somewhere.”

“Was that your gunshot?”

“No sense wasting time up there. They probably never went up into the ruins.”

Molly resented that. She and Duncan had been crossing the city’s threshold, drifting among its stories. And Kleat had summoned them.

“Well, they did, for your information,” she blurted out.

Duncan grimaced. She bit her lip. How could she have known that was their secret?

“They were up there?” Kleat said.

It was too late to take back her words. “We found barbed wire in the gate at the back.”

“You found wire?” Kleat said. “And you didn’t call for me? That was the deal. I told you—”

Molly darted a glance at Duncan. It was true, they had abandoned the evidence in order to go exploring in the city. “We called for you,” she lied. “We waited. You didn’t hear us.”

“What gate?” His eyes fell on her camera. “Show me.”

She turned on the camera and showed him her pictures of the tunnel. The camera was quirking out again. The flash glare had blanched white the interior of the tunnel. The vines and roots and coiled wire were thin dark arabesques, but also there were shapes inside, trapped shapes if you wanted to embellish the image. With some imagination, one could almost make out arms and legs.

“What are those things?” Kleat said.

“Ricochet. The flash bouncing off the mist. Maybe I’m wrong about the wire. It looks like vines.” Or tendons.

But his curiosity was piqued. “And what about these?” he pounced, as she scrolled through the terra-cotta warrior series. This was what Duncan had been hoping to hide.

“Statues.” She shrugged. The stone eyes stared out from the display.

“There must be fifty of them.”

“I didn’t count.”

“Where is this gate?”

“There’s no way to describe it,” Duncan said. “You saw what a jumble it is.”

“Then you can lead me there tomorrow,” Kleat said. “But first thing, we’re going to do a line sweep of the area down here. Those ACAVs are somewhere.”

She started to object to his diktat. But Duncan was quicker. “Good,” he agreed. “There’s nothing left of today. It’s getting dark. We need rest and food. We’ll start fresh in the morning.” Not a word more about the city, as if Kleat really might forget it.

The two men went to the hut. Before it got dark, Molly walked to the truck to grab a flashlight and another camera battery from her mule bag. Picture possibilities swarmed through her mind. There had to be a temple or a tree from which to shoot that giant reclining Buddha in its entirety, and she wanted to line up three particular spires so they took the eye to a vanishing point. And there were those sweethearts’ names in the forest, so tender, so terribly mortal, the letters deformed by the years.

She was zipping shut the mule bag when Samnang returned through the dusk. He went straight to the ledge with the looted ceramics and bronze and jade bowls, and obviously this was the first he’d seen them. He approached the brothers, crouching by the fire. From the truck, she could hear him chastising them. One of the brothers rose and shouted back, shaking his rifle. Another flicked a burning twig at him. Bad luck children, she thought.

She joined Kleat and Duncan in the hut.

“A regular civil war out there,” Kleat said. The Khmers’ arguing seemed to please him. At last Samnang disengaged and hobbled off into the forest again.

Someone had put a box of MREs inside for them. Molly sorted through the packets, calling out the names of meals. She made her own selection and slit the thick plastic with her Swiss Army knife. People complained about the meals, but she’d developed a taste for them while covering a crew of hotshots one fiery season in the San Juan range.

While her chow mein heated in the bag, she gazed out at the darkening trees, unwinding for the first time in a month. After the muggy central lowlands, the forest felt cool and restoring. Even so, sweat beaded her forehead. She wiped at it.

Soon, inevitably, Kleat and Duncan began arguing. There was no excuse for it. The evening was quiet except for animal noises, and each of the men was occupied, Duncan with his sketch pad and Kleat cleaning his pistol. And it was the same argument they’d had that morning. The only difference was that now they had real artifacts to fuel their positions. They were no longer talking about the hypothetical. Duncan had found a city. Kleat had found war relics.

“We have to retreat,” Duncan said. “First thing in the morning, before anything more gets destroyed or pillaged, we need to pack up and leave. We’re not prepared for this. The city needs protection. We have to get this right.”

Kleat rejected it with a grunt. “Not going to happen.”

Molly didn’t know what to say. She felt safe in here. She felt found. And yet Duncan was inviting the world in before they even had their foothold.

“But we could lose everything,” she said, trying to reason with him. Once word of the find spread, the eight-hundred-pound gorillas—the Smithsonians and National Geographics and universities and celebrity professors and best-selling authors and staff photographers—would descend on the place. She would get cut out, and so would Duncan. That was how it worked.

Kleat picked up the theme. “This is what I’ve been saying. We’re here. It’s ours.” He dripped solvent onto a patch and pumped the rod down the barrel.

“We’ll come back again,” Duncan said, “but on our terms, not theirs.” He gestured at the brothers. “We can get them to drive us down to one of the towns, and bring us back with supplies to last us through the next six months. That gives us the monsoon.”

“And what makes you think they’ll keep the big secret down in town?” said Kleat.

“They won’t. That’s a given. They’re human. They’re poor. We’re in a race against time. Which makes you, Molly, the most important one of us. Everything depends on you. You can document the city before the jackals pick it clean. It’s not just these guys. Once the news breaks, the Cambodian army and government will step in. That’s when the real looting begins. You’re our witness to all the greatness the way it is. It means staying through the rains, though. I’d send the drivers away before the river swelled. After that, we’d be shut inside, alone.”

“Yes,” she answered him, though he hadn’t asked the question. Yes, she wanted to be here. Shut inside. Alone.

“Get all the snapshots you want,” Kleat said, “while we search for the men. They come first. There’s not going to be any mission creep here. We came for the bones, not a city. We can beat the rains. Once I have the bones, this pile of rocks is all yours. You two can stay until kingdom come, I don’t care.” He started assembling the pistol.

“We can spend the next few days preparing,” said Duncan. “And the next six months exploring.”

“You and your city,” Kleat said. He fit the spring onto the barrel. “What about the men?”

“If they’re here, we’ll find them.”

“There’s no if. They’re here. And we’re here. And we’re staying.”

Molly dabbed at the sweat trickling down her temples. Was she getting sick?

Now was her turn to try reasoning with Kleat. “What if we can’t find them before the rain comes? Duncan has a point. It’s the difference between having a few days to search or having six months.”

“I need this.” For a moment Kleat sounded desperate. “Before it’s too late.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The captain will come, or someone like him,” Kleat said. “Once they hear it’s us up here, they’ll come to take it over. The river won’t stop them, they’ll fly right over it and banish us again. And that’s not happening. They had their chance.”

“Their chance?”

“These bones belong to me,” Kleat declared. He fit the barrel into the frame with a metallic click-clack.

Molly and Duncan exchanged a look. The bones belonged to him? “John,” Duncan said quietly. “That’s not right. What about your talk of honor?”

“One buys the other,” Kleat said. “These dead buy my dead. It’s the only way I’ll ever find my brother.”

Molly remembered Luke laughing—barking like a monkey—at the claim that Kleat had a brother.

“That’s why you’re here?” said Duncan.

“The captain sent us off like traitors. Here’s their wake-up call. Every year, the missing die a little more. Wives remarry. Children grow up and forget. New wars eclipse the old ones. Soon it will be too late.”

“What do you think the captain and his people are doing in the dirt and mud and sun?” said Duncan. “Searching for the lost ones.”

“They need to search harder, then. With the bones to shame them, I can make America sit up and listen. That’s why you’re important,” he said to Molly. “You and your newspapers. Shame them. Destroy the old rule. We need fresh blood. New direction. My brother is out there somewhere, and one way or another I’m going to take him home.”

The fire crackled outside. No one spoke for a minute.

Finally, Duncan said, “I’m sorry it’s come to this, Molly. I’m trying to think of a middle way. But nothing’s coming to me. It seems we have to choose between the bones and the city, and I know where I stand. And we know where John stands. But there are three of us.”

He looked to Molly for the deciding vote, and she made a face. “What can I say?” She was genuinely at a loss. Kleat had all but persuaded her, and yet the city needed her. “You both have strong arguments.” She was about to ask if there was really no compromise to be made, but Kleat spoke up.

“No need to fret over it,” he said. He clapped the magazine into the grip and chambered a round. He looked at his pistol, then at them.

“Are you threatening us?” Molly asked.

“Please,” he said. “It’s just that sometimes we get carried away with this democracy thing. And we shouldn’t.”

19.

According to her watch next morning, she rose at 9 A.M. the previous morning. It was darker than nine, though. Six, she thought, and hurried from her tent.

Gray rags of fog drifted in the mist, as if the morning could not make up its mind which way to blind her. She had her bearings, though. In less than five minutes she found Samnang’s bright orange fire and the men all gathered.

She feared that Kleat and Duncan were battling for the brothers’ loyalties, the one to stay, the other to leave. But as she quickly learned, the brothers had their own loyalties to attend to. They wanted more money.

“Otherwise, they’re leaving without us,” Duncan said. He was good-natured about it. “It makes sense. Why stick around? They scored a few thousand dollars’ worth of pots, and as far as they’re concerned, the city belongs to them. They’re bringing some friends back with them.”

“What about leaving with us?” Molly asked.

“More money.”

“Pirates,” Kleat fumed.

“We knew that coming in,” said Duncan.

“They’d strand us?” Molly looked around. Vin kept his eyes on the ground. The other two brothers held their chins high and their rifles prominent.

The mist was churning. The forest breathed.

Samnang brought her a coffee. “Sugar?” he asked.

“No, Samnang.” It was all spoiled. They needed food to stay. Blankets. A generator to recharge her batteries. Umbrellas. More malaria pills. A toothbrush. They needed solitude.

“This is your doing,” Kleat said to Duncan.

“It does me no good,” Duncan said. “They’ve got us.”

“How much?” said Molly.

“Another five hundred for the ride out. Five thousand to stay through tomorrow. They’re not stupid. They keep talking about the typhoon and the river.”

“I only have two hundred,” Molly said.

“I’m out,” said Duncan. What had they been thinking, supplies for six months?

“The statues,” said Kleat.

“What?”

“Show them on your camera. The terra-cotta warriors.”

“No,” said Duncan. “Don’t.”

Samnang squatted by the fire and blew on it with pursed lips. He had breath like kerosene. The fire leaped.

“They’re worth hundreds of thousands,” Kleat said. “Tell them you’ll show them the location. They’ll deal.”

“We can walk out of here on foot,” Duncan said. The mist was drawing away. Trees appeared around them.

“Show them,” Kleat told Molly.

She noticed Samnang watching her through the fire. Was there a right and a wrong to this? She was scared. They were in the middle of nowhere. “No,” she decided.

Kleat turned to the brothers. “Statues,” he said in English. He pointed up at the city. “Understand? Big money. Statues.” They frowned at him.

Tails of fog flickered off through the branches. The truck stood over there, and the Land Cruiser. Molly glanced up. Her mouth fell open.

There seemed no way they could have missed such a thing yesterday.

Eyes fixed to the canopy that was their false sky, she backed away from it.

“Molly?” said Duncan. Then he saw it, too, hidden in plain sight. Kleat swore with surprise. The brothers crouched and raised their rifles.

The rusting hulk of a vehicle hung in a spur of limbs, like a Lost Dutchman, beached in the air. One long metal tread had broken and dangled from its belly. She lifted her camera and, on the flank, in plain view, a faint insignia still showed: a black horse rearing.

20.

The revelation—the relic of the Blackhorse patrol—unplugged them from their wrangling. You could not call what followed a peace. They did not reconcile so much as disengage. It was spontaneous. No one willed it. They simply forgot one another, at least for a time.

They drifted apart, staring up at the trapped war machine, struggling to make sense of it. Sixty feet up, the vehicle looked stranded by some mythical flood, but it was the forest that had lifted it.

“Impossible,” Kleat said. “That’s eleven tons or more.”

Yet there it hung in the crook of massive branches. The helmet and cartridges had fallen from it. No one had bothered to look up. Who would have thought such a thing could happen?

Kleat paced beneath like a starving man eyeing an apple, alternately quiet and then stringing out thoughts for anyone to hear. “The first time the Vietnamese saw an APC, they called it a green dragon,” he told anyone who cared to listen. “The army used them for amphibious taxis. M-113s. Armored personnel carriers. The cavalry turned them into gunships on tracks. ACAVs. ‘Tracks,’ the troops called them. They were fast and mean. There was usually a crew of five. They’d load them full of ammunition and go hunting in columns.”

He went on about its armament, travel range, and the thickness—or thinness—of its armored skin. “They were death traps if you hit a mine or caught a rocket.” Molly quit listening. She could not get over the power of the trees. Sixty feet, six stories high, in thirty years. Eleven tons.

Duncan, the dedicated scientist, went to one of the terraces and opened his steel briefcase to take notes and sketch on his pad.

The three brothers retired to the staircase in a smudge of cigarette smoke, stricken with superstition or just discussing the possible profit to be made. The market in American bones from the Vietnam era was not something the DOD talked about, Molly had learned, but they paid well for the real thing.

Samnang alone did not seem awestruck. He had unwittingly made their fire under the dead vehicle and now began shifting it to a more suitable place. A few at a time, he carried the logs with their smoldering tips to the base of a broad, flat terrace and blew the flames back to life.

Molly noticed him. His simple act declared acceptance. Everything was changed, and yet nothing. For all their differences, they were staying. He had grasped that fact. They needed a center. The fire was that, an anchor for their camp.

“This is only one of them,” Kleat said. “We’re looking for nine men, though. There has to be a second track somewhere.”

The canopy didn’t seem to be hiding any more of them. Molly looked up among the ganglia of limbs and vines, and this appeared to be the forest’s sole catch.

She stood back and faced it as if facing the Sphinx. That’s how it seemed, like a beast in the middle of the desert. A riddle in metal skin. They had come for bones and found a fortress. They had looked in the treetops and found a chariot. What did one have to do with the other? Some hidden hand had sewn them together, but why?

She drew out her camera and telephoto lens and sighted through the long barrel. The ACAV leaped at her. Tipped slightly downward and canting to its right, it hung up there with its machine gun aimed straight at her. She took the shot and stepped to the side, out of the line of fire.

Meandering, angling for the best shots, she ransacked the track with her high-tech spyglass. The details bounded out at her. A ramp at the rear flapped open like a drawbridge. Beside the neatly stenciled U.S. ARMY, graffiti vowed maximum savagery. There was another gun shield behind the main turret, but this one lacked a barrel in the slot.

A man was watching her from the roof of the vehicle.

It didn’t register in the first instant.

She saw him, but didn’t see him.

Her mind rationalized the face as a knot of wood, or a distant statue. His eyes were right on her, and she accepted them as bulbs on a limb, or openings in the leaves.

But then his nostrils moved, nothing else, just the center of his watching face, and she realized he was taking her scent.

“Christ,” she said.

Her hand jerked. The camera moved, but not before she hit the shutter release. In or out of focus, she didn’t know. She lifted the camera back to her eye, searching, zooming, not certain she wanted to see him again.

Duncan was at her side in moments.

Gone, he was gone. Her hands were shaking, next to worthless for holding the telephoto steady.

Kleat came over.

“A man,” she said. “I saw him, his face, up there.”

“Bullshit.” But Kleat’s gun appeared. He held it in a two-handed grip, half raised.

“See for yourself.” She fiddled with the display. There was the face, or almost a face.

“You got one,” Duncan congratulated her. “Too bad he moved.”

“One what?”

“A gibbon, it looks like. A pileated gibbon. They’re all but extinct east of the Mekong. The hill tribes loved them to death. Good meat, I hear.”

Kleat holstered his gun. “A monkey,” he said.

She stared at the lighted image. The focus was ragged. The turret details were perfectly sharp, but the face was a blur, barely there at all. It was charcoal gray and, granted, simian in some measure. But it wasn’t quite the face she’d seen.

“Let me see,” said Kleat. She passed him the camera, thinking he wanted to study the image. Instead he brought it to his eye like a marksman.

“You’ve done it again,” he said after a minute.

“What?”

“First the pilot, now this.” He handed her the camera. “That’s a skull.”

She steadied the camera. There the sloped breastplate, a fading white army star, up higher the snout of the machine gun, and the turret—empty now where the face had been. And behind that, all but hidden along the upper shell, she saw the head, tucked within the shadows, unmoving.

Hard and glossy, it rested on a stubby metal pole. It looked freshly plucked from the battlefield. Through her lens, the eyes gazed down. Kleat took the camera.

“The Vietnamese must have found them,” Kleat said. “Or the fucking KR. Those poor guys. There could be more of them inside.” The idea quickened in him. “Someone’s got to go up there.”

“That will be a trick,” Duncan said.

“Get one of the boys to do it.”

“They’ll never go,” Duncan said. “Especially with a dead man up there.”

“Bargain with them.”

“Don’t force this, John. I keep telling you, part of them still lives in the tenth century, with curses and evil eyes and flying spirits. The locals give their babies charms to protect them. They stack firewood against the door to keep out the dead. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

Kleat wheeled around and walked quickly to the brothers. For a moment, Molly didn’t miss her camera. Then she realized his game.

“He’s showing them the statues,” she told Duncan.

They hurried after Kleat, but the damage was done. They were holding her camera and smearing the display with their fingertips. They were excited.

“What have you done?” said Duncan.

“I just gave you and me the world,” Kleat said. “Now talk to them. Get whatever you want out of it, all the supplies in the world, just as long as you get us into that track.”

“Forget it.”

“Sam, get over here,” Kleat said. “You tell them. The place is huge. They could search for days and never find these statues. And they don’t have days. The typhoon’s coming. We know where the statues are. I need someone to run a rope up to that vehicle. That’s for starters. They’re businessmen. Let’s do business.”

Samnang relayed the message. Doc, the eldest brother with the full sak—the suns and flames and lines and dots from his toes to his throat—glanced up at the ACAV and said, “Te.” No way.

“Come on,” Kleat said in English. He pointed at the camera display. “You want these? We’ll show you where they are. One of you street heroes, come on. All you have to do is climb up. Tell them, they don’t even have to go inside. All we need is a rope to it. We’ll take it from there.”

Doc said something. Samnang said, “They want your gun.”

“My gun?”

“They are saying that. The statues and your Glock.”

“Why? We’re already outgunned, three to one.”

Outgunned? thought Molly.

“What does it matter?” said Duncan. “If the bones are there, you get what you want.”

“And if they’re not? Tell them no statues until we get inside the track,” Kleat said. “Tell them.”

“They understand,” said Samnang.

Doc spoke. Vin handed the camera to them. Duncan and Samnang exchanged a wary look.

“Here’s your camera. They’re requesting to look at your gun. An exchange.”

“The hell.” Kleat’s voice flattened out. A vein appeared on his scalp.

Molly took her camera.

“They want me to hand it to them?”

“Just do it,” Duncan said.

“You know what they’re doing,” said Kleat.

“Not necessarily, John. Keep calm.”

“They’re pirates.”

“Don’t raise your voice, John.”

He was going to pull his gun on them, Molly realized with sudden alarm. They were baiting him to do it. They were waiting for him. Their yellow eyes stared off into the distance. They toked their cigarettes like Marlboro men. But their fingers had shifted on their rifles. They were getting the weight of their weapons, the arc of their descent, the timing, the targets. The signs were all there.

She could almost picture herself lying among the dead.

“I’ll go,” she said suddenly.

Her voice startled them.

Kleat narrowed his eyes, suspicious of everyone now. “Up there?”

“You don’t understand.” She smiled large and stepped between the men. “I’m good at this. It’s one of the hats I wear. I hang off rocks for a living. Mountain photography. Calendars and magazines. I’m not the greatest climber in the world, but I can manage a tree.”

“No,” said Duncan.

She smiled at him. “Baby steps,” she said.

She took over, chattering brightly, getting them distracted. Samnang began relaying her decision to the brothers. Vin’s eyes grew big. She reached for him and brought him down into their midst, rifle and all, disarming them one at a time.

“I’ll need a rope,” she said. “Do you have a rope?”

Samnang droned on softly. Vin nodded his head and started for the truck.

“And you,” she said to Kleat. “Give me your gun.”

Kleat backed away from her. “Now you?”

“I’m not going up there without some protection. Who knows what’s living in there?”

“Forget it.”

“You want me to fix a rope? That’s my price. A loaner.”

“I’ll watch your back.”

She held out her hand. “Right now.” She added quietly, “You son of a bitch.”

Samnang halted his translating.

She could see Kleat’s gears turning. He could refuse her. But she was his only hope, and he knew it. They were locked on to his every move, and his one chance at keeping his gun was to give it away. She would take it out of the brothers’ reach as well as his…for the time being. He handed her his Glock.

“Is the safety on?” she asked, looking at both sides of the gun.

“It’s a Glock,” he said.

“That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

“It’s all internal,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

She tucked the gun into the back of her waist, out of sight, out of mind.

The brothers’ hands relaxed on their rifles, just as she’d hoped. “Keep this for me,” she said to Duncan, and gave him her camera.

He laid one hand on top of hers, and she was shaking. His touch steadied her. He took the camera. “You want me to get a picture of you?” he asked.

That was a first. None of her subjects had ever bothered to ask if she wanted a record of herself.

21.

Vin returned with a coil of frayed, greasy brown Perlon. Molly walked to the tree and everyone followed. She turned it into a high-wire act, something to lift them from the morning of threats.

Lodged in the middle branches, the ACAV looked like a strange, small fish caught in talons of coral. She circled the tree, running her palms over the tan and white bark. “This will do.”

She shook the coil loose and, without looking, tied a bowline around her waist. She shifted the knot around to the small of her back so the rope would trail behind, not between her legs. She wouldn’t need it for anything until she got to the vehicle. The brothers squatted down to watch through a cloud of fresh smoke. Razzle-dazzle ’em, she thought.

She shucked her shoes and socks and placed them neatly by the tree. The bare feet were for extra grip, but also a bit of theater. Patting the dewlap folds of wood, she hopped up onto a massive root. “Feed me the rope,” she said. “Make sure there aren’t any knots.” Duncan stepped forward. She started off.

The climbing went quickly. The men grew smaller, their heads tipped back, mouths open. Partway up, double-checking her grip, she faked a slip. That got an audible grunt from the audience. “No problem.” She pretended to grapple her way past a perilous crux.

It was easy. The tree offered itself to her in phases, its knots and boles and branches forming a natural ladder. A whole metropolis appeared in the canopy, with limbs and looping vine bridges inter-locking the great towers of trees.

It felt good to open her wings, good to get away from the men. Things seemed much saner up here. It occurred to her that she could keep on climbing. She could vanish into the upper branches and outwait the gunslingers.

The thought grew into a temptation. Untie from the rope and she could enter the canopy and they’d never get her back. The place abounded with food and niches for shelter. Nuts and mangos and other exotic fruits nestled like Christmas ornaments.

“Molly.” Her name, so faint. Like leaves rustling.

The forest was so beautiful, and when she glanced down, her holds had withdrawn into the tree. Pathways led off along the great branches. She felt drugged.

The forest was her answer, she comprehended. But it went beyond that. The message built like a heat. All she had to do was take to the trees. Forget the men, they were deceivers. Forget the rains, they would pass. Forget the past. The forest would provide.

The ACAV broke her fantasy of dancing off into the heights.

More quickly than she’d expected, its squared metal corners and sprockets and pipes and bulldozer tread emerged around the corner. Her temptation snapped. This brute thing—not escape—was what she’d come for.

The metal ramp at the back invited her like a sturdy porch. One step and she would be inside.

“Moll-lee.” The rope tugged at her waist. It was Duncan, invisible beneath the foliage. He called again, more insistent this time.

She took a breath. It was like pulling herself from a dream. “I’m good,” she shouted down.

She peered at the inside of the thing. An open hatch on top helped illuminate the recesses. Stenciled warnings read DANGER—MONOXIDE GAS. She sniffed the air, and there was only the slight odor of fuel and oil and fertilizer. Dung, she realized. Animal dung. The green dragon had become a nest for forest creatures.

“I’m going in,” she called down.

“What?”

She pulled up some slack and made the small leap, landing lightly, barefoot, on the cool metal. The wedged vehicle didn’t shift an inch.

The rope tugged again, Duncan fretting.

“I’m off,” she shouted, and realized that the climbing lingo might confuse him. “I’m in. I’m up.” She untied from the rope and knotted it to an eyebolt on the back of the ACAV. “Come on up. The rope’s anchored.”

Branches had infiltrated through the open cupola, and white orchids with red pistils grew here. Butterflies spiraled above the war machine, their wings bright blue and the size of her hand. Death and life. She wanted her camera.

She peeked on top, and the head was jammed onto an exhaust pipe. Its eyes and face were aimed forward, and she was grateful for that. Let the others deal with it.

As it turned out, once she’d hung the rope straight down from the ACAV, the line was too greasy and thin for them to ascend. Kleat wrapped it around his fists and hauled himself up a few feet, and the rope creaked, but that was as high as he could get. Duncan had no more luck. The brothers wanted nothing to do with it. Without a climber’s Jumars to grip it, the rope was only good for a one-way ride, down.

“You’ve done your job,” Duncan called up to her. “Come down.”

“Wait,” Kleat shouted. “What about the bones?”

“It’s too dark to see,” she called out.

“We’ll send up a flashlight,” he said. “And a bag for the bones.”

That was the part she’d been hoping to avoid. “My camera,” she shouted down on a whim. Through it she could filter any horrors before having to touch them.

“What?”

“I want my camera. And some water. And a PowerBar.”

The burlap sack came to about fifteen pounds. She pulled it up hand over hand, and someone, Duncan, no doubt, had included the bag of M&M’s. There were two more burlap sacks stuffed inside. Kleat was expecting a lot of bones.

She sat on the edge of the ramp with her back to the ACAV, her bare feet swinging, and ate the PowerBar and candy and drank the water. Then she stood and turned on the flashlight and went to work inside.

22.

Over the next hour, Kleat called up periodically, impatient. “What’s keeping you?” she heard his tiny voice say. “Are they all there?”

Duncan only wanted to know if she was okay.

She didn’t answer them. A ripple of thunder sounded in the far distance. That meant it was approaching noon. The monsoon was working up its nerve. Or else the typhoon was nearing. Would it announce itself or just open up on them?

She was thorough, exploring the deepest bay of the ACAV, poking with a stick where she was afraid of snakes. With each discovery, it became more obvious that the armored box held only questions. Their answers hid elsewhere.

She saved the head for last, climbing onto the top through the opening with the machine gun.

After an hour, there was no more to find.

She started to wrap the rope over one shoulder to descend, then had a thought. Untying the anchor knot, she threaded the end of the rope through the pistol’s trigger guard, and retied the rope. Then, dangling the burlap sack from her belt, she backed off the ramp and rappelled to the ground.

As she descended from the canopy, she looked across to the top of the terraced walls and saw the city waiting for her. Her view lasted only a few feet, then she sank lower into the terminus.

Kleat and Duncan waited for her at the bottom.

“Well?” said Kleat.

She opened the sack like Santa Claus and handed him the head. “You were wrong,” she said.

Kleat held it at arm’s length. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a trophy. They had it mounted on their exhaust pipe.”

It was one of the terra-cotta warriors’ heads, its neck a long, rounded plug with a hole at the bottom. The jade pebble eyes glared up at them. The painted circles had mostly washed away, but the expression was still ghastly.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Kleat said.

The brothers, watching from the fire, saw that the head was safely inhuman. They came over from the fire. Hunkered down by his water pot, Samnang saw it, too. He approached more slowly, his expression incredulous. “Those eyes,” he said.

“You’ve seen them before?” Molly asked. He couldn’t quit staring at them.

“Once,” he said. “I can never forget.”

“The soldiers must have brought the head down from the gate,” Duncan said. “Like Molly said, a souvenir to show they’d been here. It means they were getting ready to leave. But for some reason, they never left.”

“That’s all you found?” Kleat said to Molly.

“No bones,” she said. “It was mostly empty. There’s a big machine gun, rusted solid. And these.” She gave him a handful of rotted currency.

“GI scrip,” said Kleat. “They didn’t use dollars in the field.”

“And these.” She pulled out a set of maps in plastic.

Duncan took those. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice. These could tell us where they were going and why they came here. And where we are.”

“Do you think that’s the end of it?” Kleat said. He tossed the currency away. “Funny money and a piece of pottery and some maps?”

“No.” She had wanted the city for herself and Duncan. But for a little longer they were going to have to put up with Kleat’s hunger and the brothers’ ransacking. Somehow she and Duncan could turn this to their advantage, but it would come at a cost. The question was, how much of a cost? “We’ll keep looking for the soldiers. That comes first.” His departure came second.

Kleat held out his hand. “My gun.” He hadn’t forgotten.

She reached behind her. She planted her feet. She’d rehearsed it in her mind. He would go ballistic when she confessed, would maybe even hit her, but not if she could help it.

Without a word, she brought her fist around in a long arc. It wasn’t a graceful boxer’s roundhouse, and it wasn’t very fast. His surprise was almost sad. His face turned slightly away. She landed against his ear. The shock of it ran up her arm bones.

Kleat dropped to the ground with a bellow. The terra-cotta head fell from his hands and rolled across the leaves.

The brothers fell silent, astonished. First she’d slapped him, now she’d brought him to his knees. It was so strange to them, the alpha-femme twist. It was strange to her.

“I didn’t bring it down.” She was breathing hard, wondering how it could have come to this.

Kleat looked at her. His blank expression was changing, the rage getting traction.

“I left it,” she announced loudly. “Before someone got killed.”

The worm veins surfaced. “Do you know what you’ve done to us?” he shouted at her.

Duncan came alive, thankfully. He stepped between them, pressing his back against Molly, forcing her back. He faced Kleat. “There,” he said, “it’s done. Not finished, just changed. I’m with Molly.”

“You two.” He spat at Duncan’s feet. A drop of blood trickled from his ear. She hadn’t meant to draw blood. She hoped his ear was okay.

“The gun was a crutch,” Duncan said. “You were a threat to us all.”

Off to one side, Doc picked up the head and was gawking at the jade eyes. His brothers gathered around him.

“You’re going back up that rope,” Kleat said.

“No, she’s not,” said Duncan. “There’s nothing more in the ACAV for us. The soldiers went someplace else. We’ll do what Molly said. We’ll keep searching.” He paused, with a glance at Doc. “And plundering.”

He offered his hand to help Kleat stand, and of course Kleat pushed it away.

They ate a hurried lunch while the brothers rooted through their truck for sacks to carry relics. Molly could see the terra-cotta head resting on the front seat, a baleful passenger. Duncan studied the map she had brought down.

“You can still see traces of grease pencil,” he said. “They went east at Snuol and kept on going. Who knows why? The fog of war. But the interesting thing isn’t the map itself or where they thought they were or weren’t. It’s this little bit of marginalia.”

He turned the map for Molly to see, and the old, creased plastic reflected the light. She had to separate one layer of reality from the other, the underlying contour lines and typeset names on the map from the red smudge marks on the plastic. There were four numbers beside a circle on a road.

“ ‘Oh-six, twenty-four,’ ” she read out loud. “Map coordinates?”

“It’s a date, as good as an entry in a logbook. June twenty-four.” She gave the map back to Duncan to give to Kleat. He was brooding over his meal, convinced they were now the Khmers’ prisoners.

Duncan tried to bring Kleat into it. “You said they went missing on June twenty-third. This means that a day later they were still trying to find their way.”

“But to where?” she asked.

“Not here,” said Kleat. “That’s certain. They were under deadline.”

“How do you know that?” asked Duncan.

“Because six days later the U.S. forces pulled out of Cambodia. Nixon was under siege at home. The traitors at Kent State had started a firestorm.”

She had wondered how he might get back at them.

“Those were American children who got shot there,” Duncan said.

“Pawns,” Kleat said.

“It’s old history,” she said. “You keep going backward.”

“I’m dissecting an event. Establishing connections. And deceptions,” said Kleat. “History is our clue. Kent State is the reason the Eleventh Cavalry men died here. While our troops were getting slaughtered in these jungles, the college spawn in their bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts were tying the hands of our president.”

Duncan didn’t rise to it. He let Kleat vent.

“Invading Cambodia was a masterstroke,” Kleat said. “Then Kent State blew up and we had to give the hiding places and sanctuaries back to our enemy. June twenty-nine was the fallback date. That was the day the last American troops pulled out of Cambodia. All except for these men.”

“I thought the motto was ‘Never leave a man behind,’ ” Molly ventured.

“Within reason,” Kleat said. “But the clock was ticking. This whole borderland was about to return to enemy control. These guys had two options. Keep driving around the countryside. Or hole up and pray. Their commanding officer chose to hole up. He made the choice. Whoever the bastard was, he as good as pulled the trigger on them.”

23.

It was high noon, as best as she could tell inside the green bell jar of the canopy, when the expedition split into three teams. Kleat still seethed over the loss of his gun, but the Heng brothers treated Molly like a champion.

“Rambo,” they said, still awed that a woman could hit like a man. For her reward, they paired her with Samnang and allowed her to keep her camera. Duncan was sent with the middle brother, So. Kleat went up the stairs watched over by Doc and Vin.

Doc made clear that their first priority was to locate the terra-cotta guardians at the back gate. But if they happened to find American bones along the way, that was fine, too. There was no more strike talk. For now, the issue of leaving was moot, and a few extra dollars paled beside the prospect of priceless relics.

Carrying burlap sacks and Molly’s emptied-out mule bag, and even bunches of little blue plastic bags like the kind in a deli, the searchers climbed toward the city. Molly and Samnang were quickly left behind. They had the most freedom, she realized. The brothers expected little or nothing from an old man with one leg.

Every so often, she sat down “to enjoy the view” or “rest my knees.”

Samnang was not fooled. “You’re a dangerous woman,” he teased her. “You make us believe we’re stronger than we are.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “Climbing that tree wiped me out.”

“Yes, and I have two good legs,” he said, smiling.

From halfway up the stairs, their camp looked borrowed from the forest. The green hut was already surrounded by the tiptoe of grass. Their fire lay banked under gray ashes.

They heard Kleat arguing, high above them. One of the brothers, probably Doc, snapped back at him. The argument died away.

“Have I done the wrong thing?” she wondered out loud. Samnang knew what she meant. By disarming Kleat, she had made them defenseless. They were at the mercy of the brothers and the typhoon and fate now.

“You took the fangs from a serpent, and left him alive. It is up to him now, what he does with his poison. As for the others, their hearts are still uncertain.”

“The brothers treat you badly.”

“They blame me for their miseries,” Samnang said. “That is natural. I survived, you see. Their parents did not. They have poison in them, too. We must wait for them to decide what they will do with it.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to discussing the Pol Pot years with her. Molly waited for him to volunteer more, but Samnang added nothing. She could have asked him, but told herself it didn’t matter who he had been, only who he had become, this gentle old pilgrim.

They reached the top of the stairs and found that the others were long gone. They started in among the ruins, strolling slowly, and it reminded her of their mornings, before the dawn, at the crash site. She thought of the pilot, and then of the Blackhorse soldiers.

“They could have gone anywhere,” she said.

Samnang glanced at the ground. “Mr. O’Brian went this way with the middle boy,” he said. “Mr. Kleat went through there with the other children.” Children, he called them.

“The missing soldiers, I meant. Thirty years have passed.”

“We have a saying, ‘Don’t despair on the winding river,’ ” Samnang said. “Patience. They will reveal themselves to us.”

They went straight, following a once orderly avenue between the spires and temples and palaces. The tiles were split apart by roots and subterranean forces. The forest blocked their view. Rounding the flanks of monstrous banyan trees, they saw more trees, more buildings. Eliminate the trees, restore the order, and the city would still have been as complicated as a perfume. The canals and side streets and winding avenue formed a puzzle. If the architects had not designed it as a labyrinth, the city had accumulated a labyrinth within it. As they worked deeper into the ruins, Samnang began braiding grass into knots and bending saplings into Os to mark their path. That made her feel less stupid. She was not the only one feeling overwhelmed in here.

It was a kingdom of eyes, the enormous heads beholding their trespass. Molly tried to imagine the Blackhorse soldiers drifting through the ruins with her same hushed wonder, their rifles at the ready. There were a thousand hiding places in here, and she realized that the soldiers would not have left their bones in plain view. They were jungle fighters. They would have squirreled themselves away into the most unknowable spots, burying themselves wherever the enemy might overlook them. What chance did an untrained civilian have of finding them a generation later?

They came to a quadrangle in the center of the city. She and Samnang decided it had to be the center. Four avenues met here at a broad square, or park, mobbed with grass and trees.

In the middle of it all, dominating the city, stood a tower. It was a strange hybrid of a structure, both round and square. It had a dozen angular sides and as many levels, though they were really only one level ascending in a single, steady, candy-cane spiral. A staircase corkscrewed around the exterior, and doorways led off that. The tower rose into the trees. Parrots sailed back and forth to its upper doors.

Like in the canyon she and Duncan had found yesterday, its walls were carved with bas-relief. The tower was a giant storybook. Samnang recognized some of the images, here and there pausing to press his palms together and bend his head. He explained what he could, the scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and the stages—like the Stations of the Cross—of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

“This goes back to the beginning of my people,” he said. “But so much of it escapes me. The kings, the alphabet, the battles, I should know them. I’m Khmer. I do know them. Here.” He touched his heart. “But not here.” His head. “This comes from before the Angkor, long before.”

“Duncan thinks it could be two thousand years old,” she said.

“Yes, Duncan,” Samnang said. “He has made this his spécialité.”

“He said it might have been the model for Angkor Wat.”

Samnang looked at her. “Angkor and this place, or the Sistine Chapel or Notre-Dame, they are expressions of an idea. Like the statues of Buddha, or Michelangelo’s God with a white beard, magnificent attempts to imagine a face for what has no face.”

“Have you been to the Sistine Chapel?” she asked, hoping he might offer more of his past.

“In another lifetime,” he said.

She dropped it.

The green light kept dimming. Somewhere above their hemisphere of leaves and limbs, storm clouds were eclipsing a sun they could not see. Thunder rolled like a subway train.

There was a crack of rifle fire. One of the search parties had discovered the gate and the terra-cotta statues. The others would join them. “Should we go to them?” she asked.

“Are the statues something you want?”

“No. You saw the head. Those eyes. They’re terrible.”

“Then let us not suffer for their desire,” Samnang said. “We can stay here, deaf to the world. Anyway, we will see their treasures in camp tonight.”

They went on circling the base of the tower and came across a name. Carved in deep, square letters among the bas-relief it said C. K. WATTS. Underneath was a date: 8/20/70.

Molly looked up at the tower. The logic slid together. “From up there you could see the whole city,” she said to Samnang. “I think that’s where they went.”

“Among the birds,” said Samnang. “Certainly.”

She ran her fingers over the incisions. According to the ACAV map, the lost souls of the Eleventh Cavalry had pulled into the fortress on or around June 24. If the graffiti’s date was right, the soldiers had languished here, alive, another seven weeks or more.

The idea moved her. They hadn’t just burrowed into lairs to fight it out. They’d made their home here, and found time to roam among the ruins. One of them, at least, had passed beside the stories inscribed on this wall.

She looked to see if there was a special context for the name, and it was carved beneath a monstrous warrior, one of Duncan’s wrathful deities, with a tiger circling his legs. He wore a necklace of severed heads.

She snapped a picture of the name and the demon slayer. She doubted C. K. Watts ever knew this was a ritual slayer of ignorance. But what irony, an American kid with a gun and a knife, off course and vulnerable, unconsciously appealing for wisdom. More likely he’d been taken with the image’s ferocity.

“That makes four of them,” she said. “Him, plus the three dog tags.”

The tower reached into the middle canopy. The stairs stretched up and around, offering access to scores of gaping doorways. There would be a hundred and four of them, she remembered. Maybe she was getting the hang of the place after all.

“I think this will be of interest to Mr. O’Brian and Mr. Kleat,” Samnang said. “They will want to be here.”

She promised to wait at the base of the tower while Samnang went to find the others. He disappeared into a thicket of spires and trees in the direction of the rifle shot.

Her watch read 10 A.M. yesterday. The second hand crept. She tried to restrain herself. With her macro lens, she stalked a small white gecko with red spots.

But as the everlasting seconds dragged by, she chafed. The stairs lay right here before her. And the brothers might have shanghaied Samnang to carry down their plunder. Even if they released Kleat and Duncan to explore the tower, another hour or two could pass before they arrived. The afternoon was marching on. The tower might go unexplored until tomorrow. And tomorrow was a toss of the dice. It was senseless to wait.

24.

She took the winding staircase slowly.

The tower held answers, she was certain of it. Once it would have commanded a view of the entire city, maybe even of the far plains to the west, a man-made mountain on top of a mountain. Even with the encroaching forest, the tower was still the ultimate high ground. It would have given the soldiers a vertical fortress, with a honeycomb of doorways to watch for their enemies.

The deep, wide steps spiraled in a clockwise direction. When she was a kid, her stepparents had taken her to Washington, D.C., and she still remembered the marble steps eroded by millions of feet passing up and down. Add to that twenty centuries of rainfall and you had these stairs. The inner half of the steps had melted into a single sluice for running water. It forced her to walk along the outer edge where the steps wobbled under her weight, and a slip could be deadly. But she felt only a growing sense of authority.

On her left, always her left, the city unwound its maze, a great crossroads with the tower at its center. She spied more canals and lanes and corridors veining off without landmarks that she could see. Even from this height, satellite pyramids looked identical. The place seemed built to be lost in.

On her right, the doorways yawned like ornate caves. She glimpsed statues and carvings inside, and it was entirely possible the rooms held more Eleventh Cavalry relics and graffiti. Their discovery would have to wait for another day. She wanted to see what lay at the top.

Thunder rolled through the heavens. Vines hung like slow-motion rain. She came to a summit deck, and it held a crowning structure. Molly hesitated outside the entrance, a final door.

The statue of a female lay in rubble to one side. Her twin, a half-naked Amazon with breasts as round as bowling balls, guarded the other side of the entrance with a stone sword, its point resting between her feet. Standing head and shoulders above Molly, the sentinel was voluptuous and beautiful, a change from the bestial glare of the warrior statues. She passed on the photo for now. It needed Duncan or Samnang for human scale. Not Kleat. When it came time to write the account, she didn’t want to have to explain him.

From this height, the faces carved on distant spires seemed to be lowering their eyes before the tower. She peered down from the edge for the others. She could hear their voices in the forest; they were speaking her name. But the plaza was empty. Her gain, she reckoned. For a few minutes more, the tower room belonged to her.

She stepped across the stone doorsill, and the room was richly lighted inside. The roof had a rectangular opening so large she thought it must have been built as an observatory. There were no sun or stars to see now, only the green jacket of the canopy. Leaves formed a thick, moldering carpet from one wall to the other. It smelled, not unpleasantly, like a compost pile.

Buddhas lined the far wall, or what was left of them. Side by side, each sat tucked within his own niche. She counted them: thirteen. The skylight had been built to illuminate them. At one time, the display must have been awesome.

The centuries had not been kind, however. The far end of the statue wall had collapsed into rubble. The faces were chewed down to raw stone. At least their lower bodies had been spared the ravages of time. Their long, elegant fingers twisted in ritual shapes, like gang members’ hand signals. She imagined princes and monks meditating here, issuing prayers up through the aperture, to the heavens. Long ago, this must have been a transit station to the sacred.

After a minute, she pulled her eyes from the Buddhas, and remnants of the Eleventh Cavalry lay all around her in the shadows to the sides and rear. She turned in place, discovering a tangle of green web gear with worn grommets, and a rotting boot, and a snaking length of unspent machine-gun bullets. Mounds and heaps of things lined the wall. The soldiers—some of them, anyway—had retreated to this room.

She treated it like a crime scene, touching nothing, documenting everything with her camera, memorizing the line of her motions. She planted her feet as meticulously as a tai chi artist.

Using her telephoto, she reached across the leaves to a heap of emptied metal ammunition boxes with hinged lids. Two lay on their sides, one stood upright, half filled with old water. A black-and-white dragonfly hovered there, and that was a photo.

She found—but did not touch—a toothbrush with the bristles mashed wide from overuse. Some boy’s mother had taught him well. Dental hygiene right up to cause of death.

Stacked boxes had rotted and collapsed, avalanching their contents out from the walls. There was a flashlight with a red lens, like something out of Dick Tracy. A flak jacket was propped up and empty. A broken M-16 rifle lay to one side. A tendril had grown up the barrel and out through the jammed chamber. A small white flower hung like a shell in mid-ejection.

It was as if the soldiers had shed themselves here.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, the room became more defined. The Buddhas had been defaced, not by the elements, but by gunfire. The collapsed section had been dynamited or hit by a rocket.

Bullets—hundreds of them—scarred the statue wall in long, slashing bursts. She tried to piece together their desperate firefight. Had the enemy dropped down through the roof? Or had they come running through the door and sprayed the Americans crouching beneath the Buddhas?

The place should have been heaped with bones. But there were none that she could see. Had they been scattered by animals, or had the victors carted them out and pitched them off the tower? Had she passed bits and pieces of them on her ascent without knowing it? Part of her didn’t want to find them. She fastened on the idea of them rising up through the hole in the roof, body and spirit, rescued on their Judgment Day.

She passed over the hands twice before recognizing them.

There were two of them beneath a scorch mark in one corner, the bones gloved in dried black skin.

She pulled the image closer with her telephoto, not willing to cross over to them. To the side, were those more bones? Sticks, she saw, charred firewood. A cremation? But the pyre was too small. This was no bigger than Samnang’s cool fire.

The hands had mummified over the years. Or been smoked by the fire. Someone had lopped them off at the wrists.

It came to her.

Cannibalism.

Trapped, battered by fear, out of food, they must have taken to eating their comrades.

A laugh—a yap—cracked through the room. It fell upon her, Luke’s animal laugh. But it wasn’t Luke up there. Molly looked, and there were three of them this time, like the one she’d seen in the ACAV turret. While she prowled through the room, the gibbons had stolen up and perched along the skylight rim. They had black masks and gray arms. Her pulse slowed. She took a picture of them, just to regain control.

“Hey,” she said. “Just looking.”

One leaned forward. He opened his mouth. He bared his teeth. Were they going to attack? But his eyes stayed fixed on hers, and he seemed to be trying out her language. That made her more afraid than the bared teeth.

They were studying her, and she was alone.

Careful not to turn her back to them, Molly began retreating from the center of the room. Something gave a muffled crunch beneath the carpet of leaves. Nut shells within the mast? She moved her foot and whatever it was shifted under there. Bones, she thought. What did anthropologists call it? The midden. She was walking across the cannibals’ scattered garbage.

The monkeys suddenly bolted away.

“What are you doing here, Molly?” It was Kleat’s voice at the doorway. “Sam said you’d wait.”

She exhaled softly. “I knew you were coming. I heard your voices.”

“Our voices? I don’t think so. The old cripple had us running to save you. We were too busy catching our breath to talk.”

Then she’d heard birdsong, or trees creaking. Or monkeys discussing. No matter.

“We located another gateway,” Kleat said. “With clay warriors, and rooms with pottery and jars. And a tunnel blocked with barbed wire. That makes three entrances, including the one Samnang said you found.”

He stood in the doorway. Something about the room troubled him. It disrupted his bravado. He wouldn’t come in.

“Where’s Duncan?” she asked.

“Halfway up the stairs. Crawling. I’ve never seen such a fear of heights.” Kleat would not cross the threshold. “You shouldn’t have come here alone. You could have destroyed evidence.”

Duncan appeared, and there was indeed dirt on his knees. The two men stood there, blocking the light. Did they need an invitation?

“They were here,” she said.

Samnang arrived last. Edging between the two Americans, he caught sight of the ruined Buddhas, and his palms clapped together like magnets. He bowed his head solemnly.

Samnang’s entrance seemed to break the spell. The other two stepped inside. Molly imagined Kleat would set upon the room like a wolf, but he moved tentatively, scarcely nibbling at the relics.

She watched what drew them. Kleat went for the rifle with the broken stock. Samnang gravitated to the wall holding the statues. Duncan vacillated. He moved along the edges. He lifted the web gear and dropped it, and ran his fingers along the foot of one damaged Buddha, and shook his head sadly. Then he found the husk of a radio set propped against one wall, and that occupied him.

Molly remained near the center, surrounded by their motion, shooting them making their discoveries, waiting.

The radio was partially disassembled. Duncan flipped switches on and off and the thing was dead, of course.

“There are two hands,” she said, pointing at the fire ring.

“Hands?” said Kleat. He took the pieces of rifle with him to the corner. He nudged aside the sticks of firewood and laid one of the dried hands along his outstretched palm. It was small. Too small, she realized.

“Monkeys,” Kleat said.

“Monkeys?”

“The men ran out of food.”

Kleat glanced from the hand to her. “Did you think they were human? Don’t tell me. Ghouls in camouflage.”

“No.”

Duncan returned to his tinkering. “Huh,” he said and pulled out a transistor tube. He held it up to the light. “Look at that.”

Duncan brought it over to Molly, and Kleat joined them. He heard the crunching sound underfoot. “What’s that?” He pressed at the leaves with his boot.

Duncan held out his find. “It’s a condom,” he said. “And there’s something inside.”

It was in fact a condom stretched long over a short tube and knotted at the end. He tore off the knot and peeled down the sheath, baring a roll of papers torn from a pocket-size notebook. The pages were brittle, and he didn’t try to force them open.

“It must have been a journal. Or a will.” He studied the outside of the roll. “But the rain got in. The ink’s run. It’s spoiled.”

“There are still some words,” said Molly. “Maybe with better light—”

“What is this?” Kleat said again, rocking his weight over the leaves.

Bones breaking, she thought. Monkey or squirrel or parrot bones, whatever hungry men might take from the forest. Kleat worked his fingers under the carpet of leaves.

He lifted a long fragment to expose the red stone of the floor. They weren’t bones, but cartridge shells. Duncan pocketed the papers, and Molly helped clear more of the floor. Brass shells littered the floor.

“Now we know where the side guns on the ACAV went,” Kleat said. “These are shells from an M-60. They must have pulled the big guns out of the tracks and brought them up here. Look at it all, like Armageddon in here.”

Molly picked one of the cartridges from the floor, and a beetle crawled out. She dropped it.

“There’s something more here,” Duncan said. He ran his fingers along a wide black stripe.

The three of them rolled back more of the thick mat. A big serpentine line emerged, painted onto the floor with engine grease. To its side, another line appeared.

“It’s an SOS,” Duncan said. They didn’t need to unpeel the whole thing. Stretching thirty-feet from end to end, it lay directly beneath the skylight. They looked up at the forest ceiling.

“They must have chopped a hole in the canopy, or burned it open with fuel,” Kleat said. “They were trying to signal for help.”

“But who would see it?” said Molly.

“A passing helicopter. Spotter planes. Our pilot.”

Like a child’s prayer, Molly thought. The soldiers had died making wishes to the sky.

“It’s coming together,” said Kleat. “They made their last stand in the tower. You couldn’t ask for a better field of fire. The enemy would have had to come up the stairs one at a time. But how long could nine men hold out? It must have been hand-to-hand combat in the end.”

“I thought of that, too,” said Duncan. “But then there should be bones all over the place.”

“This is quite odd,” Samnang said behind them. He had moved from the Buddhas to the doorway and was running his hands along the back wall. He walked over to them.

He stirred the shells with a stick, and a whole colony of beetles began scuttling around their feet.

“All of these come from American guns,” Samnang said. “M-60, here, M-16, this one, and this.”

Molly felt Kleat’s eyes on her, and knew what he was thinking: KR. The old guerrilla was exposing himself.

“This is detonation cord for plastic explosive.” Samnang held up a coil. “That explains the damage at the far end. C4 plastique. And these I dug from the wall.”

Samnang opened his hand to show a half dozen lead slugs. “All from American guns. Also, you would think their fire would be directed at the door, yes? But the walls are smooth and untouched, you see. Only the wall of statues is scarred. They alone were targeted.”

“What are you getting at?” Kleat said.

“I have looked,” said Samnang, “and there is no sign of an enemy.”

Kleat’s voice dropped to a growl. “They were fighting for their lives.”

“Perhaps,” said Samnang. “But against whom?”

“Okay.” Kleat mocked him. “Whom?”

Samnang let the mashed slugs fall from his palm. “Âme damnée,” he said. His French sounded like a song.

Kleat jerked. “What?” His voice thinned to a whisper. His hard-boiled expression crumpled. He stepped back as if the slugs were poisoned. Molly saw he was retreating from Samnang. Eyes round behind his thick lenses, he looked stricken.

Not certain what to make of Kleat’s sudden affliction, Molly said, “Damned men?”

“Fallen from grace,” Samnang said. He acted oblivious to Kleat’s recoil. “It is only my conjecture. But what if the men turned against one another?”

“Bullshit,” Kleat said. Molly wasn’t sure what he was denouncing though, the guesswork or its author. Or something else. He was staring at Samnang.

“How then to interpret the knife?” Samnang asked.

Kleat blinked. “What knife?”

They followed Samnang to the wall of Buddhas. Molly had not spied it through her telephoto. You had to see it from the side, jammed to the hilt in a seam between the stone blocks, the handle protruding.

Samnang let them consider the knife. Up close, the Buddhas looked eaten by disease. The knife’s presence was deliberate, like a judgment rendered, or a desecration.

“A K-Bar knife,” Kleat said, his certainty returning. “That’s how I interpret it.”

“But why would anyone stab it into a stone wall?” said Molly. “Here of all places, this wall.”

“How would I know?”

“It looks so angry. Like adding insult to injury.”

“We’re talking about a piece of stone,” said Kleat. “A dead city.”

“Molly’s right,” Duncan said. “It does look…excessive.”

“Excessive,” Kleat scoffed. “They were fighting for their lives.”

“Samnang’s got a point, though. The only damaged wall is this one. And see how the faces of the Buddhas were targeted? This knife didn’t end up here by accident. Someone found a joint in the stone and hammered it in with all his strength. This looks less like a battle than a signature.”

“What does it matter?” Kleat said. “A bunch of old statues.”

He grabbed at the handle. He was arming himself, Molly realized. Let him have it. The knife would be a rusty old thing.

He pulled, but the wall held on. He braced his other hand against the stone to pull again. Just then a clap of thunder exploded directly above the canopy.

It was so close, Molly’s knees buckled. She smelled ozone, a whiff of the upper stratosphere. The men’s eyes went wide and white. They looked at each other.

The seconds passed, her ears ringing. More thunder rippled in the far distance. The sense of nature returned.

The knife and the sky had nothing to do with each other. It had been thundering since morning. Just the same, Kleat released the stubborn handle with disgust.

In the silence that followed, another sound descended to them, the hushing sound leaves make when they tremble. But it wasn’t the leaves.

After a minute, water began dripping through the canopy.

The rain had finally come.

25.

They fled the tower slowly. Rain fell in rivulets from the canopy. Water raced down the furrow in the winding staircase, forcing them to the edge. Molly had the advantage with her climber’s balance and her youth. Twice she caught Kleat when he slipped. For a few minutes, the dangers unified them.

The forest grew darker by ounces. The rain diminished. Samnang guided them through the city to the stairs that led to camp.

The brothers had already returned from the gate. The thatch hut and campfire waited below like a lighthouse in a deep harbor. By the time they reached ground level, Molly’s cold sweat had returned.

It couldn’t be malaria, she thought. She was on proquanil. Then again, she was on proquanil because the Cambodian strain of malaria had grown resistant to chloroquine. Maybe the bug had morphed again.

The brothers, by the fire, were in high spirits, their gold teeth flickering like sparks in the darkness, their tattoos glistening from the canopy’s slow drip. Molly arrived at the hut to find two dry green ponchos spread as a floor. Vin bustled over with a cup of steaming black tea loaded with so much sugar it made her teeth ache. She thanked him.

Kleat arrived, his bronze skull as slick as a muscle car. He was wearing the flak jacket from the tower room. Now he could pretend to be bulletproof like the brothers. The superstitions were layering over them. He didn’t bother to remove his boots. Molly scooted deeper into the hut to make room for him.

He thumped her knee. “We’re saved,” he said.

Molly tried to evade his good cheer. But it was hard not to feel some camaraderie. Two nights ago they’d been licking their wounds in a restaurant, banished and irrelevant. All that was changed. Fame and wealth and great dreams were almost within their grasp. It did feel like salvation. She had her camera in her lap. The display screen flickered with images of the strange, beautiful city.

Duncan came in from the darkness. “Have you looked in the truck? There must be ten heads in there. You’ve got to get a photo of it,” he said to Molly. “It’s like they’ve decapitated the city. The heads are always the first things to be plundered. They’re portable. Collectors go wild for them. They move like lightning on the art market.”

Samnang entered from the night, wordless, and crossed his legs. Raindrops clung to his white burr cut. Cutting a glance at him, Kleat looked confused and at the same time annoyed, like a man who has misplaced his keys.

“They must not do this,” Samnang said. “Taking the heads like barbarians.”

“It’s a small price to pay,” said Kleat. “Play it through with them. You’ll get what you want. We all will.”

“You don’t understand?” Samnang asked Kleat.

Kleat tsk-tsked. Dumb question. End of discussion. The fire snapped in their silence.

The Americans and Samnang dried off under the thatch roof, all except Molly, who could not quit sweating. Suddenly ravenous, she pulled the box of MREs toward her. “Spaghetti and meatballs,” she said.

She offered the MREs to Vin and his brothers, out by the fire, but they waved off her hospitality, too intent on toting up their riches with a hand calculator. She would have to think up some other way to mother them. It was imperative that they not forsake the Americans.

The canopy leaked in episodes, dripping like a metronome, then spilling in vertical columns that released here, then there. It was all cause and effect, no mystery. A leaf brimming with rainwater would flip over, creating a chain reaction among lower leaves. Every few minutes another gush of water splashed in the darkness. It would go on until the canopy had lightened its load.

One of the miniature waterfalls scored a direct hit on their fire. White steam billowed up and the hut went dark. The brothers jumped to their feet. “Ho,” they shouted, laughing. Then the flames jumped high again.

The brothers settled back along the edge of the fire. The dirt and embers at one end of the pit seemed to twitch on their own, like someone struggling to break free from below. Molly passed it off as shadows.

Vin was dispatched to offer the Americans a bottle of clear liquid, which he poured into their empty tea cups. Kleat took a sip. “God, you could clean paint off with that,” he said.

“Not good,” Samnang murmured after Vin left.

“As long as they’re happy.”

“The happy part won’t last,” Duncan said. The brothers looked over, and he smiled and raised a toast to them. “I’ve seen men go at each other with hatchets on this stuff.”

“And us without a gun,” Kleat said. He toasted Molly and took another sip of the hooch and adjusted his flak jacket.

Molly wished she’d thought of the flak jacket, not for the armoring, but the warmth. Was she the only one who felt the cold? If only they would build the fire a little higher.

Back in Kampong Cham, they had pledged to turn around at the first sign of rain. There was no question about staying through the night, though. It would be absurd to try to retrace the oxcart trail at night, and the river would not recede until morning. Neither Samnang nor Duncan could predict tomorrow’s weather. Without a radio or even a view of the sky, they were reduced to speculation. The mountain would act as a natural magnet for the first precipitation, and maybe this little shower was all the sky contained for now.

They came up with every excuse to stay. They pretended the decision was theirs to make, that they were in full command of themselves. They pretended emotion had nothing to do with wanting to stay, that the very fact they were discussing caution meant caution still ruled. But the ruins were inciting them. Everyone had something to gain here. The nearness of the bones had Kleat in high gear, and the marvels of the city excited Duncan, and the plunder wound up the brothers. Even old Samnang had desires. Molly saw him lay out a row of incense sticks and knew he meant to return to the tower. They were all obsessed, herself included.

It was agreed that the rain signified the beginning of the wet monsoon and had nothing to do with the typhoon. The typhoon might have died in the South China Sea, or it might still strike them.

The bigger uncertainty was the brothers. Duncan guessed the truck held a half million dollars’ worth of relics now. They could simply drive away in the morning and leave the Americans. It was all a matter of their whim. Samnang said they meant to stay. They wanted more.

The fire stirred again. Something was under there. Molly saw it again, like an invisible hand moving its fingers within the red coals. A root, she decided. The heat was drying its sap, making the root contract and twist.

Kleat spread the pieces of the broken M-16 on the poncho. The rifle clip was empty. “Once his ammunition ran out, he clubbed the rifle. How many of the little bastards did he take with him?”

“I saw that movie,” said Molly. “John Wayne. The Alamo.”

“Explain this then.” Kleat held up the shattered rifle.

“We’ve been there,” she said. “If there was a battle, there should be other signs. Not just in the tower, but down in the city. Bullets in trees or in the sandstone.”

“Laterite,” Duncan corrected her. “Technically speaking. It’s a soft stone when it’s first quarried. Perfect for carving before it hardens.”

“Other signs,” she continued. “Rocket scars on the walls. Things blown up.”

“You’ll see. The bones will tell.”

“They could have left or been taken prisoner.”

“Explain the dog tags then.”

“Explain Luke,” said Duncan.

Circles within circles. The sweat stung her eyes.

Night was a frame of mind. The ACAV flickered in the heights like a box-shaped moon. There were even stars, the fireflies and sparks. And constellations of animal eyes glittering red and yellow in the trees.

Like a museum curator, Duncan began delicately appraising the pages from inside the radio set. They might have been the Dead Sea Scrolls, the four curled pages of lined notepaper. Minuscule termites had wormed their way across the pages, etching in their own account of time. Ink foxed the paper in blotches. Duncan teased the pages apart and held them to the firelight, trying to candle out any legible words. When that didn’t work, he gently pressed them flat, and the pages crumbled like dead leaves.

Kleat seemed gratified. “They wouldn’t have told us anything anyway.”

Duncan pieced the fragments together as best he could, side by side, and pored over them with Kleat’s big krypton flashlight. There was precious little to decipher: “ ‘…can’t not stay anymore, where else…darkest before dawn, oh, God, your false promise…in the life of the stone…’ ”

“No atheists in the foxholes,” Kleat said. “The boy was stoked on the Bible.”

“Here’s part of an inventory: ‘morphine, 7 amps, .50 cal, 3….’ ” Duncan leaned down and ran out of words.

“That’s all?” said Kleat.

It took another five minutes to turn the fragments onto their flip side. Duncan found a little more. “ ‘…he was right, but we were wrong to listen…let him go like Cain, but west, from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have’…And this, ‘another visit last night. They come every night now. I know I shouldn’t speak to them, but we spoke…’ ”

“What’s that all about?” Molly said.

“Regrets,” Kleat said. “The ‘he’ must have been their commanding officer. And it sounds like one of them got out of Dodge before it was too late. Obviously, they wished they’d never listened to their commander. And they wished they’d followed the man who left.”

“But who are his visitors at night, the ones he shouldn’t speak to? Maybe tribal people coming in?”

“Here we go, a bit more in pencil, along the margin.” Duncan read several lines of a poem, something about wild cats growling, wind howling, and two riders approaching. He looked up. “They must have heard a tiger. The monsoon was coming. And they were the two riders, you know, their two ACAVs approaching the city walls.”

“Useless,” Kleat said. He seemed, Molly thought, glad to be done with it.

But Samnang bent closer. “Bob Dylan,” he said.

They looked at him.

“Yes, those are the final words of a famous song.” Samnang was excited by his discovery. ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ One of my students wrote an essay on its true meaning.”

“What true meaning?” said Kleat. “It’s plain. They were trapped. They were dying. They wanted out of here.”

“And yet the soldier chose this song,” said Samnang. “A song about revolution. Why?”

“Forget the watchtower crap,” Kleat said. “Forget last wills and testaments. What we need is positive identification.”

“Let me take a turn,” Molly interrupted.

“You have better eyes?”

She held up her camera. “Let’s see what it sees.”

She knelt above the fragments and took a picture of the front side of each page. Duncan began patiently turning them over.

Out by the fire, Doc snapped a command. Hands planted on his folded legs, elbows out, he looked almost like one of the kings she’d seen carved in the stone. His voice was too loud. He was drunk.

Vin hopped to do his bidding, shoveling at the coals with his machete. After a minute, he levered up the edge of a helmet. At least that’s what Molly thought it was, the helmet that Kleat had found. They were using it to cook their dinner. She was wrong, though. It was a turtle.

They must have trapped it from the baray swamps and buried it under the coals to roast. Molly lifted her camera and zoomed in. She’d never seen a turtle eaten. Steam vented from the leg holes. The camera autofocused in the witchy light, blurring, centering, blurring. She thumbed the focus to manual and stabilized the image.

It was still alive.

Molly kept the camera between her and it. Through its glass and mirrors, she could stand almost anything.

The turtle filled her frame. There was no mistake. Its legs paddled at the air. Its neck stretched and moved. That explained the embers stirring.

The middle brother snatched the machete from Vin. He gave a light, expert chop across the belly plate. The turtle opened like magic.

The firelight pulsed. The stewpot of organs pulsed separately from the light. Alive, still alive. They used sticks and knives to spear pieces. Doc saw her shooting and, with exaggerated hospitality, held up a slippery organ to her. She shook her head no, and they laughed. Kleat laughed, too.

“There,” announced Duncan, unaware of the little incident. His puzzle of fragments was ready for her. She leaned over and snapped pictures of the reverse sides. A drop of her sweat fell on one page, staining it as black as blood.

Samnang was frowning at her. He’d noticed her sweat. She rested against the box.

“Whoever the man was,” Duncan said, “he rolled the pages up, closed them in a layer of condoms, and hid them inside a radio that was dead. A message in a bottle.”

“No name, no date.” Kleat shrugged.

“Did Samnang show you the name at the base of the tower?” Molly asked. She referenced it on her camera display. “ ‘C. K. Watts. August 20.’ It gives us some context. And the monkey remains,” she added, keeping her eyes away from the turtle, “more context. We’re not without clues.”

“It’s a dead end, I’m telling you,” Kleat said. He fished a cigar butt from his shirt pocket and whistled at Vin, who brought a lighted twig.

Molly frowned. Kleat was acting so oddly, so detached, even hostile to the possibilities. But, to borrow Samnang’s French, this was her spécialité. She was a journalist, a detective. “We know the approximate date of their arrival. We know they left at least one of their vehicles here. They took gear and weapons and barbed wire, and some or all of them climbed into the city and apparently made a decision to hide here.”

“A bad decision.” With the stogie and the flak jacket, Kleat made a poor General Patton.

“Once the decision was made,” she went on, “they were stuck with it. They tried to radio for help, but the radio was dead. They tried to signal passing aircraft, but no one saw them.”

“A lot of nothing.” It was as if he were trying to sabotage her.

“Seven weeks later,” she said, “at least one of them was still left to carve his name on the tower. We know they were hungry, and despairing. There’s that fragment about darkest before dawn and God’s false promise. The boy sounds so desolate, like there’s no hope on earth.”

“The only relevant question is where they died,” said Kleat. “I need teeth, whole jaws, the entire skull if possible. Pieces of bone for DNA analysis. Wedding bands, class rings, wristwatches with initials. Words don’t matter.”

“Of course they matter,” Molly said. “They’re our best clues at this point.” She continued scrolling through the images on her display, landing on the photos of the journal pages. The LCD was chewing through the batteries, stealing from the future to pay for the past, so to speak, using up power she could be saving to take more pictures. But she justified it as part of the interview process. The evidence was speaking to them.

She studied the images, goosing the light, enlarging sections, penetrating the inky ruins of the manuscript. “There’s more,” she said. “I can’t tell what order the pages go in. And anyway, he seems to have written things wherever there was space”—she turned her camera—“even upside down. Here’s more of the inventory list. And some words to fill in around the segments, and a number on this page, ‘7/17/70.’ ”

“Three weeks after they arrived,” said Duncan. “A month before C. K. Watts carved his name.”

She tilted the display, straining to see. “ ‘We can’t not stay anymore,’ ” she read. “ ‘Where else could we have gone? It was finished the minute the TC took the wrong turn. Now we have to live with what we’ve done. The TC gets the tower for his tomb, the first of us to go. And now we know it’s not true that he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all.’ ”

“The TC?” she said.

“The team commander,” Kleat said. “There would have been two of them, one for each ACAV. But one would have had seniority. He was the fool who brought them here.”

She returned to the display. “ ‘There is death in the life of the stone. We see that more every day. We try not to notice, but the walls talk to us. The statues speak. The city sings. The eyes see. The rain is killing us. Every day gets worse. We hide from each other, not sure who is who now. I’ve never been so lonely.’ ”

“Out of his mind,” said Kleat.

Molly scrolled to another section. “ ‘…he was right, but we were more wrong to become his rebels. It was mutiny…’ And this. ‘We let him go like Cain, but west from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have killed him for it. But we let him lead us into sin. So we were part of it, and now it’s done. And now we are scattered.’ ”

They were quiet for a minute.

“And?” said Kleat.

“They were at war all right,” she said. “You want glory. You want heroes. They were scared. They were boys trying to deal with an ugly, dirty little dead end. And they had themselves a mutiny. A revolution. And then they died off like animals.”

“Journalists,” Kleat snorted.

“Something happened here,” she said.

“How about this?” Kleat said. “Their commander fucked up. They believed in him, and he betrayed them with his stupidity. They could have killed him, but they spared him and drove him out like Cain. The man who led them wrong. He’s lucky they didn’t put a bullet through his head.”

“There are other ways to read this,” said Molly. “This says the commander got the tower for his tomb.”

“Whatever that means.”

“Part of this was written three weeks into their confinement. The rest of it sounds like it was written later, maybe over the coming weeks or months. But one thing is clear, they were at odds with one another. He talks about rebels, his rebels. There was a troublemaker. Tensions must have been running high. Nine men found themselves caught in a cage. Think about it. They were bound to start laying blame for their troubles. And somehow their commander died. Whoever wrote this sounds guilty. He talks about sin.”

“He also talks about talking statues and a singing city,” said Kleat.

Molly stopped. “Which is it, Kleat? Either the writer was insane and none of it mattered, or his words are fact, but muddled by time. You can’t have it both ways.”

Kleat released a cloud of smoke. His steel rims glittered. “None of it matters.”

The brothers had finished the turtle. They were passing the shell back and forth, sipping the gray broth.

Molly flipped the off switch. The camera display went black. “I’m going to bed,” she said.

She fit her camera into the bag, got her shoes and flashlight, and climbed down from the hut. Duncan started to follow. “Please don’t,” she said. She didn’t want to talk anymore.

He lagged back. “Don’t give up on us, Molly,” he said. “You’re right. I don’t know what, but something happened here.”

26.

She woke suddenly, in the middle of the night. Samnang’s fire cast a glimmer on her tent wall. Hours had passed. Her clothes had dried. Some second sense told her not to move.

It was raining again. Water grazed the outer skin of the forest with a muffled hiss. A rain to sleep by, she thought, drifting off.

Then she saw the shapes. The fire animated them. Their silhouettes trickled across the panels of her dome tent, bent low and ranging their rifles back and forth. The brothers. They’d come for her.

Crouched like cats, they stole along the terrace edge. She held her breath, looking for Vin’s thin figure. Maybe he could stop his brothers. Then she saw that there were more than three out there. That made no sense.

Just then, gunfire crackled up from the depths of the camp. Molly huddled behind her screen of nylon and fiberglass poles, thinking these stalking men must be the target. She braced for the explosions they would unleash in turn.

But none of the silhouette men returned fire. Instead they grew more misshapen, even their rifles, twisted and melting. Their arms trailed tendrils and became vines. The metamorphosis left her wondering what she’d seen in the first place. Pieces of the forest, nothing more.

The gunfire rattled again in the distance. That much was real. Her knees drew up against her chest. Her eyes squeezed shut.

The tent wall rustled. One of them was trying the door.

She willed herself invisible.

“Molly,” the man whispered.

He was the dark apparition of Oklahoma. She couldn’t help herself. Be a good girl. Fear squeezed the air from her lungs.

“Molly.”

Quiet, she instructed herself. Stand aside. Don’t be part of it. Return when all is safe again.

More gunfire.

“Molly.” Louder this time.

The door unzipped. She saw herself backed as far as possible into the corner. She saw herself with her eyes squeezed shut.

“It’s me,” he whispered.

She saw herself open her eyes. In the scant, cold light, Duncan hunkered at the doorway. His hair hung in long, wet strands.

The rifles crackled, on full automatic. She glanced at the tent wall. The images had fled. He was alone.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered.

She began to return to herself.

“I thought you might be afraid.”

She was shaking with fever fits. Her jaw unlocked. “Duncan.”

“Keep your voice down. They’re drunk. It will pass.”

She was convulsing. He couldn’t see it from out there.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

She wasn’t. She had demons.

“Lie low,” he said. “Keep your light off. The bullets fall back to earth, but the canopy will protect us. You’re safe.”

He started to raise her door to seal her inside with herself again. “Don’t,” she said.

He paused.

“Don’t leave.”

“If you need me, I’m here.” He started to zip the door shut again, still outside.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m here, I promise.” His chivalry bewildered her. He meant to sit in the rain like some warrior monk? She needed more.

“Come in.” It was so cold.

Backing inside, he zipped the door closed and sat beside her with his legs crossed.

Her teeth chattered. It finally occurred to him. His palm covered her forehead. “You’re sick.”

“I’m cold.”

“I can’t take you to the fire,” he said. “Not with them like this.”

“Hold me.”

It surprised him. She read his surprise. The halting way he opened his arm for her to lay her head on was like a remembered act. He had forgotten human touch.

She pressed her back to him. He was warm. They didn’t talk. Eventually the gunfire tapered off. She quit shaking and fell asleep in his arms.

27.

The birds woke her.

The rain had stopped. The city waited. She opened her eyes.

Duncan startled her. She startled herself.

During the night, she had twisted. In her sleep, she had thrown one arm across Duncan. She had one ear against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat. His ribs rose and fell in slow waves.

She never woke this way with a man, holding him and being held. It did not happen, even with lovers she trusted. And while he wasn’t a stranger, he wasn’t a lover either. She barely knew him. And yet her sleeping self had folded against him.

Molly lay very still, trying to sort out this new development. He was warm, and she’d been afraid. She remembered the gunfire, and those silhouettes. But they weren’t enough to explain her trust.

He looked almost boyish sleeping in the blue-green light. There was a powerful scent of flowers. Her eyes traveled to his shirt pocket. He’d collected an orchid yesterday.

Part of her wanted to shake him and climb back into the city. They knew their way into the ruins. She had dreamed about them last night, dreamed madly. The city was starting to inhabit her.

But she lingered, reluctant to shatter this remarkable contact. Twice men had proposed marriage to her—seriously proposed—thinking they could overcome her nightmares. As gently as possible, she’d spared them their gallantry. They couldn’t save her. The rape had burned her. Molly had resigned herself to her clenching scars.

What could explain this? She was a serial disbeliever. She required truth, good, bad, or ugly. Offer her a wound for proof and she would plunge her fingers right in. Which had made the search for the bones so fitting. The missing soldiers were an unhealed wound, like a hand-hold, both a story and, deeper, an appeal to her missionary instinct. So how did Duncan fit into that?

It wasn’t that he could protect her from the perils. The plotting brothers and the typhoon and Kleat’s paranoia endangered him as much as her. Was it that she seemed to occupy him the way the ruins occupied her? He had been her welcome to Cambodia. When she was at her weakest, he had shielded her from the sun with his scarf. When the guns started going off last night, his first thought had been for her safekeeping. He’d crawled out into the rain to guard her.

He looked twenty-something this morning. The soft light smoothed his crow’s-feet and softened the hawk profile, but it was something more. Years had melted from his face. His beard line looked…diminished. There was just stubble on his chin and upper lip. His throat was smooth. The jugular throbbed. It was like watching her own heart beat.

A long, welted scar ran in a line above his left ear. She’d never seen it before. Normally his long hair hid it. He’d survived some terrible violence, but had never mentioned it. She’d have to ask him about that someday.

She wondered. What would he be like in Boulder? With his long hair and seven-league boots, they’d take him for one more globe-trotter with an athlete’s veins. Every other man and woman you met there seemed to be in training for some imaginary Olympics or Everest. She’d written an article on the legend of Boulder, average age 29.5 years, average body fat 11 percent. She’d dubbed it an orthopedist’s paradise, with all the skiers’ knees and climbers’ shoulders you could wish for. Duncan would move among them like an aging lion. They could go to the movies on snowy afternoons, drink tea at Turley’s, chart new travels. With Duncan, she might finally feel at home.

But there were the ruins to decipher. His destiny was here, and hers, too. She felt it powerfully. She had not ended up here by accident.

Her thoughts wheeled pleasantly.

Slowly she noticed the bamboo. It stood on the far side of his face, a slender, glossy green shoot poised almost like a snake. The trespass surprised her. The forest had invaded her tent.

She lifted her head from Duncan’s chest. The bamboo had pierced the tent floor and pushed right through the thin sleeping pad. Its point was hard and sharp, the shaft slick and phallic. They could have been impaled in their sleep. That was too dramatic, of course. They would have woken at its first touch.

Only then did she notice her tent wall. It was deformed. Half caved in. A tree limb must have fallen across them.

A wall tent or pup tent would have collapsed altogether. Her dome tent had spread the weight through a system of poles. The rain must have torn the limb loose from the canopy and it had dropped during the night.

Duncan woke. He started to smile, then jerked his head away from the bamboo. He saw the deformed tent wall. “How could we have slept through that?” he said.

He pushed at the branch with his foot, but that only tightened its pressure. The tent creaked.

“These poles might not hold it,” she said.

Despite the quiet destruction of her tent, Molly was grateful for the quick exit. It was too soon for pillow talk and holding hands. In escaping the tent, they would be escaping any awkwardness.

They couldn’t sit upright. Then they saw more bamboo shoots sticking through the floor. Duncan got over her on his hands and knees, and put his back against the tree limb. She slid between his legs.

Unzipping the door dumped the dome’s remaining strength. One of the long poles snapped, then another. She slid out and helped Duncan crawl from the shambles. They faced the wreckage.

It wasn’t a fallen branch, but a vine. The thing had come untethered from the ledge above and was strapped across the tent. Its tip had burrowed into a joint in the stone. In the space of a few hours, it had muscled down and broken her tent. Molly looked around at the mist and its shapes. A giant god floated with his serene smile, and sank away.

“It’s like a tidal wave, a green tidal wave,” she said. “Do things really grow so fast here?”

“The forest must have been thirsty. The first taste of rain and it takes off like a rocket.” Duncan aimed for levity, but it troubled him.

“I’ll come back for it later.” Who was she kidding? The tent was a write-off. She felt violated and put on notice. This place was not her friend. She jerked her camera bag from the collapsed doorway.

Duncan had to use his Swiss Army knife to free their shoes. A filament of roots had invaded a rip in the floor and corded them to the ground. He pretended it was normal. “Man versus monsoon,” he intoned. “Who will win the primordial struggle?” But it bothered him, she could tell.

They walked along the ledge around little pickets of bamboo growing through the joints, and stepped across cablelike vines. His tent was collapsed as well. Lowering himself to what remained of it, Duncan cut an opening through the side and extracted his steel briefcase.

They finished descending to the terminus floor and wended their way through the mist.

Molly kept looking for the names carved into the trees. “There they are.” She tugged Duncan after her, but then she got a closer look.

The letters were bleeding.

“It’s tree sap,” Duncan said.

“But they weren’t like this before.”

“The forest is having a growth spurt. The bark pulled apart. It’s only sap.”

Thick and crimson, it seeped down from the beloved names. She regretted waiting to take the picture. Yesterday morning, they had been radiant on the gleaming bark. Now they wept, though maybe that was the more appropriate mood for the photo.

Farther on, they heard a low roar building.

“Is that the truck running?” she asked.

They hurried, thinking the brothers were leaving.

But the roar was the sound of the fire. Kleat was there, piling logs onto a small inferno. The flames leaped taller than the hut, eating a jagged hole in the fog, throwing sparks with pistol shots of sap.

The furnace heat had him pouring sweat. He’d shed his shirt, but was wearing the flak jacket. His face and scalp were as bright as mercury. He looked insane.

“What are you doing?” asked Duncan.

Kleat loaded on another fat log and straightened on the far side of the flames. His glasses reflected the light. He had showers of red and orange sparks for eyes. Inside his fury, he looked afraid. “Up late?” he yelled at them.

Molly had been almost ready to pity him. “We heard the shooting last night,” she said.

His chest hair was singed to black steel wool. She smelled the burned hair and Caucasian sweat, but also caught other smells in the smoke, potent smells, the scent of different kinds of wood, of ferns, flowers, nuts, coconut, even cinnamon. Once part of a royal garden, spices grew wild here. The fire was opening up the forest’s abundance.

“You missed the hunt,” Kleat said.

“Is that what they were doing, hunting?”

Kleat looked at them. “He should have known better.”

The fire forced her back with its hot breath. Her chills were gone. She felt fine this morning. Molly glanced around. At the edges of dissolved mist, half-formed shapes moved between the vaporous white Land Cruiser and the larger bulk of the truck. She counted three shapes with rifles. There was only one man unaccounted for.

“Where’s Samnang?” Duncan asked.

“He brought it on himself.”

“Be clear,” said Molly.

“He fucked up.”

“What happened, Kleat?”

“He waited until they were drunk, then he got his revenge. But there was no way he was going to get away with it. Of course they found out.” He toppled a decaying stump into the flames. White termites came flooding from its cavities.

“What revenge, what are you talking about?”

“He destroyed their artifacts, smashed them to pieces, the pots. Hid the rest. All the heads, they’re missing. That’s what they were trying to beat out of him. Don’t ask me. I don’t speak the language. One thing led to another.”

“You saw it? They beat him?” While she slept soundly.

“I only came for the bones.” Kleat glared at her. “You know that.”

“But you were down here.”

“I heard them arguing. I came down and they had him. They were pushing him around, hitting him with their rifles. He’s KR, I keep telling you. They hated him enough as it was. Then he pulls a stunt like this.”

They’d gone hunting.

“What did they do to him, Kleat?”

“I didn’t see anything.” He bent for more wood.

It was obvious. “They killed him.”

She cast around for bloodstains, but the rain must have flushed them into the earth. It occurred to her that they were scorching the evidence out of existence. That would explain this manic bonfire at the crack of dawn.

“They were working themselves up to it,” Kleat said. “But then I came down. They weren’t going to do it in front of me. So they gave him a head start. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Where is he?”

“He went off into the night. He’s a slippery old bastard, and they were drunk. They chased him and came back and went out again. They were afraid to leave the fire for very long. It went on for hours. You heard the gunfire, they were all over the place.”

“And you just sat here?”

“I kept the fire going. That was my job. They made it clear. A big fire. That’s the important thing. I kept them on our side. Someone had to make sure they wouldn’t leave us. They could have driven off. They still could.” He threw on more wood. “But not for a while.”

“This is murder,” she said. “And you did nothing.”

Kleat’s glasses flashed. “I stopped an execution. I came down and they set him loose. I saved his life.” He had it all worked out in his head.

Samnang was dead somewhere, she could picture it, floating in the baray pools or slung over a root. “How did you save him? They hunted him. You said so.”

“Three street kids against an old killer. Some hunt. They lost him.” Kleat stood on the far side of the flames. “Or he left, like Luke, out the front gate. Or he’s dead, okay? He’s gone.”

He shoved in another log. It struck her suddenly. “What’s in the fire?” She dragged the log out. She reached for another.

Duncan took her arm. “That won’t help, Molly.”

“He’s under there,” she said. “They’re burning his body. They’re burning the evidence.”

“Molly…” Duncan murmured.

“Get a grip, woman,” Kleat said. “First cannibals, what next?”

“He was an old man.” She turned away, tears blurring her vision.

“He was KR. They think he killed their mother and father, I got that much. You must have heard them,” he said to Duncan.

“How would they know?” said Molly. “Vin would have been an infant. Doc would have been four.”

“They’ve got it in their minds,” Duncan said. “They say it’s the reason they agreed to come along, to confront him and get the truth. I’m kind of surprised Samnang invited them. It’s almost like he wanted to get it over with.”

“They’re thieves. They were beating him to find their plunder, not to ask about their parents,” Molly said.

“Why can’t it be both?” said Kleat. “They’re thieves. And the old man was a butcher.”

They were quiet for a minute. Finally Molly said, “He watched over me.”

“So he went down in glory,” Kleat said, “doing his holy deeds.”

Duncan peered through the mist. “What are they up to over there?”

“Working up their nerve,” Kleat said. “Go see for yourself.”

28.

They left Kleat building his fire higher.

“Stay with me,” Duncan said to her. “Keep your temper, do you hear me? Don’t make it worse.” He squeezed her arm.

“I heard you.”

Broken shards lay scattered across the clearing. The forest floor was chopped and muddy. Pieces of pottery had been trod into the ground.

“This is strange,” Duncan said. “Look at how deep some of these footprints are. It’s like a herd of horses came through. But the prints are human.”

“The rain must have softened the earth,” Molly said.

“Not enough for this.” Duncan stomped at the ground but didn’t make a dent. “It’s hard to believe Samnang could have done so much damage. And why only the pots and not the heads? There must have been fifteen heads. How could one man carry them off so quickly?”

“No idea, Duncan.” She didn’t care about pots and heads and footprints. Samnang was dead.

The brothers materialized in the mist. They were circulating back and forth, from the Land Cruiser to the enshrouded truck. Their rifles twitched at Molly and Duncan’s approach.

At first she paid no attention to the vehicles. She’d never had a gun pointed at her. The bluing on the gun metal had worn through in places, like the finish on secondhand guitars. The guns had traveled many miles through many wars before ending up in these tattooed hands.

Duncan announced himself, arms wide, and they lowered the barrels. Toting his silver briefcase like an insurance adjuster, he spoke in quiet tones. Doc, with his full armor of body ink, shouted back at him and shook his rifle. Duncan went on talking, moving closer.

Molly stayed back, hating them for what they had done. It took her a minute to even look at their faces. She expected hangover scowls or bully glares, but their eyes were filled with voodoo fear. Their panic caught her off guard.

Then she noticed the Land Cruiser, and the truck, and was frightened, too. Tilted at ridiculous angles, gripped by vines, the vehicles were trapped. The forest was car-jacking them.

A fast-growing tree root had hoisted the rear of the Land Cruiser a foot off the ground. The back tires dangled. She went with Duncan to it.

Creepers had infiltrated a crack in the windshield. She peered inside. Vines wrapped the plastic steering wheel and were rooting into the underside of the dash panel.

The old Mercedes truck was being overrun, too. Vines roped its hood and doors, but it was being sucked backward into the earth. The rear wheels had sunk to the hub, tilting up the front end like a bull struggling from quicksand.

In a different setting, in a museum of modern art, it would have been sardonic, nature’s revenge. Here, this morning, it scared her. Her mind careered through explanations. The rain had created a mire under the truck. In the darkness, the first night, they’d inadvertently parked on top of a tree trunk. The vines were genetically programmed to raid. Mother Nature was tripping on speed. Nothing human was to blame. There was some consolation in that. They were all victims. They were in this together now.

The brothers were in a state. Vin had the machete they’d used on the turtle last night. His brother So carried an ax. She glanced at the tools, looking for blood. There was none, and her hopes rose, foolishly, she knew.

Duncan opened his briefcase and gave Doc a pack of Camels still wrapped in cellophane. What else did he harbor in there? A sketch pad, she knew, though he was too shy to show her his sketches. Maps, surely, his obsession. A day journal, perhaps, and photos of some long-lost loved one. Had he kept the stub of his air ticket from the States as a memento?

The pack of cigarettes went around the circle, and Duncan accepted one. The Heng boys skirted their smashed plunder, gawking at their precious vehicles, afraid to touch anything.

“How could they sleep through this?” she said. It was a silly question. The same way she had slept through the destruction of her tent.

“I’m not sure any of them did sleep,” said Duncan. “They were drunk. And busy.” Hunting in the forest.

“What do we do now?”

“We need to work with them, Molly.”

“Work with them, after what they did?”

“They have the wheels.”

“We should just go,” she whispered to him. “This very minute, Duncan.” They could fade into the mist and find the causeway, and cross between the barays, and slide through the gateway. There was still more forest to negotiate beyond the fortress walls, but once they reached the sun, or at least the sky, they could navigate their way back down the mountain. Villagers would feed them. Loggers would pick them up.

“Without Kleat?”

“He’d leave us and you know it.”

Duncan shook his head. “We’re in this together.”

“That’s very high-minded. But look around. You can’t make this better.”

“No.” He had his mind made up. “The best thing is to try and help them. We’ll be okay.”

He joined the brothers again, moving with them, taking stock of the damage. He laid his hands on the metal and glass, and that simple act did more than anything else to break their terror. At least Doc quit shouting.

The brothers’ tight faces loosened. Duncan made a suggestion, and Vin handed him the machete without hesitation.

With the care of a surgeon, meticulous so as not to scratch the white paint, he slipped the blade under a creeper binding one door and sliced it free. He cut away more vines and, opening the door, made a show of returning their machete.

Little by little, he showed them how to regain control. He got So to begin unraveling the vines from the wiring. He called Molly over, and four of them manhandled a rock into place under one of the Land Cruiser’s wheels. “We’ll get this straightened out,” he said. He put Molly to work with a shovel.

After fifteen minutes or so, he came from the Land Cruiser carrying a burlap sack stuffed with other sacks. Vin trailed behind him with his machete and rifle. “All right, let’s get Kleat,” he said. He propped her shovel against the truck.

“What are we doing?” She didn’t mean for her voice to be shrill.

“Everything’s going to be okay.”

Kleat was dragging another log from the brush. Sweat ringed his flak jacket at the neck and armpits. “We’ve got a deal,” Duncan said. “We’re all leaving today, before the rains return. But first we have a job to do.”

Kleat guessed from the sacks. “They want us to mule down more loot for them.”

“A little salvage work.” Duncan spoke to Kleat in the same soothing tone he’d used with Doc. “They need to be made whole, that’s how they see it. They’ll keep digging while we go up into the ruins. Vin’s going with us.”

The kid had found a pebble and was playing soccer with it, batting it between his toes, waiting, with the AK-47 on his back.

Kleat had a dark thought. “You know he’s taking us off to shoot us.”

“No he’s not. They want their share of the city, that’s all.”

“Then they’ll do it down here,” Kleat said. “Later, when they’re done with us.”

“Show some faith, John. We scratch their backs, they scratch ours. Everything will be fine.”

“They’re not on our side,” Kleat said. “They could do anything to us in here. Look what happened to Samnang.”

“I talked to them about that. They said he ran away. They were only searching for him. They wanted to bring him back to the camp.”

“They were trying to save him?” Kleat snorted. “They had a gun at his head.”

“They know that was wrong. But they say what he did was wrong, too. They only wanted to know where he hid the rest of their possessions.”

“They were hunting him like an animal.”

“They say it was the other way around.”

“The old man was hunting them?”

“No.” Duncan grew quiet. “The prêt. They say.”

Vin heard the word and stopped his little soccer game.

“The what?” said Molly.

“They’re a forest legend, like what the Romans called their night-walkers, lemures, or larva, the Latin for spirits still forming. If you die violently—”

Kleat’s face screwed up. “Not this again.” He upended the log and let it fall into the fire. Sparks belched. The wet skin of the limb sizzled.

“They claim the forest is full of them,” Duncan said.

“And you believe that?”

Duncan hesitated. “Of course not. But they do. Strip away the layers of Buddhism and Hinduism and you have an animistic religion dedicated to neutralizing the dead and pushing their spirits as far away and as quickly as possible. They were drunk. It was dark. We’re looking for American remains. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t seen things out there.”

“Then add one more prêt to the collection,” Kleat said. “The old man won’t make it far on a plastic leg.”

Molly still wanted to run for the causeway and find their own way back to civilization. “What if it’s a trick?” she said. “He could be leading us up so they can desert us.”

“They would never leave their own brother. Don’t you see? He’s our greatest assurance.”

“That’s the part I can’t believe,” Kleat said. “They’re giving us a hostage.”

“That’s not the right attitude, John.”

The fire glinted on Kleat’s glasses. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said.

29.

It should have been straightforward. They had all visited one or the other of the gates and its statues at least once, but the city was more alien than ever. The mist was like quicksand. Within minutes they were lost.

Molly had begun to memorize her way into and out of the heart of the ruins, but overnight the rapid forest had undone what little was familiar. Samnang had tied knots in the grass, but new grass had sprung up, higher and more lush, taking over the ruins. The saplings he’d bent into careful circles had sprung loose in the rain and grown beyond recognition. It was like entering a different city.

Vin kept sweeping his rifle back and forth at shapes materializing among the trees and temples. With the machete scabbard strapped to his back and its handle standing above his head like an exclamation point, the boy looked overloaded and self-conscious. The American soldiers with RE-1 had taught him how to moonwalk and chew Red Man. Molly and Duncan had treated him like a man, asking about his warrior sak. She could tell it was awkward for him to be using them as pack animals. Vin spoke softly to Duncan. The only word Molly understood was “please.”

“Basically, he’s asking for our cooperation,” Duncan said. “The sooner we find the gate and the statues, the sooner we can leave.”

“He wants to be friends?” Kleat said. He had his eye on the boy’s rifle.

“Does anybody recognize anything?”

“If we could just find the tower,” Molly said.

She longed to return to the room of the Buddhas. The yearning filled her. It overrode her fear of what was happening to them, their disintegration and the creeping violence. As a landmark, the tower might help orient them, but that was only an excuse. It was the room on that man-made summit that drew her. It held…something.

But this morning, with visibility cut to twenty feet, the tower seemed to have dismantled itself. As they penetrated the waist-high grass, nothing was the same. The avenue and side lanes and bridges and canals were all reconfigured. The massive faces projecting from lesser towers and the crests of flattened pyramids were no help. Their serene smiles only added to the sense of entanglement and maddening circles. Molly found herself resenting the tranquil stone expressions.

They chose a canal and followed its trickle of water uphill, reasoning that vertical gain was a direction of sorts. At least, Duncan said, they would not be going in circles. The same trickle of water could not round back on itself.

As they marched higher through the ruins, Vin kept Kleat in the front of the line, where he could watch him. The boy might be naive, but his brothers had instructed him well. As Samnang had put it, with or without his fangs, Kleat was still toxic.

As if hearing her thoughts, Kleat flashed Molly a look, then another one. She was following behind Vin, which put her within easy reach of the machete riding between his shoulder blades, practically a gift to them. She understood Kleat perfectly. He wanted her to kill the boy.

She tried to convince herself that Vin was her mortal enemy, and even that didn’t work. She wondered, if things came to it, if she could even kill an animal to eat. Kleat glared at her. Her thoughts returned to the tower.

After a half hour, they found themselves back at the bridge on the canal where they’d begun. Impossibly, the downhill trickle of water had circled back on itself. “That can’t be,” Kleat objected.

Vin didn’t question it. To him, the perpetual circling of water was just another arcane loop in a city of riddles. He and Duncan had a discussion using the lines on Duncan’s palm as a map.

After a minute, Duncan said, “Okay, a slight revision. We’re going to split into pairs and spread out the search. It should be simple. All we have to do is find one section of the wall, then we can follow it to one of the gates and get what we need.”

Vin chose the teams, himself with Duncan, and Molly with Kleat. Kleat frightened him, and Molly frightened him, too, though differently. His puppy love was obvious, and out of decorum and modesty he did not choose her. It was almost cute.

“What are we supposed to do if we find something, whistle?” Kleat said.

“Stay within earshot,” Duncan said. “Let’s not lose each other.”

They separated into pairs. As Molly wove through the piles of temples and narrow corridors, Kleat railed at her. “The machete was right in front of you. They want heads? We’ll give them a head.”

“He’s a kid. He’s not going to hurt us,” she said.

“He’s one of them. And we’re going to need his rifle and machete. Think.”

“Leave him alone, Kleat.”

Kleat put his face close to hers. “Do you want to live or not?”

She had witnessed paranoia in her career. She’d photographed it in prisons and asylums and at a treatment center for foreign torture victims. She’d even argued with it, her own fears, in therapy and alone. But Kleat’s was a species all its own.

She stood her ground, or tried to. “What kind of question is that?” she snapped.

“Don’t think I’m going to die caged in like this,” Kleat said. “Now’s no time for bleeding hearts. When the time comes, just stand out of my way.”

He bulled on, and Molly slowed. The sound of his crashing through the brush dimmed. Thunder grumbled far away. It seemed early. Without thinking, Molly glanced at her useless watch. The mist was thinning. The morning was getting on.

She strayed alongside a panel of more bas-reliefs, and, like yesterday, they were dense with stories both alien and familiar. The carvings seemed to whisper to her. She imagined herself written in the stone, the lone bird-woman living in a tree, the queen—or goddess—watching over the city, or that infant being held up to the sky by her mother.

Then her eye chanced up, and she was being watched again. This time there was a small troop of the ghostly gray monkeys, perched in the branches and sitting on ancient masonry and terraces. They unsettled her, like in the tower room that afternoon.

It wasn’t that she thought they might attack. They were cute and fuzzy, with a few infants at the long nipples and some wide-eyed youngsters. But they were wild, and there were no bars separating her from them. And they were watching her, not eating or playing, just watching, like the huge, inescapable god heads. Even the infants were staring at her.

They’d been fighting. Slowly she detected the blood. It was mostly on the larger males, whose red penises jutted out from the furred hoods between their legs. The rain must have washed much of it away, but there had been a lot of blood and it stained them in patches.

They had something up there on the ledge with them, and it occurred to her that they had taken a piece of an animal. These adorable vegetarians were feeding on some kind of meat. She started to back away. Let them feed.

One stood on the shelf and she couldn’t help but look when it lifted the thing. It was a pink human leg, smeared with blood. Her mind shunted the possibility away. Then she recognized the blue high-top sneaker wired at the ankle. It was Samnang’s prosthesis.

She froze. What have you done to him?

The monkey pounded the leg on the ledge, foot down. The sneaker didn’t make a sound. But the message was clear. She was trespassing.

Stand or run, she couldn’t decide. In the Rockies, you made yourself larger. You put your hands over your head to appear taller and lowered your eyes. If a bear attacked, you played dead. If it was a mountain lion, you fought. This wasn’t the Rockies.

Before she had time to decide, the canopy stirred. It was the softest of breezes, just a whisper. The monkeys shifted. They looked around them, at the trees, down the corridor of ruins. The whisper was approaching. Molly remembered the gust of wind that had crashed on her and Duncan their first day up here, and this had the same rising force to it. Molly glanced up to see where it was coming from and how it would strike her.

The monkeys fled.

It was that simple. They bolted into the branches and were gone. The gust of wind rushed overhead. It missed her, and plunged on with a howl.

She was left alone. White and orange flower petals drifted down onto her head and shoulders. It was so quiet she could almost hear them land.

“Kleat,” she shouted. “Kleat. Duncan.” She waited. No one answered.

After a minute, bracing herself for the carnage, she climbed up onto the ledge. It was both worse and better than she was ready for. Samnang’s leg lay where the monkey had dropped it, and clearly it had been clawed and wrenched from his body in a great struggle. But the object of their feast was not his body. One of the monkeys had been killed, perhaps in the fight with Samnang. They had been eating one of their own.

30.

“Samnang?” she called out.

From the ledge, she could see a thicket of towering bamboo. It swayed gently. The canopy stirred again. The breeze was starting up. Somewhere the forest was letting it in. This time she could smell the coming rain on it.

The bamboo shivered. The feathery tops soared to various heights. The stalks clattered, lines and shadows luring her. Samnang might have escaped into there, she decided.

It was like entering a giant wind chime as she sidled among the green and yellow rods. They were a grass, not a tree, she knew that much, but some of the stems were as thick around as small kegs.

“Samnang,” she called again.

The stand was many generations old. On the outskirts, youngsters stood no taller than her thigh, their stems as thin as pencils. Deeper in, the stand was older and taller and denser. Dried, gray, dead monsters—thirty, fifty, a hundred years old—had pierced the canopy.

The breeze stirred their long wings of leaves, sending tremors down the stems. The shafts quivered under her open palms. They pressed against her, then pulled away. They jostled her with long, arcing nudges. Samnang slipped from her mind. She was barely aware that her attention was shifting from him to the forest.

How did you capture this in a photo? It rose in her like a desire, the urge to hold the green light and the moment. There was no controlling the sensation with her lens. Surrender, she thought. It came to her in a whisper.

Yesterday they had been in a race against the rain. Today she felt in synch with it. In a strange way, the rain gave them an advantage over their captors, if that’s what Vin and his brothers truly were. Unless the Khmers made a quick exit, the river would trap them and the forest would devour their vehicles. By contrast, the only thing the Americans stood to lose was a season stranded, and probably some weight.

Surrender. The idea grew. She and Duncan could melt off into the forest and outwait the others and inherit the ruins. If it was in the stars—in this starless place—they might become lovers. They would survive. The city—the forest—would provide.

The quaking leaves reminded her of aspen. Their shape was different, like minnows, not coins, but they shuddered and flipped with the same playful motion, and their colors ranged from blood red to green to yellow veined with gold.

The stand tightened around her. Her senses took on new intensity. Every stem had its own pulse. She could practically taste the light.

Molly went slowly, trying to balance her progress with the bamboo’s rhythm. At first she looked for a simple left-to-right or back-and-forth pattern, but it was more complicated than that. You had to feel for it, yielding and then invading, stealing through its openings. Resist, push back, and it only wore you out.

It became—absurdly—erotic. The forest was dancing with her, bending her, carrying her. Like yesterday while climbing the tree, she felt pieced away from the greed and confusion and dangers of the expedition. But it was more powerful than that. She felt embraced. She felt desired.

The stand grew thicker. She found herself snaking between the stems in brief surges. The way a boatman rests among the waves, gauging the sea and hoarding his strength, Molly paused. She stopped. It took a minute to register that she was, in a way, trapped.

One green rod pressed between her thighs, another lined up against her spine, more a saddle than a scissors. There was nothing awkward or alarming about it. She would simply have to wait for the bamboo to shift and release her.

The bamboo chattered all around her. The fat stem running between her legs vibrated. Absurd, she thought again. But nice.

The stalks had tangled their leaves high above. Patience, a moment more, she thought to herself. A wicked moment more.

It happened again. The stem pulsed from the top down, a velvet jolt traveling from the sky into the forest floor. She struggled, though not for long. Surrender. Another tremor, and she felt lifted off the earth.

It was unspeakable, literally…getting humped by a tree. Not another person in the world could ever know. She couldn’t even speak it to herself. But really, what was her alternative? To fight? To cry out for help? In a moment, the leaves would untangle. The bamboo would part. She would get back control of herself.

The wood throbbed again. It was like the devil down there between her legs. It took her breath.

She pushed with her back. The bamboo bowed with her. She bent sideways, but her camera strap tangled. Surrender. How was this different from a sunset or a flower’s perfume or the meat of a fruit? It pleased her. And where was the decency in nature anyway? The soft earth gave her feet stirrups. Bamboo appeared between her fists. She hung on.

The high leaves shivered. She let her hips tilt and would have gone through with it, would have let the bamboo finish her. But as her head settled back along the one stem, she saw the soldier.

The skeleton wore a uniform of rags. The pieces of him lay in a patch so dense it formed a forest within the forest. The bamboo shafts opened and closed like seaweed in a crosscurrent.

Molly straightened. She pushed against the bamboo, really pushed, and this time the forest released her. She freed her legs and stumbled upright.

The thicket had her penned in now, unable to move forward, unable to retreat. The breeze was blowing stronger. The bamboo quickened its jangle, changing from wind music to the clatter of teeth. There was a skull in there, its eyes covered by the helmet.

“Kleat,” she shouted. “Duncan.”

The rattle rose to a clashing of wood against hollow wood. She shouted again.

Thunder fell against the top of the canopy.

She yelled herself hoarse.

It was an American uniform. He had a rifle.

The breeze became a wind. The wind became a gale.

At last she saw a distant figure approaching from the outside, chopping with machinelike double strokes, a forehand from the right, a backhand from the left. A second man appeared behind him.

“Here,” she shouted.

Duncan was in front with the machete. “Are you hurt?” he called. “Can you get to us?”

“Just come,” she shouted. She didn’t tell them more. They had to see for themselves.

The closer Duncan got, the farther away he sounded. The toc-toc of the machete blade paled in the mounting racket.

Vin was not with them. She feared Kleat had done something to him. But she didn’t see the boy’s rifle, and Kleat would have taken that.

The rain began. It wasn’t like yesterday’s slow leak. Driven by the wind, the drops had real velocity. They stung her face. While the men worked closer, she tried once more to move nearer the skeleton. But the bamboo held her out like iron bars.

Finally, Duncan cut through to her. He laid one hand on her shoulder, as if to take her back from the forest.

“Where’s Vin?” She had to shout over the crash of bamboo and thunder.

“We sent him down for help. We thought you must have broken a leg. Or that a tiger was at you. He gave us his machete just in case.”

“Not his rifle, though,” Kleat shouted. He looked almost disappointed that she was in one piece. “What are you doing in here?”

“Samnang’s leg,” she said. “You didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“His leg. The monkeys must have stolen it again.”

“Samnang’s in here?”

“I came to find him. And look.”

She pointed. The bones were all but invisible through the thrashing bamboo. It took them a minute to see.

“How did you know he was in here?” Kleat shouted.

“I didn’t.” And yet she’d come almost directly to the skeleton. Molly tried to remember the phases of her entry, her reasoning for this detour. The monkeys had gotten her attention, and there had been the music of the bamboo, and the light, and the dance. Now, with the bamboo smashing together and the rain whipping them, it seemed off the wall.

“We can’t stay in here,” Duncan said. “The wind is getting worse.”

“Give me that.” Kleat grabbed the machete from his hand.

Molly and Duncan stood back while Kleat attacked the bamboo. He threw his raw emotions at the barrier, grunting and cursing. The blade caught each time the stalks bent in the wind, pulling the handle from his grip.

In the movies, a single swipe would have opened a small highway. Here the bamboo fought them, knocking them sideways and backward. Caught at their tops, each severed stalk bucked and stabbed in wild directions, their bottoms like tubular knives. Each stem had to be yanked loose from the canopy and laid flat before the machete could be used again.

“This is no good,” Duncan shouted.

Kleat gave up. He’d gotten them closer. But the bamboo still kept them out. They could clearly see the soldier, wearing a tanker’s helmet with padded ears. His rifle was trussed to his ribs by vines, barrel up, the way it had fallen from his hands. The skeleton was amazingly whole. Green shoots had grown up between the long bones. Creepers held the ribs and spine in place. Like the city, the bones were both raided and preserved by the forest.

“He shot himself,” Duncan said. “Look at the back of his helmet, the hole. And see the way his rifle’s lying?”

“What?” The rain glanced off Kleat’s head.

“He ate his gun,” Duncan yelled. “Look. The recoil tore out his teeth.”

“What was he doing out here?” Molly said.

“It’s an old jungle fighter’s trick,” Kleat said. “E and E. Escape and evasion. Bamboo makes the perfect hiding place. It guards you in your sleep. The minute anything approaches, the bamboo wakes you up.”

Duncan scanned their sky of furious leaves and cane. It sounded like the clash of spears and the scream of men. His hair whipped like a mare’s tail. “The storm’s growing,” he said. “Listen.”

Molly listened. Deep beneath the clatter of bamboo, some monstrous entity was grinding its stone teeth together. The earth vibrated with it.

“It’s the wind,” he shouted. “There’s a sail effect on the canopy. The canopy rocks the trees. The trees rock the ruins. The wind is moving the whole city. We have to return to camp.”

“But this is my proof,” Kleat said. “I only need one of them. I need him.” His knuckles were white on the handle.

“It could take another hour to get in there.” Duncan pointed at the sky. “This is the big one.”

Mekkhala, Molly thought. The angel of thunder was here. But it would pass. The city could be theirs. This was their chance to be rid of Kleat.

“Let me try,” she said.

Duncan ignored her. “The bones aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “We can come back for them.”

“A typhoon could bring the whole forest down,” Kleat said.

She gave her camera bag to Duncan.

Kleat had brought them to within ten feet of the remains. She pressed her palms against the wall of bamboo, feeling for its tempo. Two towering stalks parted and clashed together. When they opened again, she was ready, slipping through with a skip. The stalks clapped shut. She waited again.

Her body swayed with the stand. She waited and stepped again, and waited. Like that, she insinuated herself all the way to the bones.

31.

She stood astride the skeleton, not sure what to do next. Here was this mortal thing in her keeping. The bamboo raged around her. The rain was coming down harder now.

The uniform was just threads held together with tendrils. Moss grew in the spaces of his remaining teeth. The barrel’s recoil had ripped most of his front teeth outward. Three stuck up at odd angles.

Bullied by the stand, she bent and unfastened the dog tag. They would need more, she knew. Teeth. The mandible. The whole skull.

Fastened together, the straps of the helmet would make a handle for the bucket. But when she tried to lift it, the helmet rolled away, exposing the upper face.

His jade eyes stared at her.

Molly barked and straightened bolt upright. The bamboo promptly clubbed her to her knees.

Someone had pressed the jade balls into his eye sockets years ago. Pale green, they bulged from the bones of his face. A skein of rootlets had grown across the skull and stone eyes, a mask of vegetation.

“Moll-lee.” They were calling her, though it came to her as a whisper.

The J school Ws crashed through her mind: who, what, when, where, why. The bamboo shoved at her. She couldn’t think. The typhoon was coming.

The helmet had preserved his blond hair. The skull, she told herself. It was wet. His hair was coarse.

She worked her fingers under the bone to get a purchase, and the back of his head was a ragged cave. Her hand slipped, and the whole carpet of his scalp came away.

She was almost sick. “God,” she yelped. The skull was fused to the earth.

“Moll-lee.”

A branch of leaves whipped her face. Leave the skull. The forensics people would have to make do with pieces. She plucked the three loosened teeth from their sockets and folded them, with the dog tag, in the pouch of the scalp, and shoved the bundle into one pocket of her pants. She stood, half bent, and began her exit.

The bamboo punched her ribs. It creaked and banged. The rhythm eluded her. She went too fast, then too slow. The stand struck at her. It caught her hand. She fell, then got to her feet.

Then Duncan was pulling her through. Without a word, he gripped her arms and propelled her along their narrow path through the bamboo. Kleat was already out of sight.

She cast a last glance back at the skeleton, knowing the skull would be wearing its death grin. What she didn’t expect was its knowing authority. It seemed to be nodding to her. The remains floated on sea swells of vegetation, the arms and legs spreading and rising and beckoning her back, or waving good-bye, the eyes staring.

They emerged from the bamboo, and Duncan did not stop. The clash of bamboo faded, and now she heard that deep-ocean scraping of stone on stone. Dazed by her beating in the stand, Molly looked to see if walls were shifting or spires bending. Surely the city was tearing to pieces. But it stood intact. It was nestling. The ruins were rearranging themselves deep in their foundation, settling a fraction more into the forest.

In the rain and green gloom, they could have been on a giant ark of stone. The floods were coming. Molly smelled wet fur, and it was monkeys—dozens of them now—huddled on the temples’ edges and on top of giant faces, watching them, passing them from one pair of eyes to the next.

Kleat was waiting for them in the mouth of a building, out of the rain. The bamboo had knocked one lens from his steel-rimmed glasses. The remaining lens was misted over. He seemed fractured and only half present.

His one visible eye looked a hundred years old, bloodshot and milky. For all his ugliness over the past weeks, Molly felt pity for him, even a kind of respect. At an age when many men were retiring to the links or cursing the financial pages, Kleat was getting broiled by the sun and horsewhipped by bamboo, faithful to his brother.

He had the machete. Slow water bled from the metal. With the scar along his throat, he might have just returned from battle. “What did you get?” he said.

“Sit,” Duncan said to her. She was shivering.

Molly brought out the bundled pelt. The soldier’s hair was three or four inches long. It had grown during his exile among the ruins. She unfolded the scalp, and there were dark veins along the inside of the leather. The teeth lay on top, yellow with coffee and the decades. The dog tag was so tarnished it appeared to be blank.

“Good,” said Kleat. “Very good.”

She felt ghoulish crouching over the bits and pieces of a man. She set the artifacts on a stone and wiped her hands on the wall, trying to clean away the feel of his hair. Kleat could carry the thing from here on. She’d done her duty.

“There’s something else,” she said. “He had jade eyes.”

“What are you talking about?” Kleat said.

“They were hidden by the helmet. I moved the helmet and someone had put stones in his eye sockets. It was almost like he could see.”

“Who would do that?” said Kleat.

“Maybe it’s a funeral rite,” Duncan said. “But I’ve never heard of any of the mountain tribes doing a thing like that. And the only people inside the city were the soldiers.”

“Get out of here,” Kleat said.

“Who knows?” said Duncan. “After a few months in here, the survivors might have been losing their grip on things. Going native. Going wild. Making things up. Maybe they buried him that way, modern warriors copying ancient warriors.”

“But he wasn’t buried,” said Molly. “He was lying in the open. He shot himself where no one could find him.”

Duncan fell silent.

“This fucking city,” Kleat said. He took off his glasses and cleaned his fogged lens and fit what was left of it onto his face. “At least we’ll know who he was.”

He held the tag up in the light. Molly watched his expression. He blinked. The muscles twitched in his cheeks. “Ridiculous,” he said. His lens clouded over again. He said it a second time, in a whisper.

Duncan took the tag from him and tilted it to read the embossing. His face drew into itself. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Molly pulled the tag from his fingers.

“ ‘Yale,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Lucas M.’ ”

32.

“He’s playing with us,” Kleat shouted over his shoulder. He was angry.

“It’s tattooed on his arm,” said Duncan. “We all saw it. Lucas Yale.”

They were on the move again, heading for the stairs. Nagas reared up along the rim. Water shot from their cobra mouths into the depths of the terminus. Channels hidden within the terraces sped it toward the waiting reservoirs. Duncan had said the history of Cambodia lay in its hydraulics. She was beginning to see this empire built on shaping the shapeless, capturing the rain with its ancient geometry.

The wind was picking up. It struck the canopy in bursts, creating huge green pinwheels that moved overhead. Maelstroms in the sky. Molly thought of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and that panicked her because night was not far enough away. They needed all the day that was left for their escape.

She tried to see their camp in the abyss, but the rain drove at her eyes. Roots and fallen leaves skated underfoot. The rain was as warm as blood. She put it out of her mind. She was putting a lot of things out of her mind.

“He had free run of the place. He found the bones,” said Kleat. “He saw the dog tag. He got the tattoo. Or he had this made and planted it there. Who do you think put the stones in his eyes?”

“But why do that?” Molly wondered out loud.

Kleat whirled on her. “Defiling the dead, that’s what he’s done,” he shouted. “He’s a lunatic.”

His outrage was out of proportion to the event. Kleat was possibly right. Luke had somehow written himself into the last days of the Blackhorse missing. There would be some reasonable explanation. But the remains of the soldier had not been desecrated so much as adorned. Luke hadn’t moved a bone. At most, he’d decorated them.

What disturbed her was Kleat. With his cockeyed steel rims and the missing lens, and that machete, he looked unraveled. His furious rationalizing was irrational. The soldier’s real identity wasn’t lost, only temporarily lifted. They had flesh, hair, and bone to present to the forensics lab. The soldier would get his name back. Luke’s act baffled her. Identity theft was one thing, but in the middle of a jungle? What did he gain? Nothing added up.

“You’re saying a madman went to the trouble of forging something so common, a dog tag?” Molly said. “And then hid it where we would probably never find it? All so we could find it?”

“He brought us here, didn’t he? He lured us with the tags.”

“I’m not so sure anymore. We brought ourselves. With our needs.”

“The gypsy kid walked right up to our table in the restaurant. He’d watched us for a month and selected us out of all the others. It’s so plain in hindsight.”

“It’s not plain at all. What does he get out of it? Why us?”

“Maybe he needed to get resupplied. Look at all the food and gear we brought with us. Plus two vehicles, with pirates to drive his riches out of here.” He added, “And a woman.”

“You said he’d gone. Halfway to China, you said.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

Kleat was talking nonsense. He wanted things to make sense. He wanted them to connect even if they made no sense.

He strode ahead, arms swinging, that machete like a pendulum. The blade sparked against a wall. She wanted to get it away from him. Regardless of whether they escaped today or in a week or in six months, they were going to need the machete to build camps and cut wood and butcher game and keep them sustained. In Kleat’s hand, it was only a weapon.

“What if he’s one of them?” Duncan asked from the back. He had been quiet ever since leaving their shelter.

“One of who?” Kleat’s voice was cautionary. He’d had a bellyful of ghost talk.

“One of the Blackhorse men.”

“Christ.” Kleat quickened the pace, leaving the thought behind.

Molly pondered it. “One of the original soldiers?”

“We know they were here. What if not all of them died?”

“A living MIA?”

She felt boosted. Amped up. Here was the ultimate survivor tale. A Robinson Crusoe in fatigues, subsisting in a lost city for thirty years, dodging enemies, and eluding the $2.6 million reward for his capture. In Luke, not the city, lay her story. If it was true.

But it couldn’t be. That quickly, she dismissed it. “He’s just a boy. Twenty years old.” Except for his eyes, the thousand-year-old eyes.

“I thought of that, too,” said Duncan, undeterred. “But what if he’s a different kind of MIA? What if he’s Luke’s son? Or the son of one of them?”

She stopped. Kleat came back to them.

“You’re saying Luke came looking for his father?” she asked. Then she remembered his young face. The war was thirty years ago, and the boy was twenty, not thirty. Once you’ve crossed the thirty mark, you know the difference. “He’s still too young.”

“Not if his father did survive.”

“I don’t get it.”

“They were trapped. Some of them died. Maybe only one was left. He didn’t dare descend. One war after another raged out there. Maybe he went mad. Maybe he was injured and suffering from amnesia. What if he went off into the mountains and some tribe took him in? And twenty years ago, he had a son. A son who could watch over the remains.”

A son dressed in peasant pants and Vietcong sandals. All borrowed together.

“A half-breed guardian angel?” said Kleat.

“I’m only saying what if,” said Duncan.

“Okay, what if he is the sentinel and this is like his own tomb of the unknowns. That doesn’t explain why he went down and chose us and gave away his secret.”

“Maybe that was his job. To find someone to take them home.”

“That’s crazy,” said Kleat. “The kid’s a Westerner. Blue eyes, blond hair, white skin. And where did he learn his English?”

“That’s a problem,” Duncan admitted.

“Not just his English, his American,” said Molly. “You can’t fake an accent like that. I heard it. He’s from West Texas, not the Cambodian highlands.”

“You’re right,” said Duncan. “I was just trying to come up with something other than ghosts.”

33.

A surprise awaited them partway down the staircase. From there they could see into the clearing, and the brothers had not left. The Land Cruiser stood ready to go, its engine running. Molly could smell its exhaust through the rain.

“By God,” Kleat said.

Her relief took over. She wanted to collapse. She didn’t have to hold it all together anymore. Everything was going to be fine. They were going to drive out of here.

“Hello,” Kleat shouted down. He waved the machete in the air. A tiny figure appeared on the far side of the truck and waved up at them.

“There’s luck for you,” Duncan said.

They passed the ledges, and Molly saw the splintered poles and shredded fabric of their tents among the relentless vegetation. Across the way, Kleat’s immense bonfire was nothing but mud and charred logs. The thatch hut looked as desolate as the ACAV stranded in the tree above.

The next time she came, the forest would have consumed it all, the hut, the fire pit, and the leftovers of their tents. It would be as if they’d never been here. She felt a twinge of regret. Above and behind her, the waterways were coursing and gurgling. She wanted to see the city the way the people had seen it twenty centuries ago, with the water animating its canals and gargoyles. The city would never belong to her again the way it did at this moment. Surrender. Now was her opportunity.

At the base of the staircase, Kleat paused. “All right, listen up. We’re going to have to work as a team on this.”

“We are a team,” Molly assured him. She heard the havoc in his voice. And now he had the machete.

Raindrops spattered off his scalp. The veins were rising. He took out a bundle of dollars. “We’re coming down empty-handed. But we still have cash. Don’t offer anything at first,” he said to Duncan. “Let’s see where we stand with them.”

“Good idea, John,” Duncan said.

“You stay to the right. I’ll go in from the left.” He fastened the flak jacket shut.

“That won’t be necessary, John.”

“Stay separated.”

“It’s going to work out,” Molly said.

“We’ve got what we came for,” Kleat said. He patted the pocket along his thigh. It bulged with the scalp and teeth and dog tag.

“Don’t do anything,” she said.

Kleat looked at her with his one fogged lens and that aged eye. He started across the clearing.

“He’s going to kill them,” she whispered to Duncan. “Or get us killed. Warn them.”

“They’d shoot us for sure.”

“But we’re not with him.”

“We’re Americans, Molly. Do you think they see a difference?”

“We should go back up the stairs.”

“How far do you think we’d make it?”

“Stop him then.”

They hurried to catch up with Kleat. In their absence, Doc and So had shimmed wood and stones under the wheels of the Land Cruiser and rolled it down to safety. The engine was idling.

The truck was another matter. Its front end pitched up like the stem of a sinking ship, deeper than ever. It was a goner, but the brothers weren’t giving up. With axes and shovels, they had spent the morning chewing down to the wheels and axle. Their hole looked more like a grave than true hope. A rusty cable fed from the front hitch, ready to attach to the Land Cruiser for a heroic tow.

As the three Americans approached, Doc climbed from the muddy pit, ax in hand. Molly’s stomach knotted. Their rifles were probably on the front seat of the truck, out of the rain. She looked for Vin, a friendly face.

So poked his head up from the pit. Plastered with black mud, the two Khmers looked the way God’s Adam must have looked like in his first moments, mud with two eyes. Molly did not reach for her camera.

Duncan greeted them. Doc spoke. “He wants to know, where’s their cargo.”

“Start bargaining,” Kleat said, moving to flank the pit.

It was beginning. Molly wanted to freeze them all, make them as still as carvings.

Doc wasn’t fooled.

“He wants to know how you got Vin’s machete,” Duncan said. “He wants to know where their brother is.”

So pulled himself from the pit. The mud made sucking noises. He was armed with a shovel.

“Tell them.” Kleat was smiling, all innocence. “We sent him to get help.”

So barked at them.

“They say he never came down.”

“Then he must have gotten lost. He’s on his way.” Kleat held up his money. Water sluiced off the bright steel blade.

Duncan frowned. He spoke with the brothers.

“I told them we should start searching for him. The ruins are moving around. A stone might have fallen on him. There are animals, too. And the typhoon will get much worse, I think. We don’t want to be inside here tonight.”

“Good,” Kleat said, smiling. “We’re on their side. Keep talking.”

Duncan knelt to draw in the mud with a twig. Maps, always maps with him. Doc sat on his heels to add his own lines to the diagram. So looked over their shoulders. Molly stepped closer.

No one noticed Kleat until the door slammed shut up ahead. He gunned the engine, and with a wild glance back through his broken glasses, he took off. The Land Cruiser shot a rooster tail of leaves into the air and bucked forward over roots and tipped paving stones.

He was leaving them.

Molly was surprised by her surprise. Of course he was leaving them. He was Kleat.

The brothers gave a shout. Duncan, too. A waste of breath.

Molly watched it unfold. Duncan waved his arms in the air. The two Khmers raced around to the truck and grabbed their rifles. Duncan yelled at them not to fire. They cut loose anyway and gave chase.

34.

From behind, Molly couldn’t tell one mud figure from the other. One let off a long burst that emptied his banana clip, and he changed to a fresh one without missing a step. She ran after them.

Picking up speed, Kleat reached the green mineral causeway that ran between the ancient reservoirs. He veered to miss the remains of a naga, putting more distance between them. There was going to be no stopping him.

The brothers ran on. The faster one sprinted ahead, not bothering to shoot, maybe gambling that Kleat would clip a statue or that one of his brother’s bullets might puncture a tire. Molly continued after them. She didn’t want to see Kleat punished, but she didn’t want him to escape either. She just wanted to see.

She had reached halfway across the long causeway. The mouth of the gateway appeared in front of them, like the eye of a needle. Through there it would be blue sky, or almost.

One brother fired. The other chased.

The Land Cruiser suddenly lifted up on an orange blossom.

That was the first antitank mine detonating the fuel tank.

A heavy boom echoed across the water. From Molly’s distance, the Land Cruiser seemed to be launching into space. It spiraled forward through the plume of fuel and smoke.

The truck started to land on one side, then jumped again, thrown by the second mine. It flipped onto its roof, still moving, and the screech of metal rippled back to her in stereo along the tops of both ponds.

Flames shot up. Smoke spilled like ink.

The reserve fuel tank went off. The fireball created a temporary sun in the rainfall. It even cast an artificial rainbow.

An arm appeared from one window. Somehow Kleat had survived the explosions. He was trying to drag himself from the burning car.

The sight of him struggling to escape renewed the brothers’ fury. Molly thought of the turtle in their fire last night. They would have no mercy.

She was sure the wreck had quit sliding. But then it moved again. From her distance, it looked like translucent animals rushing up from the water and bunching around the fiery vehicle. It was the rain in her eyes, she thought.

The Land Cruiser shifted. It hit a third mine. What was left of it flipped off the road.

The water was deeper than she’d guessed. The flaming ball of metal didn’t float and go under in a lather of bubbles. It vanished. The man-made lake swallowed the man-made sun in a single bite.

Molly came to a standstill.

Kleat was gone.

Plastered in mud, the two brothers howled and fired their rifles into the water, cheated of their enemy.

She wasn’t sure what obligation she had to Kleat. He had left them to die. Let the prehistoric fishes have him. But someone needed to witness what was left. Someone had to say a few words over the water.

Grimly, she started forward.

In the space of an instant, she felt a hand wrap around her left ankle, rooting her foot in place. She felt its fingers squeeze.