The Ruins

"How do you know?" she said. She could feel the fear in her voice, and it had a redoubling effect: hearing it frightened her all the more.

"Know what?" Jeff asked.

"That they aren't coming."

"I didn't say that."

"You said-"

"That it didn't seem likely they'll be coming today. "

"But-"

"And if they don't come today, and we don't act, he"-and here there was that vague wave toward the lean-to-"won't make it."

"But how do you know?"

"His bones are exposed. He's going to-"

"No-that they aren't coming."

"It's not about knowing; it's about not knowing. About the risk of waiting rather than acting."

"So they might come."

Jeff gave her an exasperated look, throwing up his hands. "And they might not come. That's the whole point."

They were circling, of course, not saying anything, really, just throwing words at each other; even Stacy could see this. He wasn't going to give her what she wanted-couldn't give it to her, in fact. She wanted the Greeks to come, wanted them to be here already, wanted to be rescued, safe, and all Jeff could say was that it might not happen, not today at least, and that if it didn't, they had to cut off Pablo's legs.

He wanted to do it; Stacy could see this. And Mathias didn't. But Mathias wasn't speaking. He was just listening, as usual, waiting for them to decide. Stacy wished he'd say something, that he'd struggle to convince her and Eric not to agree, because she didn't want Jeff to cut off Pablo's legs, couldn't believe that it was a good idea, but she didn't know how to argue this. She sensed she couldn't just say no, that she'd have to tell Jeff why. She needed someone to help her, and there was no one to do it. Eric had become slightly drunk, was sleepy-eyed with it; he was much calmer than he had been, it was true, but not entirely present anymore. And Amy was far away, down the hill, watching for the Greeks.

"What about Amy?" Stacy said.

"What about her?"

"Shouldn't we ask what she thinks?"

"She only matters if it's a tie."

"If what's a tie?"

"The vote."

"We're voting?"

Jeff nodded, made an of course gesture with his hand, full of impatience, as if this were the only logical course and he couldn't see why she was expressing such surprise.

But she was surprised. She thought they were just talking about it, searching for a consensus, that nothing would be done unless they all agreed. That wasn't how it was, though; it would only take three of them, and then Jeff would cut off Pablo's legs. Stacy struggled to put her reluctance into words, fumbling, searching for an entry. "But…I mean, we can't just…It doesn't seem-"

"Cut them off," Eric said, his voice loud, startling her. "Right now."

Stacy turned to look at him. He looked sober suddenly, clear-eyed. And vehement, too, certain of himself, of the course he was advocating. Stacy could still say no, she knew. She could say no and then Jeff would have to go down the hill and ask Amy what she thought. He'd convince her, probably; even if Amy tried to hold out, he'd eventually wear her down. He was stronger than the rest of them. Everyone else was tired and thirsty and longing to be in some other place, and somehow he didn't seem to be any of those things. So what was the point of arguing?

"You're sure it's the right thing?" she asked.

"He'll die if we leave him as he is."

Stacy shuddered at that, as if Pablo's potential death were being laid at her feet-her fault, something she might easily have averted. "I don't want him to die."

"Of course not," Jeff said.

Stacy could feel Mathias's gaze upon her. Watching her, unblinking. He wanted her to say no, she knew. She wished she could, too, but knew she couldn't.

"Okay," she said. "I guess you should do it."

Amy was taking pictures.

As she'd set off from the clearing, she'd grabbed her camera-reflexively, with no conscious motive-just picking it up and hanging it around her neck. It was only while she was crouched beside the path, midway down the hill, in that moment of relaxation and clarity that followed the release of her bladder, that she'd realized why she'd reached for it. She wanted to photograph the Mayans, to collect evidence of what was happening here, because they were going to be rescued-she kept insisting upon this to herself-and, after this happened, there would inevitably be an investigation, and arrests, and a trial. Which meant there'd need to be evidence, of course, and what better evidence could there possibly be than photographs of the perpetrators?

She started shooting as soon as she reached the bottom of the hill, focusing on the men's faces. She enjoyed the feeling it gave her, a sneaky sort of power, the hunted turning on her hunters. They were going to be punished; they were going to spend the rest of their lives in jail. And Amy was going to help this happen. She imagined the trial while she aimed and snapped, the crowded courtroom, the hush as she testified. They'd project her photos on a giant screen, and she'd point at an image of the bald man, that pistol on his hip. He was the leader, she'd say. He was the one who wouldn't let us go.

The Mayans paid her no attention. They weren't watching, hardly even seemed to glance her way. Only when she stepped out into the clearing, searching for a better angle on the group of men clustered around the nearest campfire, did two of them stir, raising their bows in her direction. She took their picture, stepped quickly back into the vines.

After awhile, the sense of power started to slip away from her, and she had nothing good to replace it with. The sun kept climbing, and Amy was too hot, too hungry, too thirsty. But she'd already been all these things when she'd first arrived, so this wasn't what the shift was about. No, it was the Mayans' indifference to her presence there, so busy with her camera, that finally began to wear her down. They were clustered around their smoldering campfire, some of them napping in the slowly diminishing line of shade at the edge of the jungle. They were talking and laughing; one of them was whittling a stick, just carving it down into nothing, a bored man's task, a way to occupy his hands while time ticked sluggishly by. Because that was it, wasn't it? That was what they were so clearly doing here: they were waiting. And not in any suspense, either, not in any anxiety as to the outcome of their vigil. They were waiting with no apparent emotion at all, as one might sit over the course of an evening, watching a candle methodically burn itself into darkness, never less than certain of the outcome, confident that the only thing standing between now and the end of waiting was time itself.

And what does that mean? Amy wondered.

Maybe the Mayans knew about the Greeks. Maybe Juan and Don Quixote had already come, had walked by the opening to the trail, kept on until they reached the village, only to be turned back, oblivious, never even thinking to check the tree line. Neither Amy nor the others had mentioned this possibility, yet it seemed so obvious now, once she'd thought of it, so impossible to overlook. They weren't coming, she realized suddenly, with the weight of certainty: no one was coming. And if this were true, then there was no hope. Not for Pablo, certainly, nor for the rest of them. And the Mayans must have understood this-it was the source of their boredom, their lassitude-they knew that it was simply a matter of waiting for events to unfold. Nothing was asked of them but that they guard the clearing. Thirst and hunger and the vine would do the rest, as they had so many times before.

Amy stopped taking pictures. She felt dizzy, almost drunk; she had to sit down, dropping into the dirt at the foot of the trail. It's only the sun, she told herself. My empty stomach. She was lying, though, and she knew it. The sun, her hunger, they had nothing to do with it. What she was feeling was fear. She tried to distract herself from this realization, taking deep breaths, fussing with her camera. It was just a cheap point- and-shoot; she'd bought it more than ten years ago, with money she'd earned as a baby-sitter. Jeff had given her a digital camera for the trip, but she'd made him take it back. She was too attached to this one to think of relinquishing it yet. It wasn't very reliable-it took bad pictures more often than not, sun-bleached or shadowed, and almost always blurrily out of focus-but Amy knew she'd have to break it or lose it or have it stolen before she'd accept the prospect of a replacement. She checked how many shots she had left-three out of thirty-six. That would be it, then; she hadn't brought any extra rolls, hadn't thought they'd be gone long enough to need them. It seemed odd to think that there was an exact number of pictures she'd taken in her life, and that nearly all of them had been with this camera. There were x number of her parents, x of trees and monuments and sunsets and dogs, x of Jeff and Stacy. And, if what she was feeling just now was correct-if the Mayans were correct, if Jeff was correct-then it was possible that there were only three more to take in her entire life. Amy tried to decide what they should be. There ought to be a group shot, she supposed, using the timer, all of them clustered around Pablo on his backboard. And one of her and Stacy, of course, arm in arm, the last in the series. And then-

"Are you okay?"

Amy turned, and there Stacy was, standing over her, with that makeshift umbrella on her shoulder. She looked wretched-gaunt and greasy-haired. Her mouth was trembling, and her hands, too, making the umbrella rattle softly, as if in a slight breeze.

Am I okay? Amy thought, struggling for an honest answer. Her dizziness had been followed by an odd sense of calm, a feeling of resignation. She wasn't like Jeff, wasn't a fighter. Or maybe she simply couldn't fool herself as easily as he did. The threat of dying here didn't fill her with an urgency to be up and doing; it made her tired, made her feel like lying down, as if to hurry the process along. "I guess so," she said. And then, because Stacy looked so much worse than she herself felt: "Are you?"

Stacy shook her head. She gestured behind her, up the hill. "They're…you know…" She trailed off, as if unable to find the words. She licked her lips, which had become deeply cracked in the past twenty-four hours-chapped, rawly split-a castaway's lips. When she tried again, her voice was a whisper. "They've started."

"Started what?"

"Cutting off his legs."

"What're you talking about?" Amy asked. Though she knew, of course.

"Pablo's," Stacy whispered, lifting her eyebrows very high, as if this news were a surprise to her, too. "They're using the knife."

Amy stood up without knowing what she intended to do. She didn't feel herself reacting yet, was numb to the news. But she must've been feeling something, because her expression changed in some way. She could see Stacy reacting to it, stepping back from her, looking scared.

"I shouldn't have said yes, should I?" Stacy asked.

"Yes to what?"

"We voted on it, and I-"

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"You were down here. Jeff said it only mattered if there was a tie. But there wasn't. Eric said yes, and then I…" There was that same frightened expression again. She stepped forward now, reached out to clutch Amy's forearm. "I shouldn't have, should I? You and Mathias and I-we could've stopped them."

Amy couldn't bring herself to accept that this was happening. She didn't believe that it was possible to cut someone's legs off with a knife, didn't believe that Jeff would ever attempt such a thing. Perhaps they'd only been talking about it, were still talking about it now; perhaps she could stop them if she hurried. She pulled herself free of Stacy's grip. "Stay here," she said. "Watch for the Greeks. Okay?"

Stacy nodded, still with that fear in her face, that trembling coming and going in the muscles around her mouth. She sat down, dropping awkwardly in the center of the path, as if some supporting string had been cut.

Amy waited another moment, watching her, making sure she was all right. Then she started hurriedly up the hill.

Jeff and Mathias were the ones who did it. They didn't ask Eric to help, which was a good thing, because he knew he wouldn't have been able to. He kept pacing about the clearing while they worked, pausing to watch and then turning quickly away, finding both states unbearable, the seeing and the not seeing.

First, they put the belts back on. They found them lying in the dirt beside the backboard, three tangled snakes, abandoned there the night before. Jeff and Mathias needed only two of them; they bound the Greek at his chest and waist. Pablo's eyes remained shut through all this jostling; he hadn't opened them, not once, since he'd stopped screaming earlier that morning. Even when Jeff prodded him now, calling his name, wanting to mime out what they were about to attempt, the Greek refused to respond. He lay there with a clenched expression on his face, everything-his mouth, his eyes-closed against the world. He seemed beyond their reach somehow, not quite present any longer. Past caring, Eric supposed, long past.

Next, they built a fire, a small one-it was all they could manage. They used three of the archaeologists' notebooks, a shirt, a pair of pants. They crumpled two sheets of paper for kindling, then added the notebooks whole. The clothing, they doused with tequila. The fire was almost smokeless; it burned with a low blue flame. Jeff set the knife in its midst, along with a large rock, shaped like an ax head. While these heated-the stone making a snapping sound as it took on a deep reddish glow-Jeff and Mathias crouched over Pablo, murmuring back and forth, pointing first at one leg, then the other, planning their operation. Jeff looked grim and downcast suddenly, as though he'd been coerced into this undertaking despite his better intentions, but if he was having any second thoughts, he wasn't allowing them to slow the procedure down.

Eric was standing right over them when they started. Jeff used a small towel he'd found in one of the backpacks to pull the stone from the fire; he wrapped it around his hand, glovelike, to protect himself from the heat. Moving quickly, in one fluid motion, he scooped up the stone, raised it over his head, turned toward the backboard. Then he slammed it down with all his strength against the Greek's lower leg.

Pablo's eyes jerked open; he began to scream again, writhing and bucking beneath his bonds. Jeff seemed hardly to notice; his face showed no reaction. He was already dropping the stone back into the fire, reaching for the knife. Mathias, too, remained expressionless, focused on his task. It was his job to keep the fire burning hot, to feed in new notebooks if they were needed, to sprinkle more alcohol, to stir and blow upon the embers.

Jeff was hunched over the backboard, muscles taut with the strain of his labor, sawing and chopping. There was the stench of the hot knife against Pablo's flesh, a cooking smell, meat burning. Eric glimpsed the shattered bone below the Greek's left knee, the bloody marrow spilling out, Jeff's knife pushing and cutting and prying. He saw the bottom half of Pablo's leg come free, the foot and ankle and shin bones a separate thing now, cut off, gone forever. Jeff sat back on his haunches, catching his breath. Pablo continued to scream and writhe, his eyes rolling, flashing white. Mathias took the knife from Jeff, returned it to the fire. Jeff picked up the little towel, started to wrap it around his hand again. As he reached for the glowing stone, Eric turned quickly away, started off across the clearing. He couldn't watch any longer, had to flee.

But there was nowhere to go, of course. Even on the far side of the clearing, with his back turned to the scene, he could still hear what was happening, the crunch of the stone slamming into Pablo's other leg, and the screaming-louder now, it seemed, higher-pitched.

Eric glanced over his shoulder-he couldn't stop himself.

Mathias was holding the black pan, the one Jeff had brought back from the bottom of the hill, with that word carved across its bottom-peligro. Eric watched him place it in the fire. They were going to use it to cauterize the Greek's wounds, pressing it flat across his stumps, one after the other.

Jeff was bent low over the backboard, working with the knife, a steady sawing motion, his shirt soaked through with sweat.

Pablo was still screaming. And there were words now, too. They were impossible to understand, of course, but Eric could hear the pleading in them, the begging. He remembered how he'd fallen on the Greek when he'd jumped down into the shaft, that feeling of his body bucking beneath him. And he thought of how Amy and he had thrown Pablo onto the backboard, that clumsy, lurching, panic-filled toss. He could feel the vine moving inside him, in his leg, and his chest, too-that insistent pressure at the base of his rib cage, pushing outward. It was all wrong; everything here was wrong, and there was no way to stop it, no way to escape.

Eric turned away again, but he couldn't maintain it. He had to glance back almost immediately.

Jeff finished with the knife, dropped it into the dirt at his side. Eric watched him pick up the towel; he wrapped it around his hand, turned to pull the pan from the fire. Mathias had to help him now. He squatted beside the backboard, bent to lift Pablo's left leg, what remained of it, grasping it with both hands just above the knee. Pablo was crying, talking to the two of them, Mathias and Jeff both, using their names. Neither of them showed any sign of hearing, though; they wouldn't look at him. The pan was glowing orange now, and the letters scratched into its bottom were a deeper color, almost red, so that Eric could still read the word they spelled there, even as Jeff swung it free of the flames. He watched Jeff spin, place the pan against the base of Pablo's stump, holding it in place, pressing hard, using all his weight. Eric could hear the flesh burning, a spitting, snapping sound. He could smell it, too, and was appalled to feel his stomach stirring in response-not in nausea, either, but, shockingly, in hunger.

He turned away, dropped into a crouch, shutting his eyes, pressing his hands to his ears, breathing through his mouth. He remained like this for what seemed like an impossibly long time, concentrating on the sensation of the vine inside his body, that insistently probing spasm in his leg, that pressure in his chest, trying to feel them as something else, something benign, some trick of perception, as Stacy kept insisting they must be: his heartbeat, his overtired muscles, his fear. He couldn't do it, though, and he couldn't wait any longer, either; yet again, he had to look.

When he turned, he found Jeff and Mathias still crouched over the backboard. Jeff was pressing the pan into Pablo's right stump now. There was that same sickeningly enticing smell in the air. But silence now-Pablo had gone still, stopped screaming. He seemed to have lost consciousness.

Then there was the sound of footsteps approaching. Amy was coming up the path. She entered the clearing at a run, out of breath, her skin shining with sweat.

Too late, Eric thought, watching her stagger to a stop, staring-seeing-a look of horror on her face. She's come too late.

Jeff didn't know what to feel. Or no: He knew what he thought, and then he knew what he felt, and he couldn't seem to bring the two into line. It had gone well, maybe even better than he'd expected-this was what he thought. They'd gotten the legs off fairly quickly, each of them a few inches below the knee, saving the joint. They'd cauterized the stumps thoroughly enough so that when they removed the tourniquets, there was only a minimal amount of bleeding. Seepage, really, would be the word for it, nothing too serious. Pablo had lost consciousness toward the end, more from shock, it seemed, than anything else. It wasn't pain-Jeff was almost certain of this-he shouldn't have been able to feel a thing. But he'd been awake; he'd been able to lift his head and see what they were doing, and that must've counted as its own sort of anguish. He was safer now, Jeff believed, though still in peril. All they'd done was buy him some time-not much, maybe another day or two. But it was something, and Jeff believed that he ought to feel proud of himself, that he'd done a brave deed. So he couldn't understand why he felt so sick at heart, almost breathless with it, as if holding back the threat of tears.

Amy wasn't helping much. None of them were. Mathias seemed reluctant to look at him, was hunched into himself beside the remains of their little fire, completely withdrawn. Eric had resumed his pacing, his fretful probing at his leg and chest. And Amy, without even bothering to take the time to understand what he'd accomplished-while they were still removing the tourniquets, carefully smearing Neosporin on the seared stumps-had immediately begun to attack him.

"Oh Jesus," she'd said, startling him. He hadn't heard her approach. "Jesus fucking Christ. What've you done?"

Jeff didn't bother to answer. It seemed clear enough.

"You cut off his legs. How could you fucking-"

"We didn't have a choice," Jeff said. He was bent over the second stump, spreading the gel across it. "He was going to die."

"And you think this will save him? Chopping off his legs with a dirty knife?"

"We sterilized it."

"Come on, Jeff. Look what he's lying on."

It was true, of course: The sleeping bag they'd used to cushion the backboard was soaked through with the leakage from Pablo's bladder. Jeff shrugged it away. "We've bought him some time. If we're rescued tomorrow, or even the next day, he'll-"

"You cut off his legs, " Amy said, almost shouting.

Jeff finally turned to look at her. She was standing over him, sunburned, her face smudged with dirt, a half-inch-deep layer of green fuzz growing across her pants. She didn't look like herself anymore; she looked too ragged, too frantic. He supposed it must be true for all of them, in one way or another. He certainly had stopped feeling like himself at some point in the past twenty-four hours. He'd just used a knife and a stone to cut off a man's legs-a friend's, a stranger's, it was hard to say any longer. He didn't even know Pablo's real name. "What chance do you think he would've had, Amy?" he asked. "With his bones exposed like that?"

She didn't answer; she was staring to his right, at the ground, with an odd expression on her face.

"Answer me," he said.

Was she starting to cry? Her chin was trembling; she reached up, touched it with her hand. "Oh God," she whispered. "Oh Christ."

Jeff followed her gaze. She was peering down at Pablo's severed limbs, the remains of his feet and ankles and shins, the bloodstained bones held together with a few remaining cords of flesh. Jeff had dropped them beside the backboard, carelessly, planning to bury them when he was through cauterizing Pablo's stumps. But it wasn't going to come to that, apparently. The vine had sent another long tendril snaking out into the clearing. It had wrapped itself around one of Pablo's severed feet and was dragging the bones away now, back through the dirt. As Jeff watched, a second tendril slithered forward, more quickly than the first, and laid claim to the other foot.

They were all staring now-Eric and Mathias, too. And then Mathias was in motion, jumping to his feet, the knife in his hand. He stepped on the first length of vine, bent to slash at it with the blade, severing it from its source. He swooped toward the second one, slicing again. Even as he did this, though, a third tendril slithered into the clearing, and then a fourth, reaching for the bones. Amy screamed-once, short and loud-then clapped her hand over her mouth, retreating toward Jeff. Mathias bent and slashed, bent and slashed, and the vine kept coming, from all directions now.

"Leave it," Jeff said.

Mathias ignored him. Cutting and stomping and tearing at the vines, faster and faster, but still too slow, the tendrils fighting back, wrapping themselves around his legs, hindering his movements.

"Mathias," Jeff said, and he stepped toward him, grabbed his arm, pulled him away. He could feel the German's strength, the taut, straining muscles, but also his fatigue, his surrender. They stood side by side, watching as the vine pulled the severed limbs into itself, the white of the bones dragged into the larger mass of green, vanishing altogether.

They were still standing like this, all four of them, perfectly motionless, when, from across the hilltop, there came that familiar chirping again, the sound of a cell phone plaintively ringing at the bottom of the shaft.

S tacy sat beneath her jerry-rigged umbrella, in her little circle of shade, cross-legged, hunched into herself. She kept having to resist the temptation to glance at her wrist, kept having to remind herself that her watch wasn't there, that it was resting on a table beside a bed in Cancún, in her hotel room, where she ought to be right now, too, but wasn't. Or perhaps not: perhaps her fears had finally come true and a maid had stolen the watch. In which case, it would be where? With her hat, she supposed, and her sunglasses, adorning some stranger, some woman laughing over lunch at a restaurant on the beach. Stacy could feel the absence of these possessions in a way that was almost physical, an ache inside her chest, a bodily yearning, but it was her glasses that she missed most of all. There was too much sun here, too much glare. Her head throbbed with it-throbbed with hunger, too, and thirst, and fatigue, and fear.

Behind her, up the hill, they were amputating Pablo's legs. Stacy tried not to think of this. He was going to die here; she couldn't see any way around it. And she tried not to think of that, too.

Finally, she couldn't help it: She gave in, glanced at her wrist. There was nothing there, of course, and her thoughts began to circle once again-the night table, the maid, the hat and sunglasses, the woman eating lunch at the beach. This woman would be rested and fed and clean, with a bottle of water at her elbow. She'd be careless, carefree: happy. Stacy felt a wave of hatred for this imaginary stranger, which quickly metastasized, jumping to the boy who'd squeezed her breast outside the bus station, to the-probably fictional-felonious maid, to the Mayans sitting across from her with their watchful faces, their bows and arrows. One of the boys was there now, the one who'd followed them on the bike yesterday, the little one, riding on the handlebars. He was sitting in an elderly woman's lap, staring toward Stacy, expressionless, like all the other Mayans, and Stacy hated him, too.

Her khakis and T-shirt were covered with the pale green fuzz from the vine, her sandals also. She kept brushing it away, burning her hands, but the tiny tendrils quickly grew back. They'd already eaten several holes in her T-shirt. One, just above her belly button, was as big as a silver dollar. It was only a matter of time, Stacy knew, before her clothes would be hanging off her in shreds.

She hated the vine, too, of course, if it was possible to hate a plant. She hated its vivid green, its tiny red flowers, the sting of its sap against her skin. She hated it for being able to move, for its hunger, and its malevolence.

Her feet were still caked with mud from the long walk across that field the previous afternoon, and the mud continued to give off its faint scent of shit. Like Pablo, Stacy thought, her mind jumping up the hill, to what was happening there, the knife, the heated stone. She shuddered, shut her eyes.

Hate and more hate-Stacy was drowning in it, dropping downward, with no bottom in sight. She hated Pablo for having fallen into the shaft, hated him for his broken back, his fast-approaching death. She hated Eric for his wounded leg, for the vine moving wormlike beneath his skin, for his panic in the face of this. She hated Jeff for his competence, his coldness, for turning so easily to that knife and heated stone. She hated Amy for not stopping him, hated Mathias for his silences, his blank looks, hated herself most of all.

She opened her eyes, glanced about. A handful of minutes had passed, but nothing had changed.

Yes, she hated herself.

She hated herself for not knowing what time it was, or how much longer she'd have to sit here.

She hated herself for having stopped believing that Pablo was going to live.

She hated herself for knowing that the Greeks weren't going to come, not today, not ever.

She tilted back her umbrella, risked a quick look at the sky. Jeff was hoping for rain, she knew, depending on it. He was working to save them; he had plans and schemes and plots, but they all had the same flaw, the same weakness lurking within them-they all involved a degree of hope. And rain didn't come from hope; rain came from clouds, white or gray or the deepest of black-it didn't matter-they had to be there. But the sky above her was a blinding blue, stubbornly so, without a single cloud in sight.

It wasn't going to rain.

And this was just another thing for Stacy to hate herself for knowing.

They decided to drop back into the hole.

It was Jeff's idea, but Amy didn't argue. The Greeks weren't coming today. Everyone was admitting this now-to themselves at least, if not to the others-and thus the cell phone, the perhaps mythical cell phone calling to them from the bottom of the shaft, was the only thing left to pin their hopes on. So when Jeff proposed that they try one final time to find it, Amy startled him by agreeing.

They couldn't leave Pablo alone, of course. At first, they were going to have Amy sit with him while Eric and Mathias worked the windlass, lowering Jeff into the shaft. But Jeff wanted her to go, too. He was planning on making some sort of torch out of the archaeologists' clothes, soaking them in tequila, and he wasn't certain how long the light would last from this. Two sets of eyes down there would be more efficient than one, he said, allowing the search to be more thorough, more methodical.

Amy didn't want to go down into the hole again. But Jeff wasn't asking what she wanted; he was telling her whathe wanted, describing it as something that had already been decided, a problem they needed to solve.

"We could carry it to the hole," Mathias said, meaning the backboard, meaning Pablo, and they all thought about this for a moment. Then Jeff nodded.

So that was what they did. Jeff and Mathias lifted the backboard out from under the little lean-to, carried it across the hilltop to the mouth of the shaft-carefully, working hard not to jostle Pablo. There were some terrible smells coming off the Greek's body: the by-now-familiar stench of his shit and urine, the burned-meat stink of his stubs, and that sweeter scent, lingering underneath everything else, that first ominous hint of rot. No one said anything about it; no one said anything about Pablo at all, in fact. He was still unconscious, and appeared worse than ever. It wasn't just his legs Amy had to avoid looking at; it was also his face. When she'd first applied to medical school, she'd gone on some campus tours, and she'd seen the cadavers the students dissected: gray-skinned, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed. That was what Pablo's face was beginning to look like, too.

They set him down beside the shaft. The chirping had stopped, but now, as soon as they arrived, it started up again, and they all stood there, staring into the darkness, heads cocked, listening.

It rang nine times. Then it stopped.

Mathias checked the rope. He unspooled it from the windlass, the whole thing, laying it out in a long zigzag across the little clearing, searching its hemp for weakness.

Amy stood beside the hole, peering into it, trying to gather her courage, remembering her time down there with Eric, just the two of them, the things they'd spoken of to keep their fear at bay, the lies they'd told each other. She didn't want to return again, would've said no if only she could've thought of a way to do so. But now that they'd carried Pablo all the way across the hilltop, she couldn't see how she had a choice.

Eric crouched, began to probe at the wound on his leg, muttering to himself. "We'll cut it off," he said, and Amy turned to stare at him, startled, not certain if she'd heard correctly. Then he was up and pacing once more. The vine had eaten holes in his shirt, almost shredding it. He was covered in his own blood, spattered and dripped and smeared with it. They all looked bad, but he looked the worst.

Jeff was making his torch. He used a tent pole, wrapping duct tape around its bottom for a grip so the aluminum wouldn't grow too hot for him to hold. He knotted some of the archaeologists' clothes around the top-a pair of denim shorts, a cotton T-shirt-tying them tight. Amy couldn't see how it was going to work, but she didn't say anything, was too worn-out to argue about it. If they had to attempt this, she wanted just to do it and get it done.

Mathias stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. The rope was fine. They all watched as he carefully wound it back around the windlass. When he was done, Jeff slid the sling over his head, tucking it under his arms. He was holding the box of matches, the already-opened bottle of tequila, his flimsy-looking torch. Mathias and Eric stepped to the windlass, leaning against the hand crank with all their weight. And then, without the slightest hint of hesitation, Jeff stepped into the open air above the shaft. He didn't say anything in parting to Amy; they hadn't talked about a plan. She was supposed to follow him into the hole-that was all she knew. The rest, they'd have to make up once they got down there.

There was that familiar creaking of the windlass. Mathias and Eric strained against its pull, letting the rope out, turn by turn, sweating with the labor of it. Amy leaned over the shaft, watched Jeff drop into the darkness; he seemed to grow smaller as he descended. She could see him for longer than she would've anticipated, as if he were somehow drawing the sunlight with him into the depths. He grew shadowy, ghostlike, but she could still discern him long after it seemed he should've vanished altogether. He didn't return her gaze, didn't lift his face to her, not once, kept his eyes focused downward, toward the bottom of the hole.

"Almost there," Mathias said. It wasn't clear whom he was talking to, perhaps himself; that was how quiet his voice was.

Amy turned, glanced at him, at the windlass. The rope was nearly played out, just a few more rotations to go. When she looked back into the shaft, Jeff was gone. The rope went down and down and down into the darkness, swaying slightly as it uncoiled, and she could no longer see its end. She had to resist the urge to call out to Jeff, the sense that he'd vanished not merely from sight but altogether.

The windlass finally stopped its creaking. Eric and Mathias joined Amy beside the hole, all three of them staring into it. Amy could hear the other two working to catch their breath. "All right?" Mathias called.

"Pull it up," Jeff yelled back. His voice seemed far away, full of echoes, not quite his own.

Mathias rewound the windlass by himself, and it went quickly, weightless, the creaking sounding different now, higher-pitched, with an odd hint of laughter in it, which was a creepy thing to hear. It made Amy shiver, hug herself. Say no, she was thinking. You can say it. Just say it. But then Eric was handing her the sling, helping her into it, and she still hadn't spoken. It's not that bad, she told herself. You've already done it once. Why shouldn't you do it again? And those were the words she kept in her head as she stepped out into the open air, swaying there for a moment, before she began her slow descent into the hole.

It was different in daylight. Better in some ways, worse in others. She could see more, of course, as she moved downward-could see the shaft, with the rocks and timbers embedded in its walls, the vine growing here and there in long, looping strands, like decorations for a party. But the light also heightened the feeling of transit, of crossing a border as she dropped, moving from one world into another. It was an oppressive sensation. Day into night, sight into blindness, life into death: These were the connotations. Looking up wasn't the right idea, either-it only made things worse-because, even at this relatively shallow depth, the daylight already seemed impossibly far away. And, just as Jeff had appeared to grow smaller as he descended, now the hole looked to be shrinking, as if threatening to close altogether, like a mouth, swallowing her into the earth. She gripped the sling, concentrated on slowing her breathing, struggling to calm herself. The sling was damp-from Jeff's body, Amy assumed, his sweat. Or maybe it was her own. She was beginning to sway back and forth, almost touching the walls of the shaft, and she tried to stop herself, but that only seemed to make it worse, a wobbly, seasick feeling stirring in her gut. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth, and this didn't help things, made it seem all the more possible, even with her stomach empty, that she might throw up here, puke spewing from her, splattering down on Jeff, waiting in the darkness below.

She shut her eyes.

Somehow, the feeling passed.

The air was growing cooler and cooler, cold even. Amy had forgotten about this, would've worn something warmer had she remembered, plundering a sweater from one of the archaeologists' backpacks. She began to shiver, even as she continued to sweat. Nerves, she knew: fear.

By the time she opened her eyes again, Jeff had come into view. Murkily: He was there, and not there. It was like seeing him underwater, or through smoke. He had his head tilted back. Amy couldn't make out his face, but there was something about his posture that made her certain he was smiling up at her. Despite herself-despite her fear, despite her sweating and shivering and general sense of discomfort-she smiled back.

Her feet touched the floor of the shaft. The sling went slack; the creaking stopped. And it was odd, because the sudden silence gave her a panicky sensation, a tightness in her chest. "Well," she said, just for the sound of the words, to break that eerie quiet. "Here we are."

Jeff was helping her out of the sling. "It's incredible," he said. "Isn't it? How far down do you think we are?"

Amy was too startled by the obvious excitement in his voice, the pleasure, to answer him. He was enjoying this, she realized. Even with everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, somehow he was managing to find pleasure in this. He was like a little boy, with a little boy's passions: the illicit joys of things underground-caves and hideouts and secret tunnels.

"Farther than I've ever been," he said. "No doubt about that. You think it could be a hundred feet?"

"Jeff," she said. It was strange: they were in darkness, but there was light, too. Or some hint of it, some residue dropping toward them from above. As her eyes kept adjusting, she could see more and more, the walls and floor of the shaft, and Jeff, too-his face. She could see him peering at her, his puzzled expression.

"What?" he asked.

"Let's just find the phone, okay?"

He nodded. "Right. The phone."

Amy watched him crouch, begin to prepare his torch. He uncapped the tequila, started to sprinkle the liquor over the knot of clothing, slowly, letting it soak in. He took his time, pouring a small trickle, then pausing, then pouring some more. Amy could smell the tequila; she was so emptied out-hungry, thirsty, tired-that the scent alone made her feel slightly drunk. She could see a sock and a shoe lying on the floor of the shaft, a few feet to Jeff's right, and it took a long moment to realize that they were Pablo's. They were the ones Eric had removed yesterday so that he could scrape the bottom of Pablo's foot to see if his spine was broken. They'd forgotten them in the flurry of their departure last night, and now they were already covered with a thin growth of vine. Amy almost bent to retrieve them, thinking Pablo would want them, but then she caught herself, feeling stupid. And wretched, too, because-morbidly-she'd started to smile. No need for socks and shoes anymore, of course, not for Pablo, not ever again.

"There was a shovel there last night," she said, surprising herself with the words. She hadn't thought them out first, hadn't even been conscious of noticing the shovel's absence until she'd heard herself remark upon it. She pointed toward the far wall of the shaft, where the shovel had been leaning. It wasn't there anymore.

Jeff turned, followed her gesture. "Are you sure?" he asked.

She nodded. "It was the kind you can fold up."

Jeff stared for another moment, then returned to his torch, dribbling more tequila across it. "Maybe they took it," he said.

"They?"

"The vines."

"Why would they do that?"

"Mathias and I were trying to dig a hole earlier, using a rock and a tent stake-for a latrine, and to distill our urine. Maybe they don't want us to be able to do that."

Amy was silent. There was so much to contest in this that she felt something like panic in the face of it, a buzzing sensation rising in her head. She didn't know where to begin. "You're saying they can see? They could see you digging?"

Jeff shrugged. "They have to have some way of sensing things. How else would they be able to reach out and take Pablo's feet like that?"

Pheromones, Amy was thinking. Reflexes. She didn't want the vine to be able to see, was horrified by the prospect of this, wanted its actions to be automatic, preconscious. "And it can communicate?" she said.

Jeff stopped with the bottle, capped it; the clothes were thoroughly saturated now. "What do you mean?"

"They saw you digging up there, and then they told the ones down here to hide the shovel." She wanted to laugh, the idea seemed so absurd. But something was keeping her from laughing, that buzzing in her head.

"I guess," Jeff said.

"And they think? "

"Definitely."

"But-"

"They dragged down my sign. How could they have known to do that without-"

"They're plants, Jeff. Plants don't see. They don't communicate. They don't think. They-"

"Was there a shovel there last night?" He gestured toward the shaft's far wall.

"I think so. I-"

"Then where is it now?"

Amy was silent. She couldn't answer this.

"If something moved it," Jeff said, "don't you think it makes sense to assume it was the vine?"

Before she could respond, the chirping resumed. It was coming from her left, down the open shaft. Jeff fumbled quickly with the box of matches, plucked one out, struck it into flame, held it to the knot of clothing. The alcohol seemed to grab at the match, sucking its light into itself with a fluttering sound, a cloud of pale blue fire materializing around the torch. Jeff lifted it up, held it before them; it gave off a weak, tenuous glow, which seemed constantly on the verge of going out. Amy could tell it wouldn't last long.

"Quick," he said, waving her toward the open shaft.

The chirping continued-it was up to three rings now-and the two of them rushed forward, hurrying to find it before it fell silent again. Five rapid strides and they were into the shaft, a steady stream of cold air pushing against them, making the torch in Jeff's hand shudder weakly. Amy felt a moment's terror, leaving that small square of open sky behind, the ceiling dropping low enough for Jeff to have to crouch as he moved forward. The darkness seemed to press in on them, to constrict somehow with each step they took, as if the walls and ceiling of the shaft were shifting inward. The vine, oddly, in such a lightless place, appeared to be growing in great profusion here, covering every available surface. They were wading through it, knee-deep, and it was hanging toward them from above, too, brushing against Amy's face; if she hadn't been so desperate to find the phone, she would've immediately turned and fled.

There came a fourth chirp, still in front of them, drawing them more deeply into the shaft. Amy could sense a wall somewhere ahead-even in the darkness, even without being able to glimpse it yet-somehow she knew that the shaft came to an end in another thirty feet or so. The chirping had an echo to it, but it still seemed clear to her that the phone was by this far wall, lying on the floor, buried beneath the vines. They'd need to get on their hands and knees to search for it. She was nearly running now, her eagerness to find the phone before it stopped ringing combining with her terror of this place, both of them working together to push her onward.

Jeff was moving more cautiously, hanging back. She was leaving him and his torch behind her, the vine brushing against her body, but softly, caressingly, seeming almost to part to allow her passage.

"Wait," Jeff said, and then he stopped altogether, holding the flickering torch out before him, trying to see more clearly.

Amy ignored him; all she wanted was to get there, to find it, to leave. She could see the wall now, or something like it: a shadow materializing in front of her, a blockage.

"Amy," Jeff said, louder now, his voice echoing back at her from the approaching wall. She hesitated, slowing, half-turning, and it came to her suddenly that the vine was moving, that this was the sense of constriction she was feeling; it wasn't simply the darkness deepening, the shaft narrowing. No, it was the flowers. Hanging from the ceiling, the walls, rising toward her from the floor, the flowers on the vine were moving, opening and closing like so many tiny mouths. Realizing this, she nearly stopped altogether. But then the phone chirped a fifth time, drawing her on; she knew there wouldn't be many more rings. And it was close now, too-right against the wall, she guessed. All she had to do was drop onto her-

"Amy!" Jeff yelled, startling her. He was moving again, hurrying toward her, the torch held up before him. "Don't-"

"It's right here," she said. She took another step. It was silly, but she wanted to be the one to find it. "It's-"

"Stop!" he shouted. And then, before she could respond, he was right beside her, grabbing her arm, jerking her back a step, pulling her close to him. She sensed his face beside her own, felt its warmth, heard him whisper, "There's no phone."

"What?" she asked, confused. A sixth chirp sounded right then, seeming to emerge from the vines directly in front of them. Amy tried to pull free. "It's-"

Jeff yanked her back, his grip tight, hurting her. He bent, whispered again, right into her ear. "It's the vine," he said. "The flowers. They're making the noise."

She shook her head, not believing, not wanting to believe. "No. It's right-"

Jeff leaned forward with the torch, shoving it down toward the floor of the shaft, into the mass of vines a few feet in front of them. The vines flinched away from the fire, parting as the torch approached, creating an opening in their midst. They moved so quickly, they seemed to hiss. Jeff crouched, pushing the flames downward into what ought to have been the floor but was open darkness instead, the draft increasing suddenly, stirring Amy's hair, disorienting her. Jeff was waving the torch back and forth now, widening the hole he'd created, and it took Amy several seconds to realize what she was seeing, what this darkness was, why there was no floor here. It was the mouth of another shaft, dropping straight down; the vines had been growing across it, hiding it from sight. A trap, she realized. They'd been luring her and Jeff forward, hoping they'd step into open air here, fall into the darkness.

There was a sharp whistling sound, like a whip might make, and one of the vines lashed out, wrapped itself around the aluminum handle of Jeff's torch, yanked it from his grip. Amy watched it fall, its light fluttering, almost failing, but still burning even as it hit bottom, thirty feet beneath them. She had a glimpse of white-bones, she thought-and what might've been a skull staring up at her. The shovel was there, too, and more of the vine, a writhing, snakelike mass of it, recoiling from the little knot of fire burning in its midst. Then the flames flickered, dimmed, went out.

It was dark after this, terribly dark, darker than Amy would've thought possible. For a moment, all she could hear was Jeff's breathing beside her, and the faint thump of her own heartbeat in her ears, but then that whistling sound came again, louder this time, denser, and she knew even before they began to grab at her that it was the vines she was hearing. They seemed to come from every direction at once, from the walls and the floor and the ceiling, smacking against her body, wrapping themselves around her arms and legs-even her neck-pulling her toward the open shaft.

Amy screamed, scrambling backward, tearing at them with her hands, yanking free one limb, only to feel another immediately become ensnared. The vine wasn't strong enough to overpower her in this manner-it tore too easily, its sap bleeding across her skin, burning her-but it kept coming, more and more of it. She spun and kicked and continued to scream, panicking now, losing her sense of direction, until finally, in the darkness, she could no longer tell which way led to safety, which to the shaft's open mouth.

"Jeff?" she called, and then she felt his hand grasping her, pulling her, and she surrendered, following him, the vines thrashing at both of them, grabbing and tearing and burning.

Jeff shouted something, but she couldn't understand it. He was dragging her backward, the two of them stumbling, falling over each other, onto their hands and knees amid the vines, which caught at them, trying to hold them down, and then they were up again, and there was a faint hint of light in front of them, and they were sprinting for it, Jeff pulling Amy by her arm, the vines falling away behind them, going still again, motionless, silent.

Amy saw the sling hanging from its rope. And then, up above, that little window of sky. When she craned backward, peering toward it, she could see Eric and Mathias, the shadowed outline of their two heads, staring down at her.

"Jeff?" Mathias called.

Jeff didn't bother answering. He was looking back toward the open shaft behind them. It was just darkness there now, with that steady push of cold air, but he seemed reluctant to take his eyes from it. "Get in the sling," he said to her.

Amy could hear how short of breath he was. She was, too, and she stood beside him for a long moment, not moving, struggling to regain herself.

Jeff crouched, grabbed the bottle of tequila, uncapped it. He picked up Pablo's sock, spilled some of the liquor across it.

"What're you doing?" she whispered.

There was the sound of something stirring now from within the dark mouth of the shaft, almost inaudible, but growing steadily louder. Jeff started to stuff Pablo's sock down the neck of the tequila bottle, using his forefinger to push it deep. The sound kept increasing in volume, still too soft to hear clearly, but oddly familiar-like the shuffle of cards-strange and horrifying and almost human.

"Hurry, Amy," Jeff said.

She didn't argue; she reached for the sling, ducked her arms through it, her head.

Mathias called again: "Jeff?"

"Pull her up!"

Amy tilted her head back, looked. The heads were still visible, peering down at her from that tiny rectangle of sky. She knew they couldn't see her in the darkness, though. She saw Mathias cup his hands around his mouth. "What happened?" he yelled.

Jeff was fumbling with the box of matches. "Now!" he shouted.

The sound was louder-a little louder with every passing second-and as it climbed in volume, it grew steadily more familiar. Amy knew what it was; it was in her head, this knowledge, but just out of reach. She didn't want to hear any more, didn't want the knowledge to reveal itself. The sling gave a jerk, and then that creaking began again, dropping toward her from above, blotting out this other sound, the one she didn't want to know, and she was in motion, rising into the air, her feet swinging free of the shaft's floor. Jeff didn't even glance at her. His gaze moved back and forth, from the box of matches to the darkness where that sound lurked, even now continuing to gain in volume, as if intent on following her upward into the light, capturing her, dragging her back down.

Beneath her, Amy saw Jeff's hand flick, a match burst into flame. He held it to Pablo's sock, the tequila catching instantly, coming alight with the same pale blue fire as the torch. Jeff rose to his feet, held the bottle out to his side for a moment, making sure it was burning steadily. Then, side-armed, like a grenade, he threw it down the open shaft. Amy heard the bottle shatter, and a glow swept outward, illuminating Jeff more fully.

A Molotov cocktail, she thought. It seemed odd to her that she should know the name for this; she pictured Poles throwing them impotently at Russian tanks, a futile, desperate gesture. Beneath her, Jeff stood perfectly still, staring off into the shaft; the fire was already dimming, and she kept rising so steadily. Soon, she knew-quite soon-she'd lose sight of him altogether. The flames ought to have stopped that dreadful noise, that sound she recognized yet didn't want to know, and at first this seemed to be the case, but then the noise resumed again, more quietly, and yet in a manner that somehow seemed to envelop her completely. It took Amy a moment to realize that the sound wasn't coming from beneath her any longer; it was all around her now, and above her, too. Jeff was slipping from sight, the fire dying out, the shadows reclaiming him, and as she lifted her eyes to see how much farther she had to climb, a hint of movement caught her gaze, held it fast. It was the plants hanging from the walls of the shaft, paler, more spindly versions of their cousins up above. Their tiny flowers were opening and closing. This was what was making that terrible noise, Amy realized-it was coming so much more softly now, insidiously-the sound she finally had no choice but to recognize, to acknowledge, the sound she also guessed was being echoed all across the hillside.

They're laughing, she thought.

Once they'd pulled them both back up from the shaft, there wasn't much left to do. Jeff was out of plans, for once; he seemed a little dazed by what he'd witnessed down there. They carried Pablo back to his lean-to; then they all sat together-everyone but Stacy, who was still at the base of the hill, waiting for the Greeks-and passed around the plastic jug of water. Eric noticed that Jeff's hands were shaking as he reached to take his allotted swallow, and he felt an odd sense of pleasure in this. After all, his own hands were shaking-they had been for quite some time now-so it felt good to see the others beginning to join him. The miserable misery of the miser, he thought. For some reason, he couldn't get the words out of his mind, and he had to keep resisting the urge to speak them.

"They were laughing at us," Amy whispered.

No one said anything. Mathias capped the jug, stood up and returned it to the tent. Jeff had told them what had happened as soon as he'd emerged from the hole, how it was the plants who'd been making that cell phone noise, trying to lure them into a trap, and even this disappointment, with its accompanying freight of terror, had held some solace for Eric. Because now they were going to see; now, having witnessed the vine's power, they were going to believe him when he said it was still in his body, growing, eating him from the inside out. He could still feel it, certainly; he couldn't stop feeling it. There was a burrowing sensation in his leg, something small and wormlike in the flesh beside his shinbone, constantly in motion, probing and chewing. It seemed to be working its way toward his foot. And then, higher up, in his chest, there was no movement at all, only a steady pressure, impossible to ignore. Eric imagined some sort of void there, just beneath his ribs, a natural cavity within his body that was slowly being filled by the vine, the plant twisting back upon itself as it grew, shoving his organs aside, taking up more and more space with each passing moment. He believed that if he were to cut himself at this spot, just the smallest of incisions, the plant would tumble outward into the light, smeared with his blood, like some horrific newborn, writhing and twisting, its flowers opening and closing, a dozen tiny mouths begging to be fed.

Pablo moaned-it almost sounded like a word, as if he were calling out for something-but when they turned to look, his eyes were still shut, his body motionless. Dreaming, Eric thought, yet he knew immediately that it wasn't so, that it was worse, far worse. It was delirium, the stumble before the fall.

Dreaming, delirium, dying…

"Shouldn't we give him some water?" Amy asked.

Her voice sounded odd to Eric. Her hands must be shaking, too, he thought. No one answered her. They sat for several long moments staring in silence at Pablo, waiting for him to open his eyes, to stir, but he did neither. The only sound was the wet, phlegmy rattle of his breathing. Eric had the memory of himself lying half-asleep somewhere, early in the morning, listening as someone dragged furniture back and forth across the floor of the room above him, rearranging it. He'd been visiting a friend, sleeping on a couch. Oddly, Eric couldn't remember the friend's name. He could see the empty beer bottles lined up on the coffee table, could smell the mustiness of the pillow he'd been given, could hear the furniture being pushed and shoved from one side of the room above him to another, but he was so tired, so parched, so famished that somehow he couldn't remember who his host had been. That was the noise he was hearing now, though-there was no doubt of this-that was what Pablo's breathing sounded like, a table being dragged across a wooden floor.

Amy persisted: "He hasn't had any water, not since-"

"He's unconscious," Jeff said, cutting her off. "How are we supposed to give him water?"

Amy frowned, silenced.

One by one, they all stopped watching Pablo-shutting their eyes, glancing away, not looking back. Eric's gaze drifted around the clearing, aimlessly, only to catch, finally, on the knife. It was lying beside the lean-to. Its blade was dull with the Greek's blood, completely stained from point to hilt. It wasn't that far away-to reach it, all Eric had to do was shift a foot or two to his left, then lean, stretching, and suddenly it was in his hand. Its grip felt warm from the sun, comfortingly so, the right thing for him to be holding. He tried to wipe the blade clean on his T-shirt, but the blood had dried and wouldn't come off. Eric was dehydrated enough that he had to work with his tongue before he could gather enough saliva to spit. Even this didn't help, though; as soon as he started to scrub at the blade, his T-shirt-eaten to a muslinlike transparency by the green fuzz of the vine-began to shred into nothingness.

It didn't matter, he decided. It wasn't infection that he was worried about.

He leaned forward and cut a three-inch-long slit in his leg, just to the left of his shin, slightly beneath the incision Mathias had made earlier that morning. It hurt, of course, especially since he had to push deep, probing down into the muscle, prying the flesh back with the edge of the knife, so that he could hunt for the tiny piece of vine he knew must be in there. The pain was intense-loud, was how it felt-but also strangely consoling: it felt bracing, clarifying. Blood was pooling in the slit, spilling outward, running down his leg, making it difficult to see, so he reached with his free hand, stuck his forefinger into the wound, digging, searching by feel, the pain like a man running up a flight of stairs now, sprinting, skipping steps. The others were watching him, too startled to speak. The worming sensation continued, despite the pain; Eric could feel the thing fleeing downward, away from his finger. He started in once more with the knife, cutting deeper, and then Jeff was on his feet, moving quickly toward him.

Eric glanced up, the blood running thickly down his lower leg, beginning to collect in his shoe again. He was expecting solicitude, an offer to help, and was astonished to see the disgust on Jeff's face, the impatience. Jeff reached, grabbed for the knife, yanking it from Eric's grip. "Stop it," he said, tossing the knife away, sending it skittering into the dirt. "Don't be a fucking idiot."

There was silence in the clearing. Eric turned to the others, assuming one of them might offer something in his defense, but they avoided his eyes, their faces set, echoing Jeff's disapproval.

"Don't you think we've got enough problems?" Jeff asked.

Eric made a helpless gesture, waving his bloody hands at his bloody shin. "It's inside me."

"All you're going to do is get yourself infected. Is that what you want? An infected leg?"

"It's not just my leg. It's my chest, too." Eric touched the spot on his chest, the dull ache there, laying his palm against it. He believed he could feel the vine pressing subtly back.

"Nothing's inside you. Understand?" Jeff asked, his voice matching the hardness in his face-the frustration, the fatigue. "You're imagining it, and you just-you just fucking have to stop." With that, he turned and strode back into the center of the clearing.

He started to pace, and everyone watched him. Pablo continued to drag that heavy table along the wooden floor, and suddenly the name Mike O'Donnell popped into Eric's head. That was his friend: redhaired, gap-toothed, a lacrosse player. They'd known each other in high school, had gone to different colleges, gradually grown apart. He'd been living in an old row house outside of Baltimore, and Eric had spent a weekend there. They'd gone to an Orioles game, had bought horrible tickets from a scalper, ended up not being able to see a thing. All this was only two or three years ago, but it seemed impossibly far away now, another life altogether from the one he was living here, sitting in this little clearing, listening to the dreadful rasp of Pablo's breathing-dreaming, delirium, dying-wanting to push his finger into his open wound again, but resisting the urge, telling himself, It's not there, and struggling to believe it.

Jeff stopped pacing. "Somebody should go relieve Stacy," he said.

No one moved; no one spoke.

Jeff turned first to Amy, then to Mathias. Neither of them met his eyes. He didn't even bother to look at Eric. "All right," he said finally, waving his hand, dismissing the three of them-their inertia, their lassitude, their helplessness-his disgust seeming generalized now, all-encompassing. "I'll do it."

And then, without another word or glance, he turned and walked out of the clearing.

They should've eaten something, Jeff realized as he picked his way down the hill. It was well past noon now; they should've divided up the two bananas, cut them into five equal portions, chewed and swallowed, and called it lunch. Then the orange for dinner-maybe some of the grapes, too-these were the things that wouldn't keep, that were already beginning to spoil in the heat. And then what? Pretzels, nuts, protein bars-how long could this last them? A couple more days, Jeff assumed, and after that the fasting would begin, the starving. There was no point in worrying about it, he supposed, not when there wasn't anything he could do to change the situation. Wishing or praying-increasingly this was all that was left for them, and, in Jeff's mind, wishing or praying was the same as doing nothing at all.

He should've brought the knife with him. Eric was going to keep cutting himself, unless the others stopped him, and Jeff didn't trust Amy and Mathias to do this. He was losing them, he knew. Only twenty-four hours and already they were acting like victims-slope-shouldered, blank-faced. Even Mathias seemed to have retreated somehow, over the course of the morning, grown passive, when Jeff needed him to be active.

He should've known it wasn't a cell phone in the shaft; he should've anticipated such a turn of events, or something like it. He wasn't thinking as clearly as he ought to, and he knew this would only lead to peril. The vine could've easily eaten the rope, but it hadn't. It had left it untouched on the windlass, which meant that it had wanted them to drop back into the hole, and Jeff should've seen this, should've understood that it could only mean one thing, that the chirping sound was a trap. The vine could move and think and mimic different noises-not just the cell phone but the birds, too. Because it must've been the vine that had cried out like that to warn the Mayans as he'd crept down the hill the previous evening, and he should've realized this also.

He was getting sloppy. He was losing control, and he didn't know how to reclaim it.

Stacy came into sight, sitting hunched under her sunshade, facing the clearing, the Mayans, the jungle beyond. She didn't hear Jeff approach, didn't turn to greet him, but it wasn't until he was nearly upon her that he understood why. She was sitting cross-legged, slumped forward, the umbrella propped on her shoulder, her eyes shut, her mouth hanging ajar: she was sound asleep. Jeff stood for nearly a minute, staring down at her, his hands on his hips. His first flash of anger at her negligence passed in an instant; he was too worn-out to sustain it. He knew it didn't really matter, not in any practical sense. If the Greeks had arrived, they would've called out as soon as they'd glimpsed her sitting here, would've roused her while they were still far enough away to be stopped. And, more to the point, the Greeks hadn't arrived, probably weren't ever going to. So there was no place for anger here; it came and went, brief as a shudder.

Her umbrella was angled the wrong way, its circle of shade only covering the upper half of her body, leaving her lap, her crossed legs, exposed to the noontime sun. Her feet, in their mud-stained sandals, were burned all the way up to the ankle-a deep, raw-meat red. They were going to blister later, then peel, a painful process. If it were Amy, this would involve a prodigious amount of complaining-tears, even, at times-but Stacy, Jeff knew, probably wouldn't even notice, let alone mention it. This was part of that spacey quality of hers, a sort of disassociation from her body. Jeff often found it hard to resist comparing her to Amy. He'd met them together, had lived in the same dorm with them his freshman year, one floor down, directly beneath their room. He'd come up late one evening to complain about a pounding noise and found them in their pajamas, crouched above a small pile of wood with a hammer and nails and a sheet of instructions written in Korean. It was a bookshelf Amy had purchased over the Internet, very cheap, not realizing she'd have to put it together herself. Jeff ended up building it for them; in the process, they'd all become friends. For a short period, it wasn't even clear which of them he was courting, and he supposed that this was part of what made it so difficult for him to stop looking at them in a comparative way, weighing their differences, one against the other.

In the end, Amy had won him with her personality-she was so much more solid than Stacy, more grounded, more dependable, despite her complaining-but, in a purely physical sense, Stacy had actually been the one he'd found more attractive. It was something about her dark eyes, and the way she could look at you with them, all of a sudden, a glance that seemed almost painfully open, hiding nothing. She was sexy, alluringly so, where Amy was merely pretty. There'd even been a brief period, shortly after he and Amy had started dating in earnest, when Jeff had entertained the brief, tawdry fantasy of having an affair with Stacy. Because what had happened on the beach with Don Quixote wasn't an isolated occurrence. Stacy had a tendency toward that sort of thing; she was promiscuous in a sly, helpless way, almost despite herself. She liked to kiss strange boys, to touch and be touched, especially when she'd been drinking. Eric knew about some of these misadventures, but not others. They had fights over the ones he did discover, screaming and cursing viciously at each other, only-always-to make up in the end, with Stacy offering tearful, apparently heartfelt promises, which she'd inevitably break, sometimes within days. It seemed strange to remember all this now, especially his fantasy of betrayal, and difficult to recall exactly how he'd managed to entertain it. Or why, for that matter. Far away: that was how it felt.

The odd thing about Stacy was that, despite the aura of sexuality she exuded, there was also something strikingly childish about her. Partly this was a matter of personality-that flightiness, that preference for play and fantasy over anything that might possibly feel like work-but it was just as much something physical, something in the features of her face, the shape of her head, which was noticeably round, and a little too large for her body, more like a little girl's than a grown woman's. It was a quality Jeff doubted she'd ever grow out of. Even if she survived this place, even if she lived on into a wrinkled, stooping, shuffling, trembling old age, she'd probably still retain it. And, of course, it was especially heightened now, with her looking so defenseless, sunk so deeply in sleep.

She shouldn't be here, Jeff thought. The words rose in his head unsought, startling him. It was true, of course: None of them should've been there. Yet they were, and without much prospect, it increasingly appeared, of ever managing to be anywhere else again. It had been his idea to come to Mexico, his idea to accompany Mathias on his search for Henrich. Was this what those words were pointing toward, some hesitant shouldering of responsibility? The vine had taken root on Stacy's sandals, clinging to the leather like a garland, and as Jeff began to flirt with this idea, he crouched before her, reaching to pull the plant free.

She woke to his touch, jerking away, scrambling to her feet, dropping her umbrella: frightened. "What happened?" she asked, almost shouting the words.

Jeff made soothing motions in the air; he would've touched her, too-grasped her hand, hugged her-but she took a step backward, moving beyond his reach. "You fell asleep," he said.

Stacy shielded her eyes, struggling to orient herself. The vine was growing on her clothes, too, Jeff saw. A long tendril hung off the front of her T-shirt; another trailed down the left leg of her khakis, twining itself around her calf. Jeff bent, picked up her sunshade, held it out to her. She stared at it, as if she were having trouble recognizing it-what it was, how it related to her-then she took it, propped it on her shoulder. She retreated another step. As if she's frightened of me, Jeff thought, and felt a flicker of irritation.

He waved up the hill. "You can go back now."

Stacy didn't move. She lifted her sunburned foot, scratched absentmindedly at it. "It was laughing," she said.

Jeff just stared at her. He knew what she meant, but he couldn't think of a way to respond. Something about her, about this encounter here, was making him conscious of his fatigue. He had to resist the urge to yawn.

Stacy gestured around them. "The vine."

He nodded. "We went back down into the shaft. To look for the cell phone."

Stacy's expression changed in an instant-everything did, her posture, the sound of her voice-animated by hope. "You found it?"

Jeff shook his head. "It was a trap. The vine was making the noise." He felt as if he'd struck her; the effect of his words upon her was that dramatic. She slumped, her face going slack, losing color.

"I heard it laughing. The whole hillside."

Jeff nodded. "It mimics things." And then, because she seemed in such need of reassurance: "It's just a sound it's learned to make. It's not really laughter."

"I fell asleep." Stacy seemed surprised by this, as if she were talking of someone else. "I was so scared. I was…" She shook her head, unable to find the right words, then finished weakly: "I don't know how I fell asleep."

"You're tired. We all are."

"Is he okay?" Stacy whispered.

"Who?"

"Pablo. Is he"-and here again, there was that fumbling search for the proper words-"all right?"

It was odd, but it took Jeff a moment to grasp what she was talking about. He could look down and see the blood spattered on his jeans, but he had to struggle before he could remember whom it belonged to, or how it had gotten there. Tired, he thought, though he knew it was more than that. Inside, he was in full flight, just like the rest of them. "He's unconscious," he said.

"His legs?"

"Gone."

"But he's alive?"

Jeff nodded.

"And he's going to be okay?"

"We'll see."

"Amy didn't stop you?"

Jeff shook his head.

"She was supposed to stop you."

"We were already done."

Stacy fell silent at that.

Jeff could feel his impatience building again, his frustration with her; he wanted her to leave. Why wouldn't she leave? He knew what she was going to say next, guessed at it, waited for it, but was still taken aback when it came-affronted.

"I don't think you should've done it," she said.

He gave a brusque wave, swatting the words aside. "A little late for that, isn't it?"

Stacy hesitated, watching him. Then, seemingly despite herself: "I just wanted to say it. So you'd know. That I wish I'd voted the other way. That I didn't want you to cut them off."

Jeff couldn't think how to respond to this. All the options that presented themselves were unacceptable. He wanted to shout at her, to shake her by her shoulders, slap her across the face, but he knew that nothing good would come from any of this. Everyone seemed so intent on failing him here, on letting him down; they were all so much weaker than he ever would've anticipated. He was simply trying to do the right thing, to save Pablo's life, to save them all, and no one seemed capable of recognizing this, let alone finding the strength within themselves to help him do any of the difficult things that needed to be done. "You should get back," he said finally. "Tell them to give you some water."

Stacy nodded, tugging at the tiny vine that clung to her T-shirt. She pulled it free, and the fabric tore open in a long slit. She wasn't wearing a bra; Jeff had a brief glimpse of her right breast. It looked surprisingly like Amy's: the same size, the same shape, but with a darker nipple, a deep brown, whereas Amy's was the faintest of pink. Jeff glanced quickly away, the gesture assuming a life of its own, inertia carrying him onward, turning him around, so that, without really meaning to, he ended up with his back to her. He stared across the clearing at the Mayans. Most of them were lying in the shade along the edge of the jungle now, trying to hide from the day's heat. Several were smoking, talking among themselves; others appeared to be napping. They'd let the fire burn down, banking the embers with ashes. No one was paying Jeff or Stacy any attention, and he had the brief illusion that he could just stride across the clearing, walk right through their midst, vanish into the shadows beneath the trees, and that none of them would stir to stop him. He knew it for what it was, though, a fantasy, could imagine easily enough the scramble for their weapons as he started forward, the shout of warning, the twang of bowstrings, and he felt no impulse to attempt it.

He could see the little boy from the day before, the one who'd followed them as they'd left the village, riding on the handlebars of that squeaky bike. He was standing near the remains of the campfire, trying to teach himself to juggle. He had three fist-size stones, and he'd toss them one after another into the air, striving for that smooth circular motion one saw clowns give to balls and swords and flaming torches. He lacked their grace, though, couldn't begin to approximate it; he kept dropping the stones, only to pick them up and immediately try again. After half a dozen repetitions of this, he sensed Jeff's gaze. He turned, stared at him, holding his eyes, and this, too, seemed to become a sort of game, a challenge, both of them refusing to look away. Jeff certainly wasn't going to be the one to surrender; he was pouring all his frustration into the encounter, all his fury, becoming so focused upon it that he hardly registered the sound of Stacy turning and starting away from him, her footsteps diminishing with each passing second, before they faded, finally, into silence.

Stacy found Amy and Eric in the clearing beside the tent. Amy was sitting on the ground, with her back to Pablo, clasping her knees to her chest. Her eyes were shut. Eric was pacing; he didn't even glance at Stacy when she appeared. There was no sign of Mathias.

Stacy's thirst was her first concern. "Jeff said I could have some water," she announced.

Amy opened her eyes, stared at her, but didn't speak. Neither did Eric. There was a cooking smell in the clearing, a dark circle of soot where Mathias had built his fire, and Stacy thought, They made lunch. Then she remembered the reason for the fire, and she half-glanced toward Pablo, half-saw him lying there beneath his lean-to (his sunken eyes, the glistening pink-and-black stubs of his legs…), before she recoiled, turning toward the tent, fleeing. The flap was hanging open, and she ducked quickly past it, leaving her sunshade lying on the ground outside.

The light was dimmer here; it took a moment for Stacy's eyes to adjust. Mathias was lying on one of the sleeping bags, curled onto his side. His eyes were closed, but Stacy could sense, somehow, that he wasn't asleep. She crept to the rear of the tent, passing right by him, and crouched to pick up the jug of water. She twisted off its cap, took a long swallow, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It wasn't enough, of course-the entire jug wouldn't have been enough-and she toyed briefly with the idea of taking another sip. She knew it would be wrong, though, and felt guilty merely at the thought of the transgression, so she capped the bottle. When she turned to leave, she found Mathias peering toward her, with that typically unreadable expression of his.

"Jeff told me I could," she said. She was worried he might think she was stealing the water.

Mathias nodded. He remained silent, staring.

"Is he okay?" Stacy whispered, gesturing out toward Pablo.

Mathias hesitated long enough for it to begin to seem as if he wasn't going to answer her. Then he gave a slow shake of his head.

Stacy couldn't think of anything more to say. She took another step toward the open flap, then stopped again. "Are you?" she asked.

Mathias's face shifted, edging toward a smile that didn't happen. For an instant, she thought he might even laugh, but that didn't happen, either. "Are you?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No."

And then, nothing: he just kept staring at her with that look, which was one small notch beyond blank, hinting at a weary sort of amusement without actually expressing it. Finally, she realized he was waiting for her to leave. So that was what she did; she stooped back out into the sunlight, zipping the flap shut behind her.

Eric was still pacing. Stacy noticed that his leg was bleeding again, and she thought about asking him why, but then she realized she didn't want to know. She wished he'd go into the tent with Mathias and lie down, and would've forced him to do it, too, if she could've only thought of a way. They all ought to be in the tent, probably; that would be what Jeff would want. In the shade, resting, conserving their strength. But it felt like a trap inside. You were closed in; you couldn't see what was happening, what might be coming. Stacy didn't want to be in there, and she assumed the others felt the same way. She didn't understand how Mathias could bear it.

She retrieved her sunshade, sat in the dirt a few feet to Amy's right. Eric continued to pace, the blood leaking slowly down his leg; his shoe squeaked with it every time he took a step. Stacy wanted him to stop, wanted him to find some sort of calm for himself, and she spent a while willing this to happen. Sit down, Eric, she thought. Please sit down. It didn't work, of course; even if she'd spoken the words, shouted them, it wouldn't have worked.

The worst part of being out in the clearing wasn't the sun, or the heat. It was the sound of Pablo's breathing, which was loud, ragged, oddly irregular. Sometimes it would stop for a stretch of seconds-just fall silent-and, despite herself, Stacy would always end up glancing toward the little lean-to, thinking the same two words: He died. But then, with a rattling gasping rasp that always made her flinch, the Greek's breathing would resume once more, though not before she'd been forced to look at him again, to see those glistening, blistered stumps, those eyes that refused to open, that thin thread of dark brown liquid seeping from the corner of his mouth.

There was the vine, too, of course; they were surrounded by it. Green, green, green-no matter which direction Stacy turned, it lay waiting in her line of vision. She kept trying to tell herself that it was just a plant, only a plant, nothing more than a plant. This was what it looked like now, after all; it wasn't moving, wasn't making that dreadful laughing sound. It was simply a pretty tangle of vegetation, with its tiny red flowers and its flat, hand-shaped leaves-soaking up the sunlight, harmlessly inert. This was what plants did; they didn't move, didn't laugh, couldn't move, couldn't laugh. But Stacy wasn't equal to the fantasy. It was like clenching an ice cube in her hand and willing it not to melt; the longer she held to it, the less she had. She'd seen the vine move, seen it burrowing into Eric's leg, seen it reach out to suck dry Amy's vomit, and she'd heard it, too, heard it laughing-the whole hillside laughing. She couldn't help but sense it watching now, observing them, planning its next sally.

She shifted closer to Amy, positioning her flimsy umbrella so that it covered them both in shade. When she took Amy's hand, she was startled by how damp it felt. Scared, she thought. And then she asked that question again, the same one she'd offered Mathias in the tent: "You okay?"

Amy shook her head, started to cry, gripping Stacy's hand.

"Shh," Stacy whispered, trying to soothe her. "Shh." She put her arm around Amy's shoulders, felt her weeping deepen, her body starting to jump with it, to hicccup. "What is it, sweetie?" she said. "What's the matter?"

Amy pulled her hand free, wiped her face with it. She began to shake her head, then couldn't seem to stop.

Eric was still pacing, lost in his own world, not even looking at them. Stacy watched him as he moved back and forth, back and forth, across the little clearing.

Finally, Amy managed to speak. "I'm just tired," she said, whispering the words. "That's all. I'm so tired." Then she started to cry again.

Stacy sat with her, waiting for it to pass. But it didn't. Finally, Stacy couldn't bear it any longer. She stood up, strode to the far side of the clearing. Pablo's pack was lying there; she reached into it, pulled out one of the remaining bottles of tequila. She carried it back toward Amy, breaking its seal-it was the only thing she could think to do. She sat again beneath the umbrella, took a long, burning swallow of the liquor, then held out the bottle. Amy stared down at it, still crying, blinking through her tears, wiping at them with her hand. Stacy could sense her debating, could feel her almost deciding against it, then surrendering. She took the bottle, put it to her lips, threw her head back, the tequila sloshing forward into her mouth, down her throat. She surfaced with a gasping sound-part cough, part sob.

Eric was sitting beside them suddenly, holding out his hand.

Amy gave him the bottle.

And so this was how they moved forward into the afternoon as the sun slowly began to wester. They huddled close together in that little clearing-surrounded by the massed and coiled vine, its green leaves, its red flowers-and passed the gradually emptying bottle back and forth among themselves.

It didn't take long for Amy to become drunk.

They started slowly, but it didn't matter. Her stomach was so empty that the tequila seemed to burn its way straight to her core. At first, she simply grew flushed, almost giggly with it, a little dizzy, too. Next came the slurred quality-to her words, her thoughts-and then, finally, the weariness. Eric had already drifted into sleep at her side, the trio of wounds on his leg continuing to leak their thin strings of blood down his shin. Stacy was awake-talking, even-but she'd somehow begun to seem increasingly far away; it was difficult to follow her words. Amy shut her eyes for a moment and began to think about nothing at all, which felt blissful: exactly the right way to be.

When she opened her eyes again, feeling stiff-wretched, actually-the sun was much lower in the sky. Eric was still asleep; Stacy was still talking.

"That's the thing, of course," she was saying. "Whether or not there was another train to catch. It shouldn't make a difference, but I'm sure it does to her; I'm sure she thinks about it all the time. Because if it was the last train of the day, if she would've had to spend the night in this strange city where she didn't even really know the language yet-well, that makes it a little better, doesn't it?"

Amy had no idea what Stacy was talking about, but she nodded anyway; it seemed like the right response. The tequila bottle was resting in front of Stacy, capped, lying on its side, half-full. Amy knew she should stop, that she'd been stupid to drink what she already had, that it would only dehydrate her, making everything that much more difficult to bear here, that night was coming and they ought to be sober to meet it, but none of this held any sway over her. She thought it all through, acknowledged its wisdom, then held out her hand for the bottle. Stacy passed it to her, still talking.

"I think so, too," she said. "If it's the last train, you run for it; you jump. And she was an athlete, remember-a good one. So she probably didn't even consider the possibility of falling, probably didn't even hesitate. Just ran, leapt. I didn't know her, really, so I can't say how it happened. I'm just speculating. I did see her once after she got back, though. Maybe a year later-which is pretty quick, when you consider everything. And she was playing basketball. Not with the team anymore, of course. But out on the playground. And she seemed, you know-she seemed okay. She was wearing sweatpants, so I couldn't see what they looked like. But I saw her run up and down the court, and it was almost normal. Not normal, exactly, but almost."

Amy took two quick swigs of the tequila. It was warm from sitting in the sun, and somehow this made it go down a little more easily than usual. They were big swallows, but she didn't cough. Stacy held her hand out for the bottle and Amy passed it back to her. She took a tiny sip, very ladylike, then capped the bottle and set it in her lap.

"She seemed happy-that's what I'm trying to say. She seemed all right. She was smiling; she was out there doing what she liked to do, even if, you know…" Stacy trailed off here, looking sad.

Amy was drunk and half-asleep, and she still had no idea what Stacy was talking about. "Even if?"

Stacy nodded gravely. "Exactly."

After that they sat for a stretch in silence. Amy was about to ask for the bottle again, when Stacy brightened suddenly.

"Want to see?" she asked.

"See?"

"How she ran?"

Amy nodded, and Stacy handed her the umbrella, the bottle. Then she stood up, started quickly across the little clearing, pretending to play basketball: dribbling, passing, feinting. After a jump shot, she jogged back, her hands high in the air, playing defense. Then, once more, she darted quickly to the other side, a fast break, a little leap for the layup. She ran with an odd hitch to her stride, almost a limp, and seemed slightly off balance, like some sort of long-legged wading bird. Amy took a long swallow from the bottle, watching, perplexed.

"You see?" Stacy said, breathing hard, still immersed in her imaginary game. "They saved the knees-that's the important thing. So she could still run pretty good. Just a little awkward. But like I said, this was only after a year or so. She might be even better now."

They saved the knees. Amy understood now: sprinting for a train, jumping, falling. They saved the knees. She took another swig of tequila, ventured a glance toward Pablo. His breathing had quieted somewhat, grown softer, slower, though that unsettling rasp-wet sounding, phlegm-filled-remained an essential part of it. He looked terrible, of course. How could he not? He had a broken back, and two seared stubs for legs. He'd lost a lot of blood, was dehydrated, unconscious, probably dying. And he stank, too-of shit and urine and charred flesh. The vine had begun to sprout on the sleeping bag, which had become sodden with the various fluids seeping off of him. They should do something about this, Amy realized, probably get rid of the sleeping bag altogether, lift Pablo clear of his backboard, yank the fetid thing out from under him. She understood that this would be the right thing to do, that it was what Jeff would probably have them attempt if he were here, but she made no move to undertake it. All she could think of was the previous evening-she and Eric at the bottom of the shaft, heaving Pablo toward the swaying backboard. She knew she wasn't going to try to pick the Greek up again, not now, not ever.

"Without the knees," Stacy was saying, "you have to swing them. Like this."

Amy turned to watch as Stacy moved around the edge of the clearing, stiff-legged, swaying, her face focused, concentrating. She was good at this sort of thing; she always had been, was a natural mimic. She looked like Captain Ahab, pacing the deck on his peg-leg. Amy laughed; she couldn't help it.

Stacy turned toward her, pleased. "I don't have the other one yet, do I? With the knees? Let me try again." She resumed her imaginary basketball game, just dribbling at first, trying out different leg movements, searching for the right effect. Then, abruptly, she seemed to get it, an awkward sort of grace, like a ballerina with numb feet. She ran to the far end of the clearing, did another layup, before coming quickly back toward Amy, playing defense.

Eric stirred. He'd been lying on his side, curled into a ball, and now he sat up, watching Stacy. He didn't look well. Amy supposed this was true for all of them. He was hollow-eyed, unshaven. He looked like a refugee: hungry, worn-out, fleeing some disaster. His shirt hung off him in tatters; the wounds on his legs seemed incapable of closing. He watched Stacy dribbling and passing and shooting, his expression oddly vacant, a waiting-room look, someone in an ER, staring at a television whose volume was too low to hear, waiting for a nurse to call his name.

"She's playing basketball," Amy said. "But with fake legs."

Eric turned his head, transferring that empty gaze from Stacy to Amy's face.

"There was this girl," Amy said. "She fell under a train. But she could still play basketball." She knew she wasn't saying it right, was just confusing the matter. It didn't seem to matter, though, because Eric nodded.

"Oh," he said. He held out his hand, and she passed him the bottle.

They watched Stacy play another point, and then, when she finally stopped-out of breath, sweating with the exertion-Amy applauded. She was feeling better and better for some reason, and determined not to let the feeling slip away. "Do the stewardess!" she called.

Stacy tensed her face into a stiff, exaggerated smile, and then she began, silently, to work her way through a preflight orientation, demonstrating how to use a seat belt, where the exits were, how to don an oxygen mask, all of her gestures clipped and robotic. She was mimicking the stewardess from their flight into Cancún. She'd done it for them the night they'd arrived, after they'd dropped their things off at their rooms and met on the beach, where they sat together in a loose circle, sipping bottles of beer. This was before they'd met the Greeks, before Mathias, too. They were still pale, a little weary from the trip, but pleased to be there-a happy time. And they'd laughed, all of them, at Stacy's performance, drinking their beer, feeling the sand beneath them, still warm from the day's sun, and listening to the sound of the surf, the music drifting toward them from the hotel terrace-yes, a happy time. And perhaps Amy was trying to reclaim that now by asking Stacy to mimic the stewardess once again, trying to prod them back toward that innocence, that ignorance of this terrible place into which they'd somehow stumbled. It wasn't working, of course. Not that it was Stacy's fault: She had the smile down, the tense gestures-she was the stewardess. It was Eric and Amy who'd changed, who were failing this effort at reclamation. They watched; Amy even managed a laugh, but there was a sadness in it that she couldn't keep out.

They saved the knees, she thought.

That first night on the beach, they'd each offered their contributions. They were good at this sort of thing, had all come from the same type of background-summer camps and ski trips-they knew what to do under a starry sky, or around a campfire, how to entertain one another. They each had their appointed roles. Stacy did her mimicry. Jeff taught them things, told them facts he'd read in the guidebook on the flight down. Eric made up funny stories, imagining how their trip might unfold, creating outrageous scenarios, making them laugh. And Amy sang. She had a nice voice, she knew; not a particularly strong one, but quietly adept, perfect for those campfires, those starry skies.

Stacy returned across the clearing now, sat beside them; she took back the umbrella. Her shirt was torn, Amy noticed; she could see her breast. It was true for all of them: their clothes were rapidly being eaten into shreds by that green webbing of vine. There was nothing you could do about it; you brushed it away, but a few minutes later it was back again. And every time you swiped at it, the vine bled its sap onto your skin, burning you. Their hands looked scarred-it hurt to pick things up. They could dig into the backpacks, she supposed, find themselves new shirts and pants, but there was something creepy about this, wearing other people's things, dead people's, those mounds of green scattered across the hillside, and Amy hoped she'd be able to avoid this eventuality as long as possible. It felt like a surrender in some way, a defeat; as long as rescue seemed imminent, what was the point in replacing her clothes?

Eric kept rubbing at his chest. There was a spot right at the base of his rib cage that he couldn't seem to stop touching. He'd press at it, then dig with his fingers, then gently massage it. Amy knew what he was doing, knew that he thought the vine was inside him, and it was beginning to make her anxious, his constant probing; she wanted him to stop.

"Tell us something funny, Eric," she said.

"Funny?"

She nodded, smiling, trying to prod him on, to distract him from that feeling inside his chest, distract all three of them. "Make up a story."

Eric shook his head. "I can't think of anything."

"Tell us what'll happen when we get home," Stacy said.

They watched him take another swallow of tequila, his eyes watering from it. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, then recapped the bottle. "Well, we'll be famous, won't we? At least for a while?"

They both nodded. Of course they'd be famous.

"The cover of People magazine, maybe," Eric continued, warming to the idea. "Time, too, probably. And then somebody'll want to buy the film rights. We'll have to be smart there, stay together, all of us signing something, some document, agreeing to sell the story as a group-we'll get more money that way. We'll need a lawyer, I guess, or an agent."

"They'll make a movie out of it?" Stacy asked. She looked excited by the idea, but surprised, too.

"That's right."

"Who'll play me?"

Eric peered at Stacy, considered. Then he smiled, waving at her chest. "Your tit's hanging out, you know."

Stacy glanced down, adjusted her shirt. There wasn't really enough of it left to cover her breast, but she didn't seem to care. "Seriously. Who'll play me?'

"First, you have to decide who you are."

"Who I am?"

"'Cause they'll have to change us some, you know. Make us more into characters. They'll need a hero, a villain-that sort of thing. See what I'm saying?"

Stacy nodded. "And which am I?"

"Well, there are two female parts, right? So one of you will have to be the good girl, the prissy one, and the other one'll have to be the slut." He thought about this, then shrugged. "I guess Amy would be the prissy one, don't you think?"

Stacy frowned, taking this in. She didn't say anything.

"So you'd, you know-you'd be the slut."

"Fuck you, Eric." She sounded angry.

"What? I'm just saying-"

"You're the villain, then. If I have to be the-"

Eric shook his head. "No way. I'm the funny guy. I'm the Adam Sandler character. Or Jim Carrey. The one who shouldn't be there, who came along by mistake, who keeps stumbling into the others, tripping over things. I'm the comic relief."

"Then who's the villain?"

"Mathias is the villain-definitely. Those scary Germans. They'll have him lure us here on purpose. The vine'll be some sort of Nazi experiment gone awry. His father was a scientist, maybe, and he's brought us here to feed daddy's plants."

"And the hero?"

"Jeff-no doubt about that. Bruce Willis, stoically saving the day. An ex-Boy Scout." He turned to Amy. "Was Jeff a Boy Scout? I bet Jeff was a Boy Scout."

Amy nodded. "An Eagle Scout."

They laughed at this, all three of them, though it wasn't a joke. He really had been an Eagle Scout. His mother had a framed clipping from the local paper hanging in their front hall; it showed Jeff in his uniform, shaking hands with the governor of Massachusetts. Amy felt an odd tightness in her chest when she thought of this, a sudden sense of warmth toward him, a protectiveness. She remembered the way it had been down in the shaft, the vines whipping through the dark, grabbing at her, pulling her toward that hole. She'd glimpsed the bones at the bottom before the torch fluttered out; other people had died there-she might've, too. And it wasn't because of any skill or foresight on her own part that she'd survived. Jeff had saved her. Jeff would save them all, if they'd only let him. They shouldn't be laughing at him.

"It's not funny," she said, but her voice came out too quietly, and the other two were too drunk. They didn't seem to hear her.

"Who's going to play me?" Stacy repeated.

Eric waved the question aside. "It doesn't matter. Somebody who looks good with her tit hanging out of her shirt."

"You'll be the fat one," Stacy said, sounding angry again. "The fat, sweaty one."

They were going to start fighting now, Amy realized-she recognized the tone. Another exchange or two like that, and they'd begin to shout at each other. She didn't think she could handle this-not here, not now. So she tried to distract them. "What about me?" she asked.

"You?" Eric said.

"Who's going to play me?"

Eric pursed his lips, considering this. He uncapped the bottle, took another sip, then held it out toward Stacy, a peace offering. She accepted it, tilting her head back, taking a big swallow, almost chugging. She giggled as she lowered the bottle, pleased with herself, her eyes shining strangely, looking glazed.

"Someone who can sing," Eric said.

"That's right." Stacy nodded. "So they can have musical numbers."

Eric was smiling. "A duet with the Boy Scout."

"Madonna, maybe."

Eric snorted. "Britney Spears."

"Mandy Moore."

They were both laughing. "Sing for us, Amy," Eric said.

Amy was smiling, feeling confused, ready to be affronted. She couldn't tell if they were laughing at her or if it was something she should find funny, too. She was just as drunk as they were, she realized.

"Sing ‘One is the loneliest number,'" Stacy said.

"Yeah," Eric nodded. "That's perfect."

They were both grinning at her now, waiting. Stacy offered her the bottle, and Amy took a swallow from it, shutting her eyes. When she opened them again, they were still waiting. So she started to sing: "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. Two can be as bad as one. It's the loneliest number since the number one. No is the saddest experience you'll ever know. Yes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever know. 'Cause one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. One is the loneliest number, worse than two…" She trailed off, feeling out of breath, dizzy with it. She handed the bottle to Eric. "I can't remember the rest," she said. It wasn't true; she just didn't want to sing anymore. The lyrics were making her sad, and for a while there she'd been feeling okay-or almost okay, at least. She didn't want to feel sad.

Eric took a long swallow. They were two-thirds of the way through the bottle now. He clambered to his feet, stepped across the clearing, a little unsteady in his gait. He bent, picked something up, then came teetering back toward them. He had the bottle in one hand; in the other, he was holding the knife. Amy and Stacy both stared at it. Amy didn't want it to be there, but she couldn't think of anything to say that might make him put it down. She watched him spit on its blade, try to clean it on his shirt. Then he waved the knife toward her. "You can sing it at the end. When you're the last one left."

"‘The last one left?'" Amy asked. She wanted to reach out and take the knife from him, tried to order her arm to rise, to move in his direction, yet nothing happened. She was very, very drunk, she knew-and so tired, too. She wasn't equal to this.

"When everyone else is killed off," Eric said.

Amy shook her head. "Don't. That's not funny."

He ignored her. "The Boy Scout'll live-he's the hero; he has to survive. You'll just think he's dead. You'll sing your song, and he'll pop back to life. And then you'll escape somehow. He'll build a hot-air balloon out of the tent and you'll float away to safety."

"I'll die?" Stacy said. She seemed alarmed by the possibility, wide-eyed with it. She was beginning to slur her words. "Why do I have to die?"

"The slut has to die. No question. Because you're bad. You have to be punished."

Stacy looked hurt by this. "What about the funny guy?"

"He's the first-he's always the first. And in some stupid way, too. So people will laugh when he goes."

"Like how?"

"He gets cut, maybe, and the vine pushes its way into his leg. It eats him from the inside out."

Amy knew what he was going to do next, and she raised her hand, finally, to stop him. But she was too late. He was doing it-it was done. He'd lifted his shirt, cut a four-inch slit along the base of his rib cage. Stacy gasped. Amy sat with her arm held out, uselessly, before her. A horizontal line of blood crested the lip of Eric's wound, swept downward across his stomach, soaking into the waistband of his shorts. He watched it, frowning, probing at the cut with the point of the knife, prying it farther open, the bleeding increasing.

"Eric," Stacy cried.

"I thought it would just come tumbling out," he said. It had to be painful, but he didn't seem to mind. He kept pushing at the wound with the knife. "It's right under here. I can feel it. It must sense me cutting, somehow, must pull back into me. It's hiding."

He felt with his left hand, pressing at the skin above the wound; it looked like he was about to cut himself again. Amy leaned forward, snatched the knife from him. She thought he'd resist her, but he didn't; he just let her take it. The blood kept coming, and he made no effort to staunch it.

"Help him," Amy said to Stacy. She dropped the knife into the dirt at her side. "Help him stop it."

Stacy looked at Amy, openmouthed. She was panting; she seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. "How?"

"Pull off his shirt. Press it to the cut."

Stacy set down her umbrella, stepped toward Eric, started to help him out of his T-shirt. He'd become very passive; he lifted his arms like a child, letting her tug the shirt up and off him.

"Lie down," Amy ordered, and he did it, on his back, the blood still coming, pooling in the tiny hollow of his belly button.

Stacy balled up the T-shirt, held it to the wound.

Things had gotten bad again, and Amy knew there was no way to alter this, no way to force the afternoon back into its false air of tranquillity. There'd be no more mimicry now, no more joking, no more singing. She and Stacy sat in silence, Stacy leaning forward slightly, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Eric lay on his back, uncomplaining, strangely serene, staring up at the sky.

"It's my fault," Amy said. Stacy and Eric both turned to look at her, not understanding. She wiped at her face with her hand; it felt gritty, sweat-stained. "I didn't want to come. When Mathias first asked us, I knew I didn't want to. But I didn't say anything; I just let it happen. We could be on the beach right now. We could be-"

"Shh," Stacy said.

"And the man in the pickup. The taxi driver. He told me not to go. He said it was a bad place. That he'd-"

"You didn't know, sweetie."

"And after the village, if I hadn't thought of checking along the trees, we never would've found the path. If I'd kept silent-"

Stacy shook her head, still pressing the T-shirt to Eric's abdomen. The blood had soaked all the way through now; it wasn't stopping. Her hands were covered with it. "How could you've known?" she asked.

"And I'm the one, aren't I? The one who stepped into the vines? If I hadn't, that man might've forced us to leave. We might've-"

"Look at the clouds," Eric said, cutting her off, his voice sounding dreamy, oddly distant, as if he were drugged. He lifted his hand, pointed upward.

And he was right: clouds were building to the south, thunderheads, their undersides ominously dark, heavy with the promise of rain. Back in Cancún, at the beach, they'd be gathering their things, returning to their rooms. Jeff and she would make love, then slip into sleep, a long nap before dinner, the rain blurring their window, an inch-deep puddle forming on their tiny balcony. Their first day, they'd seen a gull sitting in it, partially sheltered from the downpour, staring out to sea. Rain meant water, of course. Amy knew they should be thinking of ways to gather it. But she couldn't; her mind was empty. She was drunk and tired and sad; someone else would have to figure out how to collect the rain. Not Eric, of course, with his blood rapidly soaking through that T-shirt. And not Stacy, either, who looked even worse than Amy felt: sunstruck, shaky, all dazed behind the eyes. They were useless, the three of them, with their silly stories, their singing, their laughter in a place like this; they were fools, not survivors.

And how was it possible, with such little warning, that the sun had sunk so low? It was nearly touching the horizon. In another hour-two at the most-it would be night.

When did it first begin to go wrong?

Afterward, the next morning, whenall of them suddenly meant one less than it had before, Eric would spend a long time trying to unravel this. He didn't believe it was the drinking, nor even the cutting. Because things were still manageable then-unmoored, maybe, a little out of control, but still endurable in some essential way. Lying on his back like that, with Stacy pressing the T-shirt to his wound, struggling to staunch the flow of blood, while the clouds built in the sky above them, Eric had felt an unexpected sense of serenity. Rain was coming; they weren't going to die of thirst. And if that was true, if they could so easily overcome this most pressing obstacle to their survival, why shouldn't they be able to overcome all obstacles? Why shouldn't they make it home alive?

There was the need for food, of course, hiding just behind the need for water-and what could rain possibly do for that? Eric peered up at the sky, puzzling over this dilemma, but without any success. All he managed to accomplish by focusing upon it was to rouse his lurking sense of hunger. "Why haven't we eaten again?" he said, his voice sounding far away even to himself-thick-tongued, weak-lunged. The tequila, he thought. And then: I'm bleeding.

"Are you hungry?" Amy asked.

It was a stupid question, of course-how could he not be hungry?-and he didn't bother to answer it. After a moment, Amy stood up, stepped to the tent, unzipped the flap, slipped inside.

Right there, Eric would decide the next morning. When she went to get the food. But he didn't note it at the time, just watched her vanish into the tent, then turned his attention back to the sky again, those clouds boiling upward above him. He wasn't going to move, he decided. He was going to stay right there, on his back, while the rain poured down upon him.

"It's not stopping," Stacy said.

She meant his wound, he knew. She sounded worried, but he wasn't. He didn't mind the bleeding, was too drunk to feel the pain. It was going to rain. He was going to lie here and let it wash him clean. Clean, he'd find the strength to reach inside himself, into that slit he'd cut below his rib cage, reach in with his hand and search out the vine, grasp it, yank it free. He was going to be okay.

Amy returned from the tent. She was carrying the plastic jug of water, the bag of grapes. She set the jug on the ground, opened the bag, held it out toward Stacy.

Stacy shook her head. "We have to wait."

"We've missed lunch," Amy said. "We were supposed to have lunch." She didn't lower the grapes, just kept holding them toward Stacy.

Once again, Stacy shook her head. "When Jeff gets back. We can-"

"I'll save some for him. I'll put them aside."

"What about Mathias?"

"Him, too."

"What's he doing?"

Amy nodded toward the tent. "Sleeping." She shook the bag. "Come on. Just a couple. They'll help with your thirst."

Stacy hesitated, visibly wavering, then reached in, plucked out two grapes.

Amy shook the bag again. "More," she said. "Give some to Eric."

Stacy took two more. She put one in her own mouth, then dropped one into Eric's. He cradled it on his tongue for a moment, wanting to savor the feel of it. He watched Stacy and Amy eat theirs; then he did the same. The sensation was almost too intense-the burst of juice, the sweetness, the joy of chewing, of swallowing-he felt light-headed with it. But there was no satisfaction, no diminishment, however modest, in his hunger. No, it seemed to leap up within him, to rouse itself from some deep slumber; his entire body started to ache with it. Stacy dropped another grape into his mouth, and he chewed more quickly this time, the swallowing more important than the savoring, his lips immediately opening for another one. The others appeared to feel a similar urgency. No one was talking; they were chewing, swallowing, reaching into the bag for more. Eric watched the clouds build as he ate. All he had to do was open his mouth, and Stacy would drop another grape into it. She was smiling; so was Amy. The juice helped his thirst, just as Amy had promised. He was beginning to feel a little more sober-in a good way-everything seeming to settle a bit, to coalesce around and within him. He could feel his pain, but even this was reassuring. It'd been a stupid thing to do, he knew, digging into himself with that knife; he couldn't quite grasp how he'd found the courage to attempt it. He was in trouble now. He needed stitches-antibiotics, too, probably-but he nonetheless felt strangely at peace. If he could just keep lying here, eating these grapes, watching the clouds darken above him, he believed that everything would be all right, that somehow, miraculously, he'd make it through.

It came as a bit of a shock to realize that-abruptly, without any apparent warning-the bag was almost empty. There were only four grapes left; they'd eaten all the rest. The three of them stared at the bag; no one spoke for a stretch. Pablo continued his ragged breathing, but Eric had reached the point where he barely even noticed it anymore. It was like any other sort of background noise-traffic beyond a window, waves on a beach. Someone had to say something, of course, to comment on what they'd done, and it was Amy who finally shouldered this responsibility.

"They can have the orange," she said.

Stacy and Eric remained silent. There'd been a lot of grapes in the bag; it ought to have been easy enough to set aside allotments for Mathias and Jeff.

"I have to pee," Stacy whispered. She was talking to him, Eric realized. "Can you hold your shirt?"

He nodded, taking the T-shirt from her, maintaining the pressure against his side. He could feel the vine again, shifting about inside him, just beneath the pain. It had gone away after he'd cut himself, but now it had come back.

"Do I have to use the bottle?" Stacy asked Amy.

Amy shook her head, and Stacy stood up, moved across the clearing. She didn't seem to want to venture into the vines. She crouched with her back to them, and Eric heard her begin to urinate. It didn't sound like very much, a brief spattering, and then she was rising again, pulling up her pants.

"They can have some of the raisins, too," Amy said, but quietly, almost as if she were speaking to herself.

Stacy returned, sat beside Eric. He thought she was going to resume holding the T-shirt against his wound, but she didn't. She picked up the plastic jug of water, uncapped it, poured a little on her right foot. Eric and Amy stared at her in astonishment.

"What the fuck're you doing?" Amy asked.

Stacy seemed startled by the sharpness in her voice. "I peed on myself," she said.

Amy reached, snatched the bottle from Stacy's hand, recapped it. "That's our water. You just poured it on your fucking foot."

Stacy sat for a moment, blinking in a theatrical way, as if not quite understanding what Amy was saying. "You don't have to swear," she said.

"We'll die without that-you know? And you're just-"

"I wasn't thinking, okay? I wanted to clean the pee off my foot and I saw the jug, and I-"

"Jesus fucking Christ, Stacy. How can you be so out of it?"

Stacy waved at the sky, the gathering clouds. "It's going to rain. We'll have plenty of water."

"So why didn't you wait?"

"Don't shout, Amy. I said I'm sorry, and-"

"Sorry doesn't bring the water back, does it?"

Eric wanted to say something, to stop or distract them, but the right words weren't coming to him. He recognized what was happening, what was starting here. This was how Amy and Stacy fought, in sudden, intense eruptions that seemed to arrive out of nowhere, little flash floods of rage that would come and go with a violence matched only by their brevity. A single inadvertent word could set them off-more often than not when they'd been drinking-and within seconds they'd be flailing at each other, sometimes literally. Eric had seen Stacy slash Amy's cheek with her nails, deep enough that she drew blood, and he knew that Amy had once slapped Stacy so hard that she'd knocked her to the floor. Then, inevitably, at the very peak of their ferocity, these encounters would collapse upon themselves. The girls would look at each other in mutual bewilderment, wondering how they'd managed to say all they'd said; they'd beg each other for forgiveness, would embrace, begin to cry.

And now here they were again, sprinting down that familiar path.

"Sometimes you can be so stupid," Amy said.

"Fuck off," Stacy muttered, barely audible.

"What?"

"Just drop it, okay?"

"You're not even sorry, are you?"

"How many times do I have to say it?"

Eric tried to sit up, felt a tearing sensation from his wound, and thought better of it. "Maybe you guys should-"

Amy gave him a look of pure disdain. He could see her drunkenness in her face, exaggerating her expressions. "Stay out of it, Eric. You've already caused enough problems."

"Leave him be," Stacy said. Both of their voices were too loud; it hurt his head to listen. He wanted to get up and leave them to this, but he was still bleeding, still in pain, still quite drunk; he didn't feel like he could move.

"If he fucking cuts himself again, I'm just gonna let him bleed."

"You're being a bitch, Amy. You realize that?"

"Slut."

Stacy looked astonished by this, as if Amy had spit on her. "What?"

"He's right-that's who you'd be."

Stacy waved this insult aside, struggling for an expression of detachment, aiming for the high ground, but Eric could see it wasn't working. They were approaching the scratching stage, he knew-the slapping, the kicking. "You're drunk," she said. "You're making a fool of yourself."

"Slut. That's who you are. "

"Can't you hear yourself slur?"

"Shut up, slut."

"Youshut up, bitch."

"No. You shut up."

"Bitch."

"Slut."

"Bitch."

"Slut."

And then something odd happened. They both fell silent, staring off to Eric's right. Or not silent, because the two words continued, in their voices, going back and forth, back and forth-Bitch…Slut…Bitch…Slut…Bitch…Slut-only Amy and Stacy weren't speaking anymore; they were staring, first in surprise, then in something closer to horror, out across the hilltop, where their voices were rising now, shouting that harsh pair of words, beginning to blur together, one merging into the other.

BitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlut…

It was the vine. It was mimicking them, as if mocking their fight, imitating the sound of their voices so perfectly that even as Eric realized what was happening, even as he stared at Stacy and Amy and saw that their mouths were no longer moving, that they'd fallen silent, that it couldn't possibly be the two of them he was hearing, he didn't quite accept it. Because it was their voices-stolen somehow, misappropriated, but their voices nonetheless.

BitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlutBitchSlut…

Mathias was standing over them suddenly, looking sleep-tousled, blinking, visibly waking up even as Eric watched him. "What is it?" he asked.

No one answered him. What, after all, was there to say? The voices grew softer, then louder again, branching out beyond those two words: If he fucking cuts himself…You're not even sorry, are you?

"It's the vines," Stacy said, as if this needed explanation.

Mathias was silent, his eyes moving about, taking things in-the plastic bag with its four remaining grapes, the bloody T-shirt pressed to Eric's abdomen, Pablo's motionless form, the nearly empty bottle of tequila. "Where's Jeff?" he asked.

I peed on my foot, the vine shouted. They can have the orange.

"Down the hill," Amy said.

"Shouldn't someone have relieved him?"

No one answered. They were all looking off into the distance, feeling shamed, wishing the voices would stop, that Mathias would leave them be. Eric's chest tightened-the first stirrings of anger. How could Mathias claim the right to judge them? He wasn't one of them, was he? They hardly even knew him; he was practically a stranger.

Sometimes you can be so stupid.

"Have you been drinking?" Mathias asked.

Again, they remained mute. And suddenly, there was Eric's voice, too, coming toward them from across the hilltop: Mathias is the villain-definitely. And then, almost like a record skipping: Nazi…Boy Scout…Nazi…Boy Scout…

Eric could feel Mathias turning to look at him, but he kept his gaze averted, peering off to the south, toward the clouds, which continued to darken and build. They were going to let loose soon, very soon; he wished it were now.

You shut up.

Leave him be.

Tell us something funny.

I'm the funny guy.

"How long has this been going on?" Mathias asked.

"It just started," Amy said.

They saved the knees.

Nazi.

Let him bleed.

You're drunk.

Nazi.

Fuck off.

Nazi. Nazi. Nazi.

Eric could see Mathias disengaging, making the decision, his face seeming to close somehow. "I'll go relieve him," he said.

Amy nodded. So did Stacy. Eric just lay there. He felt like he could hear the plant inside him, sense it vibrating against his rib cage, speaking, calling out. Couldn't anyone else hear it? Slut, it said in Amy's voice. And then, in Stacy's: Bitch. The balled-up T-shirt was completely soaked through now, like a sodden sponge; when he squeezed at it, blood cascaded warmly down his side.

Nazi.

Slut.

Nazi.

Bitch.

Nazi.

They watched Mathias turn, walk out of the clearing.

The voices continued for some time yet-Amy's and Stacy's and Eric's, coming from all different directions, talking one over the other, occasionally rising to a shout-and then, just as abruptly as they'd begun, they stopped. The silence wasn't as much of a relief as Eric would've expected, though; there was a tension to it, everything freighted with the knowledge that the vine could start again at any moment. And also the sense of being listened to, spied upon. It took awhile for them to gather the courage to speak, and when Stacy finally did, it was in a whisper.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Amy waved this aside.

"I wasn't thinking," Stacy persisted. "I just…I had pee on my foot."

"It doesn't matter." Amy gestured upward, toward the clouds. "We'll be fine."

"You're not a bitch."

"I know, honey. Let's just…let's forget it, okay? Let's pretend it didn't happen. We're both tired."

"Scared."

"That's right. Tired and scared."

Stacy shifted a little, edging toward her. She held out her hand, and Amy took it, clasped it.

Eric wanted to get up, follow Mathias down the hill, make everything clear to him. It had been his own voice shouting that word over and over again-Nazi-and he couldn't imagine what Mathias must be thinking now, didn't want to consider it, yet he kept probing at it, despite himself. I should've explained, he thought with a growing sense of panic. I should've told him it was a joke. He was in too much pain to pursue him, though, still bleeding heavily from his wound-at this rate, he didn't see how it would ever stop. But somebody had to go; somebody had to make it right. "Go tell him," he said to Stacy.

She gave him a blank look. "Tell who?"

"Mathias. That it was a joke."

"What was a joke?"

"Nazi-tell him we were just playing around."

Before Stacy could answer, Pablo startled them by speaking. It was in Greek, of course: a single word, surprisingly loud. They all turned to stare at him. His eyes were open, his head lifted off the backboard, the muscles in his neck standing taut, trembling slightly. He repeated the word-potato, absurdly, was what it sounded like to Eric. He lifted his right hand, made a beckoning motion. He seemed to be gesturing toward the plastic jug.

That rasping voice: "Po-ta-to."

"I think he wants some water," Stacy said.

Amy picked up the jug, carried it to the backboard, crouched beside Pablo. "Water?" she asked.

Pablo nodded. He opened and closed his mouth, like someone mimicking a fish. "Po-ta-to…po-ta-to…po-ta-to …"

Amy uncapped the jug, poured some of the water into his mouth. Her hands were shaking, though, and it came out too quickly, nearly choking him. He coughed, sputtering, turned his head away.

"Maybe you should give him a grape," Stacy said. She picked up the plastic bag, held it toward Amy.

"You think so?"

"He hasn't eaten-not since yesterday."

"But can he-"

"Just try it."

Pablo had stopped coughing. Amy waited till he turned back toward her, then took out one of the grapes, held it up for him to see, raising her eyebrows. "Hungry?" she asked.

Pablo just stared at her. He seemed to be fading, sinking inward. For a moment, there'd been something like color in his face, but now it had gone gray again. His neck went slack; his head fell heavily against the backboard.

"Put it in his mouth and see what happens," Stacy said.

Amy slid the grape between Pablo's lips, pushing at it until it disappeared. Pablo shut his eyes; his jaw didn't move.

"Use your hand," Stacy said. "Help him chew it."

Amy grasped the Greek by his chin, pulling his mouth open, then pushing it shut. Eric heard the wet sound of the grape popping, and then Pablo was gagging again, turning his head to the side, retching. The squashed fruit spilled out, followed by a surprising amount of liquid. Black liquid, full of stringy clots. It was blood, Eric knew. Oh Jesus, he thought. What the fuck are we doing?

And then, making him jump, nearly the exact same words sounded in the air behind him: "What the fuck are you doing?"

Eric turned, astonished, and found Jeff standing above them, staring at Amy with a look of fury.

Sitting at the bottom of the hill, watching for the Greeks, Jeff had felt as if he were entering a slower, thicker version of time. The seconds had dragged themselves into minutes, the minutes had accumulated into hours, and nothing happened, nothing of note, nothing whatsoever-certainly not the thing he was there to stop from happening, the Greeks arriving, bumbling their way across the clearing, entering that forbidden zone into which Jeff and the others had fallen captive. He sat, the sun drawing precious moisture from his skin, adding its heat to the other discomforts of his body-his thirst and hunger, his fatigue, his growing sense of failure here, of doing and acting, only to inflict as much harm as he was attempting to prevent.

There was too much to think about, and none of it good.

There was Pablo, of course-how could Jeff help but think of Pablo? He could still feel the weight of the stone in his hand, the heat coming through that towel, could still hear the sound of bone shattering as he'd hammered at Pablo's tibia and fibula, could still smell the acrid stench of his burning flesh. What choice did I have? he kept asking himself, knowing even as he did so that this was a bad sign, this impulse to justify, to explain, as if he were fending off some accusation. I was trying to save his life. And these, too, were the wrong words to have echoing through his head-the trying to implying a failure, a thing hoped for, striven toward, but nonetheless unattained. Because it was true: Jeff was giving up on Pablo. Maybe, if rescue arrived in the coming hours, or even sometime tomorrow, he still might be saved. Was this going to happen, though? That was the question upon which everything hinged-the coming hours, the coming day-and Jeff was losing faith in it, relinquishing hope. He'd believed that by taking off the legs, or what remained of the legs, he might buy the Greek time-not much, but some-enough, maybe, just enough. But it wasn't going to end like that. He had to admit this to himself now. Pablo was going to linger for another day, or two, or three at best, and then die.

In great pain, no doubt.

There was always the chance that the Greeks might come, of course, but the more Jeff considered this possibility, the less likely it seemed. The Mayans knew exactly what they were doing here; they'd done it before, would almost certainly have to do it again. Jeff assumed that they must've stationed someone to guard the far end of the trail, someone to turn any potential rescuers aside, to divert and mislead them. Don Quixote and Juan would never be equal to this; even if they were coming, which Jeff doubted, they'd be easily deflected. No, if rescue were to arrive, it would be much later-too late, probably-weeks from now, after their parents realized that they'd failed to return and began to probe at this development, to worry and to act. Jeff didn't want to guess how long this might take-the calls that would have to be placed, the questions asked-before the necessary gears would start to turn. And, even then, would the search ever proceed beyond Cancún? Their bus tickets had been printed with their names on them, but were records kept of this? And, if that hurdle were somehow cleared, and the hunt shifted to Cobá, how would it ever proceed the extra thirteen miles into the jungle? Whoever it was who might be pursuing the case would be given photographs, Jeff assumed; he'd show these to the taxi drivers in Cobá, the street vendors, the waiters in the cafés. And perhaps the man with the yellow pickup would recognize them; perhaps he'd be willing to share what he knew. And then what? The policeman or detective would follow the trail, walk it to the Mayan village, bearing those four or five or six photographs-depending on whether he'd already managed to find out about Mathias and Pablo and connect them all together-and what would the Mayans offer him? Blank faces, certainly. A ruminative scratching of the chin, a slow shake of the head. And even if, by some miracle of persistence and shrewdness, this perhaps mythical policeman or detective managed to make his way past these assertions of ignorance, how long would it take? All those steps to labor his way through, with the potential for detours and dead ends at every stage-how long? Too long, Jeff guessed. Too long for Pablo. There was no question of this. And too long, he supposed, for the rest of them also.

They needed it to rain. That was the first thing, the most crucial. Without water, they weren't going to last much longer than Pablo.

And then there was the question of food. They had the small amount they'd brought with them-snacks, really-which might, through aggressive rationing, sustain them for two or three more days. But after that?

Nothing. Fasting. Starving.

Eric was in trouble, Jeff knew. The cutting, the pacing, the muttering-bad signs, all of them. And his wounds would become infected soon; there was no way Jeff could think of to prevent this. Time, once more, would come into play here. Gangrene, septicemia-they'd be slower than thirst, probably, but far faster than starving.

Jeff didn't think about the vines-didn't want to, wouldn't have known how to. They moved, made sounds; they thought and planned. And worse was to come, he suspected, though what this might entail, he couldn't begin to guess.

He sat. He watched the Mayans watching him. He waited for the Greeks to arrive, believing even as he did so that this wasn't going to happen. He thought about water and food and Pablo and Eric. When clouds began to build to the south, he peered toward them, willing them to grow, to darken, to drift ever northward. Rain. They would have to gather it. They hadn't spoken of this. He ought to have made some plan with the others, left directions for them to follow, but he was tired, had too much to think about; he'd forgotten. He rose to his feet now, stared back up the trail. Why wasn't someone coming to relieve him? This, too, they should've spoken of, should've planned, yet hadn't.

The clouds continued to build. There was that plastic toolbox from the blue tent. They could empty it, use it to collect some of the rain. There had to be other things they could adapt for this purpose, too, but he needed to be up on the hilltop to think of them, needed to see what was available.

He paced. He sat again. He watched the Mayans, the clouds, the trail behind him. The Mayans stared back, mute and impassive. The clouds continued to build. The trail behind him remained empty. Jeff stood and stretched, then paced some more. The sky had clouded over completely now; rain was imminent, he could tell, and he was just beginning to toy with the idea of turning, hurrying up the hill, balancing the risk of leaving the path unguarded against that of the rain coming while they were still unprepared for its arrival-brief and intense, as all such storms in this part of the world appeared to be-when he heard footsteps approaching down the trail.

It was Mathias.

Something was wrong; Jeff could see this just in the way Mathias moved. There was a taut quality to his walk; he was hurrying and holding himself back all at once. His face retained its usual expression of guardedness, but with a slight shift to it, almost indiscernible. It was the eyes, Jeff thought: a sense of wariness in them, even alarm. He stopped a few yards short of Jeff, out of breath.

"What is it?" Jeff asked.

Mathias waved behind him, up the hill. "You didn't hear?"

"Hear what?"

"They were talking."

"Who?"

"The vines."

Jeff stared at him-not disbelieving, exactly, but too startled to speak.

"Mimicking us," Mathias said. "Stacy and Amy and Eric-mimicking their voices."

Jeff considered this. He didn't believe it was enough to explain Mathias's agitation; there had to be something more. "Saying what?" he asked.

"I fell asleep, in the tent. And when I woke up…" Mathias trailed off, as if uncertain how to proceed. Then, finally: "They were fighting."

"Fighting?"

"The girls. Shouting things at each other."

"Oh Christ." Jeff sighed.

"They've been drinking. The tequila. Quite a bit, I think."

"All of them?"

Mathias nodded.

"They're drunk?"

Again, Mathias nodded. "They called me a Nazi."

"What?"

"The vines. Or Eric, I guess. It was his voice, but the vines were shouting it."

Jeff watched him. This was it, he realized; this was what had upset him. And why not? He had to feel alone here among them-he hardly knew them. He was an outsider, easily scapegoated. Jeff struggled to reassure him. "It was a joke, I'm sure. Eric, you know-that's what he's like."

Mathias remained silent, neither confirming nor denying this.

"I should get up there," Jeff said. "You'll watch for the Greeks?"

Mathias nodded.

Jeff started to leave, then caught himself. "What about Pablo?"

Mathias made a vague gesture, throwing out his hand. "The same," he said. "Not good."

With that, Jeff started quickly up the hill, running on the flatter stretches, slowing to a walk whenever it grew steep. He seemed to be losing his breath far more easily than he ought to have. It had only been a day since they'd arrived here, and already he could feel himself growing weaker. He had the sense that this physical decline somehow mirrored a more general deterioration: everything was slipping beyond his control. Stacy and Amy and Eric had spent the afternoon drinking tequila. How stupid could they be? Myopic, impulsive, irresponsible-three fools flirting with their own destruction. Then, of course, they'd turned on one another; they'd fought, shouting insults. And Eric, for some unknown reason, had called Mathias a Nazi. Jeff's disbelief in this tangle of events slowly surrendered to a building sense of rage. This was its own folly, he knew, and yet he couldn't resist its pull, couldn't quell the desire to punish the three of them in some way, to slap them back into a proper sense of gravity. He was still riding this wave of emotion when he finally reached the hilltop, stepped into the little clearing, and glimpsed Amy force-feeding a grape to the barely conscious Pablo.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he said, and they all turned to stare at him, startled by his presence there, the fury in his voice.

Pablo was vomiting, though that seemed the wrong word for it. Vomiting implied something dynamic and forceful; what Pablo was doing was much more passive. His head rolled to the side, his mouth opened, and a stream of black liquid spilled out. Blood, bile-it was hard to tell what it was. There was too much of it, though, more than Jeff would've thought possible. Black liquid with thicker skeins running through it, like clots. It formed a shallow pool alongside the backboard, too jellylike, it seemed, for the dirt to absorb. Jeff was four yards away, but even at that distance he could smell it-putridly sweet.

"He was hungry," Amy said. Jeff could hear in her voice how drunk she was, the threat of a slur haunting each of her words. In her left hand, she was clenching the plastic bag that had once held their supply of grapes; there were three left now. The nearly empty tequila bottle was lying in the dirt beside Stacy. Eric was pressing a bloody T-shirt to his side.

Jeff felt his rage begin to expand inside his body, filling him, pressing outward against his skin, as if searching for an exit. "You're drunk. Aren't you?"

Amy looked away. Pablo had stopped vomiting; his eyes were shut now.

"All of you," Jeff persisted, surprising himself by how quiet he was managing to keep his voice. "Am I right?"

"I'm not," Eric said.

Jeff turned on him, almost lunging. Stop, he thought. Don't. But it was too late; he'd already begun to speak, his voice rising with each successive word, coming faster, harder, propelled by his anger. "You're not drunk?"

Eric shook his head, but it didn't matter, because Jeff hardly noticed the gesture. He hadn't paused for a response; no, he just kept talking, knowing he was handling this in the worst possible manner, but no longer able to stop himself, and not wanting to, either, because there was joy in it, too: the relief of speaking, of shouting. The release felt physical, almost sexual in its intensity.

"Because being drunk is really your only defense here, Eric-you understand? You fucking cut yourself again, didn't you? You cut your fucking chest. You have any idea what you're doing-how profoundly stupid you're being? You're sticking a dirty knife into your body every few hours, and we're trapped here, with a tiny fucking tube of Neosporin, whose shelf date has already expired. You think that's smart? You think that makes the slightest fucking sense? Keep it up and you're gonna die here. You're not gonna make it-"

"Jeff-" Amy began.

"Shut up, Amy. You're just as bad." He turned on her. It didn't matter whom he was yelling at; any of them would do. "I would've expected you, at least, to know better. Alcohol is a diuretic-it dehydrates you. You know that. So how the fuck could you-"

You think that's smart? It was his own voice, coming from somewhere to his left, jarring him into silence. You think that makes the slightest fucking sense? He turned, stared, knowing what it was but still half-expecting to see a person standing there, mimicking him. A wind had come up; it pulled at the vines, making their hand-shaped leaves sway and bob, as if in mockery.

Now it was Amy's voice: Slut!

And then Stacy's: Bitch!

"It's because you're yelling," Stacy said, her voice almost a whisper. "It does it when we yell."

Boy Scout, Eric's voice called. Nazi!

The clouds had thickened almost to the point of dusk; it was hard to tell what time it was. The storm was upon them, clearly, but night, too, seemed close at hand. And they weren't ready for it, not nearly, not any of it.

"Look," Amy said, gesturing skyward. She was trying very hard not to slur, he could tell, yet without much effect. "It doesn't matter-we'll get our water."

"But have you prepared for it?" Jeff asked. "It'll come and go, and you'll just be sitting here, watching it, won't you? Watching it run down into the soil, vanishing, wasted." Jeff could feel his anger dissipating, not in a satisfying way, either, not in a rush or a jolt, but in a slow, implacable seepage. He didn't want it to go, felt abandoned by its departure, as if it were a form of strength that was leaving him; his body seemed weaker for its withdrawal. "You're pathetic," he said, turning away from them. "All of you-fucking pathetic. You don't need the vine to kill you. You're gonna make that happen all on your own."

Stacy's voice called: Then who's the villain?

Sing for us, Amy, Eric's responded.

Bitch!

Slut!

Nazi!

And then his own voice again, sounding hateful in its anger: You're drunk, aren't you?

Jeff stepped to the orange tent, unzipped its flap, pushed his way inside. He scanned the supplies piled against the tent's back wall. The toolbox was waiting there, but nothing else of any relevance to his present needs. He crouched over the box, opened its lid, and found, oddly, not tools inside, but a sewing kit. A little pincushion cactused full of needles. Spools of thread on a double rack, covering the full spectrum of colors, like a box of crayons. Scraps of cloth, a small pair of scissors, even a tape measure. Jeff dumped everything onto the tent's floor, carried the empty box back out into the clearing.

Nothing had changed. Eric was still lying on his back, the bloody T-shirt pressed to his abdomen. Stacy was sitting at his side, with that same frightened expression on her face. Pablo's eyes remained shut, the ragged sound of his breathing rising and falling. Amy was beside him; she didn't look up when Jeff appeared. He set the box in the middle of the clearing, open to catch the rain. Then he started across the hilltop, toward the mouth of the shaft, where the supplies from the blue tent still lay tumbled together in a mound.

The plants continued their mimicry. Sometimes the voices came in a shout, other times very softly. There were long pauses, during which, it seemed, they might've stopped altogether, then sudden flurries of speech, the words and voices merging one into another. Jeff tried not to pay attention to them, but some of the things they said surprised him, gave him pause, made him wonder. He assumed that was the point, as hard as this was to believe, suspected that the vines had begun to speak now in an effort to drive the six of them apart, turn them one against another.

Stacy's voice said, Well, Jeff isn't here, is he? And then Eric's came: Was Jeff a Boy Scout? I bet Jeff was a Boy Scout. Laughter followed: Eric and Stacy's, mixing together, with an edge of mockery to it.

It was as if the vine had learned their names, knew who was who, and was tailoring its mimicry accordingly, the better to unsettle them. Jeff tried to think back over the past twenty-four hours, to remember the things he'd said, searching for possible difficulties. He was so tired, though, so benumbed, that his mind refused to help him. It didn't matter anyway, because the vine knew, and as Jeff started to pick through the pile of supplies beside the open shaft, he heard his voice begin to speak.

End it. Cut his throat. Smother him.

The longer we stay here, the better its chances.

It mimics things. It's not really laughter.

Then the whole hillside seemed to erupt at once-there were giggles and guffaws and chuckles and snickers-it went on and on and on. Interspersed with this was his own voice, shouting, as if trying to silence the noise, repeating the same phrase over and over again: It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter…

Jeff retrieved the Frisbee from the tangle of supplies, the empty canteen, carried them back across the hilltop toward the orange tent. His idea was that as the Frisbee filled with rain, he could pour it into the canteen, the plastic jug, the bottle they'd been using to collect their urine. It wasn't the best plan, but it was all he could think of.

Amy and Stacy and Eric hadn't moved. The vine had sent forth another tendril; it was feasting on Pablo's vomit now, audibly sucking at it. The three of them were watching, slack-jawed: drunk. When the vine finished with the little puddle, it retreated back across the clearing. No one moved; no one said a thing. Jeff felt his anger stirring at the sight of this-their impassivity, their collective stupor-but he didn't speak. That was over now, the urge to yell. He set the Frisbee beside the open toolbox, then emptied Mathias's water bottle of their urine. The others watched him, silent, all of them listening to the vines as they quieted for a moment, only to jump again in volume, still laughing. The sound of strangers, Jeff assumed. Cees Steenkamp, maybe. The girl whom Henrich had met on the beach. All these piles of bones, their flesh stripped clean, their souls long ago unhoused, but their laughter preserved here, remembered by the vine, and called forth now, wielded like a weapon.

It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter… It's not really laughter…

There were still some strips of nylon left over from the blue tent, and Jeff fiddled with them now, trying to think of a way to use them to catch the rain, or store the water once they'd collected it. He should've thought of this earlier, he knew; he could've used the sewing kit he'd found in the orange tent to stitch the lengths of nylon together into a giant pouch. But now he no longer had the time.

Tomorrow, he thought.

And then the rain began to fall.

It came in a rush, as if a trapdoor had swung open in the clouds above them, releasing it. There was no warning, no preparatory drizzle; one moment the sky was merely brooding, dark gray, with that held-breath quality the tropics often have before a storm's approach, a breeze lightly stirring the vines, and then, seemingly without transition, the air was full of falling water. Daylight faltered, took on a greenish hue one step short of darkness; the hard-packed earth beneath them turned instantly to mud. It felt difficult to breathe.

The plants fell silent.

The Frisbee filled in seconds. Jeff poured the water into the canteen, let the Frisbee fill once more, with equal rapidity, and poured again. Then he held the canteen out to Stacy. He had to shout to be heard over the rain, which sounded almost like a roar now. "Drink!" he yelled. His hat, his clothes, his shoes were all soaked completely through, clinging to him, growing heavy.

He poured the water from the Frisbee into the plastic jug, let it fill, poured again, let it fill, poured again. When he was finished with the jug, he started in on Mathias's empty bottle.

Stacy drank from the canteen, then passed it to Eric, who was still lying on his back, shirtless, the rain spattering mud across his body. He sat up awkwardly, clutching at his side, took the canteen.

"As much as you can!" Jeff shouted at him.

Soap, he was thinking. He should've checked the backpacks for a bar of soap. They would've at least had time to wash their faces and hands before the storm passed-a small thing, he knew, but he was certain it would've lifted everyone's spirits. Tomorrow, he thought. It came today, so why shouldn't it come again tomorrow?

He finished with Mathias's bottle, held out his hand for the canteen, refilled it, then passed it to Amy.

The rain kept pouring down on them. It was surprisingly cold. Jeff began to shiver; the others did, too. It was the lack of food, he assumed. Already, they didn't have the resources to fight the chill.

The Frisbee filled again, and he lifted it to his lips, drank directly from it. The rain had a sweetness that surprised him. Sugar water, he thought, his head seeming to clear as he drank, his body to take on an added solidity, a heft and gravity he hadn't realized he'd been lacking. He filled the Frisbee, drank, filled the Frisbee, drank, his stomach swelling, growing pleasantly, almost painfully taut. It was the best water he'd ever tasted.

Amy had stopped drinking. She and Stacy were standing there, hunched, hugging themselves, shivering. Eric had lain back down again. His eyes were shut, his mouth open to the rain. His legs and torso were growing muddier and muddier; it was in his hair, too, and on his face.

"Get him into the tent!" Jeff shouted.

He took the canteen from Amy, started to fill it once more as he watched her and Stacy pull Eric to his feet, guide him toward the tent.

The rain began to slacken. It was still falling steadily, but the downpour was over. Another five or ten minutes, Jeff knew, and it would stop altogether. He stepped across the clearing to check on Pablo. The lean- to hadn't done much to shelter him; he was just as wet as the rest of them. And, like Eric, he'd been back-spattered with mud-his shirt, his face, his arms, his stumps. His eyes remained shut; his breathing continued its irregular rasping course. Oddly, he wasn't shivering, and Jeff wondered if this were a bad sign, if a body could become so ravaged that even trembling might be beyond its strength. He crouched, rested his hand on Pablo's forehead, nearly flinched at the heat coming off him. Everything was a bad sign, of course; there were nothing but bad signs here. He thought of the vine, how it had echoed his own voice: End it. Cut his throat. Smother him. And he held the words in his mind, teetering on the edge of action. It would be easy enough, after all; he was alone here in the clearing. No one would ever know. He could simply lean forward, pinch shut Pablo's nostrils, cover his mouth, and count to-what? A hundred? Mercy: this was what he was thinking as he lifted his hand from Pablo's forehead, moved it down his face. He held it there, an inch or so above the Greek's nose, not touching him yet, just playing with the idea-ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine-and then Amy was pushing her way out of the tent, carrying her drunkenness with her, stumbling slightly as she stepped into the clearing. Her hair was limp from the rain; there was a smear of mud on her left cheek.

"Is he okay?" she asked.

Jeff stood up quickly, hating the slur in her voice, feeling that urge to shout again, to sober her with his anger. He fought the temptation, though, not answering-how could he answer?-and moved back across the clearing toward the open toolbox.

Which, inexplicably, was nearly empty.

Jeff stared down at it, struggling to make sense of this development.

"There's a hole," Amy said.

And it was true. When Jeff lifted the box, he revealed a thin stream of water pouring steadily from its bottom, which had a two-inch crack in it. He'd missed it somehow earlier, when he'd emptied the box of its sewing supplies. He'd been rushing; he hadn't taken the time to examine it. If he had, he might've been able to fix it before the rain came-the duct tape, he thought-but now it was too late. The rain had come; the rain was leaving. Even as he thought these words, it was falling more and more gently; in another minute or so, it would stop altogether. Disgusted with himself, he threw the toolbox, sent it tumbling away from him toward the tent.

Amy looked appalled. "What the fuck?" she said, almost shouting. "There was still water in it!"

She ran to the toolbox, set it upright again. It was a pointless gesture, Jeff knew. The storm had passed; the sky was beginning to lighten. There wasn't going to be any more rain-not today at least. "You're one to talk," he said.

Amy turned toward him, wiping at her face. "What?"

"About wasting water."

She shook her head. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Not now."

"Don't what, Amy?"

"Lecture me."

"But you're fucking up. You know that, don't you?"

She didn't respond, just stared at him with a sad, put-upon expression, as if he were the one at fault here. He felt his fury rising in response to it.

"Stealing water in the middle of the night. Getting drunk. What're you thinking? That we're playing at this?"

She shook her head again. "You're being too hard, Jeff."

"Hard?Look at all those fucking mounds." He pointed out across the hillside, at the vine-covered bones. "That's how we're going to end up, too. And you're helping it happen."

Amy kept shaking her head. "The Greeks-"

"Stop it. You're like a child. The Greeks, the Greeks, the Greeks-they aren't coming, Amy. You've got to face that."

She covered her ears with her hands. "Don't, Jeff. Please don't-"

Jeff stepped forward, grabbed her wrists, yanked them down. He was shouting now. "Look at Pablo. He's dying-can't you see that? And Eric's going to end up with gangrene or-"

"Shh." She tried to pull away, glancing anxiously at the tent.

"And the three of you are drinking. Do you have the slightest idea how fucking stupid that is? It's exactly what the vine would want you to-"

Amy screamed, a shriek of pure fury, startling him into silence. "I didn't want to come!" she yelled. She jerked her hands free, began to swing at him, hitting him in the chest, knocking him back a step. "I didn't want to come!" She kept repeating it, shouting, hitting him. "You're the one! You suggested it! I wanted to stay at the beach! It's your fault! Yours! Not mine!" She was hitting his chest, his shoulders; her face was contorted, shiny with dampness-Jeff couldn't tell if it was the rain or tears. "Yours!" she kept yelling. "Not mine!"

The vine started up again suddenly, also shouting: It's my fault. I'm the one, aren't I? The one who stepped into the vines? It was Amy's voice, coming at them from all sides. Amy stopped hitting him, stared wildly about them.

It's my fault.

"Stop it!" Amy shouted.

I'm the one, aren't I?

"Shut up!"

The one who stepped into the vines?

Amy spun on him, looking desperate, her hands held out before her, begging. "Make it stop."

It's my fault.

Amy pointed at him, her hand shaking. "You were the one! You know that's true! Not me. I didn't want to come."

I'm the one, aren't I?

"Make it stop. Will you please make it stop?"

Jeff didn't move, didn't speak; he just stood there staring at her.

The one who stepped into the vines?

The sky was darkening again, but it wasn't the storm. Behind the screen of clouds, the sun was reaching for the horizon. Night was coming, and they'd done nothing to prepare for it. They ought to eat, Jeff knew, and thinking this he remembered the bag of grapes. It wasn't only the drinking; she and the others had helped themselves to the food, too. "What else did you eat?" he asked.

"Eat?"

"Besides the grapes. Did you steal anything else?"

"We didn't steal the grapes. We were hungry. We-"

"Answer me."

"Fuck you, Jeff. You're acting like-"

"Just tell me."

She shook her head. "You're too hard. Everyone-we're all…We think you're too hard."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

It's my fault.

Amy spun, shouted out toward the vines again. "Shut up!"

"You've talked about it?" Jeff asked. "About me?"

"Please," Amy said. "Just stop." She was shaking her head once more, and now he was certain of it; she was crying. "Can't you stop, honey? Please?" She held out her hand.

Take it, he thought. But he made no move to do this. There was a history here, a well-trod path upon which conflict tended to unfold between them. When they argued, no matter what the topic, Amy would eventually grow upset-she'd weep; she'd retreat-and Jeff, however long he might resist the pull, would end up shuffling forward to soothe her, to pet her, to whisper endearments and assure her of his love. He was always, always, always the one to apologize; it was never Amy, no matter who might be at fault. And this was no different: it was "Can't you stop?" that she'd been saying, not can't I, or even can't we. Jeff was tired of it-tired at large, tired down into his bones-and he vowed to himself that he wasn't going to do it. Not here, not now. She was the one at fault; she was the one who needed to stop, who needed to step forward and apologize, not him.

At some point, without his noticing the exact moment, the vine had fallen silent.

It would be dark soon. Another five or ten minutes, Jeff guessed, and they'd be blind with it. They ought to have talked things through, ought to have set up a watch schedule, doled out another ration of food and water. Even now, in this final waning of light, they ought to have been up and doing. "Too hard," Amy had said. "We think you're too hard." He was working to save them, and behind his back they were gossiping, complaining.

Fuck her, Jeff thought. Fuck them all.

He turned away, left Amy standing with her hand held out before her. He stepped to the lean-to, sat down beside it, in the mud, facing Pablo. The Greek's eyes were shut, his mouth hanging partway open. The smell he was giving off was almost unbearable. They ought to move him, Jeff knew, lift him free from that disgusting sleeping bag-sodden and stinking with his body's effusions. They ought to wash him, too, ought to irrigate the seared stumps, flush them free of dirt. They had enough water now; they could afford to do this. But the light was failing even as Jeff thought these things, and he knew they could never do it in the dark. It was Amy's fault, this missed opportunity-Amy's and Stacy's and Eric's. They'd distracted him; they'd wasted his time. And now Pablo would have to wait until morning.

The stumps were still bleeding-not heavily, just a steady ooze-they needed to be washed and then bandaged. There was no gauze, of course, nothing sterile; Jeff would have to dig through the backpacks again, search for a clean shirt, hope that this might suffice. Maybe he could use the sewing kit, too, a needle and thread. He could search out the still-leaking blood vessels and tie them off one by one. And then there was Eric to think of also: Jeff could stitch up the wound in his side. He turned, glanced at Amy. She was still standing in the center of the clearing, motionless; she hadn't even lowered her hand. She was waiting for him to relent. But he wasn't going to do it.

"Tell me you're sorry," he said.

"Excuse me?" The light was fading enough that it was already difficult to see her expression. He was being a child, he knew. He was as bad as she was. But he couldn't stop.

"Say you're sorry."

She lowered her hand.

He persisted: "Say it."

"Sorry for what?"

"For stealing the water. For getting drunk."

Amy wiped at her face, a gesture of weariness. She sighed. "Fine."

"Fine what?"

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Come on-"

"Say it, Amy."

There was a long pause; he could sense her wavering. Then, in something close to a monotone, she gave it to him: "I'm sorry for stealing the water. I'm sorry for getting drunk."

Enough, he said to himself. Stop it here. But he didn't. Even as he thought these words, he heard himself begin to speak. "You don't sound like you mean it."

"Jesus Christ, Jeff. You can't-"

"Say it like you mean it, or it doesn't count."

She sighed again, louder this time, almost a scoff. Then she shook her head, turned, walked off toward the far edge of the clearing, where she dropped heavily to the ground. She sat with her back to him, bent into herself, her head in her hands. The light was nearly gone; Jeff felt he could almost see it departing, draining from the air around them. He watched Amy's hunched form as it faded into the shadows, merging with the dark mass of vegetation beyond her. It seemed as if her shoulders were moving. Was she crying? He strained to hear, but the phlegmy rattle of Pablo's breathing obscured all other sounds within the clearing.

Go to her, he said to himself. Do it now. Yet he didn't move. He felt trapped, immobilized. He'd read once how to pick a lock, and he believed that he could do it if he ever needed to. He knew how to break free from the trunk of a car, how to climb out of a well, how to flee a burning building. But none of that helped him here. No, he couldn't think of a way to escape this present situation. He needed Amy to be the one, needed her to be the first to move.

He was certain of it now: she was crying. Rather than softening him, though, this had the opposite effect. She was playing on his sympathies, he decided, manipulating him. All he'd asked of her was that she say she was sorry, say it in a genuine way. Was that such an unreasonable thing? Maybe she wasn't crying; maybe she was shivering, because she must be wet, of course, and cold. As he watched, trying to decide between tears and the shivering, he saw her tilt to her side, lie down in the mud. This, too, ought to have elicited sympathy in him, he knew. But, once again, he felt only anger. If she was wet, if she was cold, why didn't she do something about it? Why didn't she get up and go into the tent, search through one of the backpacks, find herself some dry clothes? Did she need him to tell her to do this? Well, he wasn't going to. If she wanted to lie in the mud, shivering or crying, or both, that was her choice. She could do it all night, if that was what she desired, because he wasn't going to go to her.

Later, much later, after the sun had set, after Mathias had returned from the bottom of the hill and joined the others in the tent, after the sky had cleared and the moon had risen, its pale sliver shaved one step closer to nothingness, after Jeff's clothes had dried on him, stiffening slightly in the process, after Pablo's breathing had stopped at one point for a full thirty seconds before starting again with an abrupt gagging rattle, like a bedsheet being torn in half, after Jeff had thought a dozen times about going to Amy, rousing her, sending her into the tent, only to decide against it on each successive occasion, after he'd sat through his entire shift, and most of the shift to follow, not moving, wanting her to be the first to stir, to come and beg his forgiveness, or even, more simply, just wordlessly embrace him, Amy staggered to her feet. Or not quite: she rose, took a half step toward him, then fell to her knees and began to throw up. She was leaning forward on one hand; the other was pressed to her mouth, as if to hold back the vomit. It was too dark to see her properly. Jeff could make out her outline, the shadowy bulk of her body, but nothing more. It was his ears rather than his eyes that told him what was happening. He could hear her gagging, coughing, spitting. She tried to stand again, with the same result-another half step before she dropped back to her knees, her right hand still clutching at her mouth while her left seemed to reach toward him through the darkness. Was she calling for him? Beneath the gagging, coughing, spitting, did he hear her say his name? He wasn't certain-not certain enough at least-he didn't move. And now both her hands were pressing at her mouth, as if to dam that flow of vomit. But it wasn't possible, of course. The gagging continued, the choking and coughing. Jeff could smell it now, even over Pablo's stench-the tequila, the bile-and it kept coming.

Go to her, he thought yet again.

And then: You're too hard. We all think you're too hard.

He watched as she hunched low, her hands still pressed to her mouth. She hesitated like that, going silent finally: no more coughing or gagging or choking. For nearly a minute, she didn't move at all. Then, very slowly, she tilted over onto her side in the mud. She lay perfectly still, curled into a fetal position; Jeff assumed she'd fallen back asleep. He knew he was supposed to go help her now, wipe her clean like an infant, guide her back into the tent. But this was her own fault, wasn't it? So why should he be the one to pick up the pieces? He wasn't going to do it. He was going to let her lie there, let her wake at dawn with vomit caked to her face. He could still smell it, and he felt his own stomach turning in response to the stench-not just his stomach but his feelings, too. Anger and disgust and the deepest sort of impatience-they kept him by the little lean-to through the night, watching but not doing. I should check on her, he thought-how many times? A dozen, maybe more. I should make sure she's okay. He didn't do it, though; he sat watching her, thinking the words, recognizing their wisdom, their rightness, but not doing, all night not doing.

It was nearing dawn before he finally stirred. He'd nodded off some, his head bobbing in and out of consciousness as the moon climbed and climbed above him, then crested and began to sink. It had almost set before he managed to rouse himself, struggling to his feet, stretching, his blood feeling thick in his veins. Even then he didn't go to Amy, though; not that it would've mattered. He stared at her for a long moment-her still, shadowy mass in the center of the clearing-then shuffled to the tent, unzipped the flap, and slipped quietly inside.

Stacy had heard Jeff and Amy shouting at each other. It had been impossible to make out their words over the rain drumming against the tent, but she could tell that they were arguing. The vine had a part in it, too; she could hear it mimicking Amy's voice.

Yelling, It's my fault.

And then: I'm the one, aren't I?

It was just she and Eric in the tent. The storm made it too dark to see much. Stacy didn't know what time it was, but she could sense that the day was leaking away from them. Another night-she didn't know how they were going to manage it.

"If I sleep, will you watch over me?" Eric asked.

Stacy's thoughts felt muddy from too much alcohol. Everything seemed to be moving a little more slowly than it ought to. She stared at Eric through the dimness, struggling to process his question. The rain continued, the tent sagging beneath it. Jeff and Amy had stopped their yelling. "All night?" she asked.

Eric shook his head. "An hour-can you stay up for an hour? I just need an hour."

She was tired, she realized, as if simply talking about it was making it so. Tired and hungry and very, very drunk. "Why can't we both sleep?"

Eric gestured toward the supplies piled against the tent's rear wall. "It'll come back. It'll push its way in again. One of us has to stay awake."

He means the vine, Stacy thought, and for a moment she seemed to sense it there, hidden in the shadows, listening, watching, waiting for them to fall asleep. "Okay," she said. "An hour, then I'll wake you."

Eric lay down on his back. He was still pressing the balled-up shirt to his side. It was too dark in the tent to tell if the bleeding had stopped. Stacy sat beside him, took his free hand; it was clammy to the touch. They should dry off, she knew; they should change out of their wet clothes. She was cold, still shivering, but she didn't say anything, made no move toward the backpacks. The archaeologists were all dead, along with whoever might've come before or after them, and-stupidly-their belongings felt contagious to Stacy. She didn't want to wear their clothes.

Eric fell asleep, his hand going slack in hers. Stacy was startled by the rapidity with which he managed it. He began to snore, and it sounded oddly like Pablo's watery rasp-frighteningly so. Stacy almost woke him, wanting him to roll over and fall silent, but then, abruptly, he stopped of his own accord. That was scary, too, in a different way, and she leaned down, her ear right above his face, to make sure he was breathing.

He was, of course.

Bent low like that, her head nearly at a horizontal, only a foot or so above the tent's floor, it seemed easier to keep dropping than to struggle upward again. She lay beside him, pressing close. The rain was passing-it was nothing but a drizzle now-and it felt almost peaceful in the tent. Stacy shut her eyes. She wasn't going to sleep-how could she have? It wasn't even night yet. Amy would be in soon, and they could sit up talking together, keeping their voices quiet, maybe even whispering, so that they wouldn't wake Eric. She was tired, it was true, but she'd given him her word, and she knew the vine was lurking all about them, just waiting for her to lower her guard. No, she wasn't going to sleep. All she was going to do was shut her eyes for a moment, so that she could listen to that soft pattering on the nylon above their heads, and perhaps daydream a little, imagining she was somewhere else.

When she opened her eyes again, it was very dark in the tent-pitch-dark, too dark to see. Someone was standing over her, shaking her shoulder. "Wake up, Stacy," this person kept saying. "It's your shift."

It was Jeff's voice, she realized. She didn't move, just lay on her back, peering up at him through the darkness. Things were returning to her, but too slowly to make much sense of them. The rain. Amy shouting "Slut" at her. Jeff and Amy arguing. Eric asking her to watch over him. She felt hungover, but still drunk, too-a painful combination. Her head not only ached; it felt spillable in some strange way, as if, were she to move too quickly in one direction or another, she might pour out of herself. It wasn't something she could think clearly about; she simply knew that she didn't want to stir, that it would be perilous to do so. Her bladder was full to the point of discomfort, but even that wasn't sufficient to impel her into motion. "No," she said.

She couldn't see Jeff, but somehow she sensed his surprise, a stiffening in the shadows above her. "No?" he asked.

"I can't."

"Because?"

"I just can't."

"But it's your turn."

"Ican't, Jeff."

He raised his voice, growing angry. "Cut the shit, Stacy. Get up."

He nudged her, and she almost screamed. Her entire body ached. She started to chant: "I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't-"

"I'll do it." It was Mathias's voice, coming from the far side of the tent.

She sensed Jeff lifting away from her, twisting to look. "It's her turn."

"It's okay. I'm awake."

Stacy could hear him getting up, rustling about, picking his way toward the tent's flap. He stopped just short of it, hesitating.

"Where's Amy?" he asked.

"Outside still," Jeff answered. "Sleeping it off."

"Should I-"

"Leave her be."

Stacy heard Mathias zipper open the flap, and something almost like light entered the tent. For a moment, she glimpsed all three of them: Eric lying motionless on his back, Jeff standing above her, Mathias stepping out into the clearing. Thank you, she thought, but she couldn't quite manage to push the words into speech. The flap closed, dropping them once more into darkness.

Without really meaning to, she was shutting her eyes again. Jeff was lying down a few feet to her left, mumbling to himself with an unmistakable air of complaint-about her, Stacy assumed. She didn't care. He was already mad at Amy, so why shouldn't he be angry with her, too? Later, the two of them could laugh about it; Stacy would mimic him, the way he continued to mutter even now, murmuring and sighing.

I should check on Eric, she thought.

She tried to remember what had happened before she fell asleep. Had she awakened him first, as she'd promised? The more she considered this, the less likely it began to seem, and she was just starting to rouse herself, laboring to open her eyes again, maybe even sit up and prod at him, when Mathias began to shout Jeff's name.

It was the same thing all over again: waking with that musty smell surrounding him, the vine growing across his legs. Inside me, Eric thought as he reached to touch it. My chest, too.

Mathias was yelling from the clearing. There was movement in the tent, someone else stirring. It was too dark to see who. Eric was trying to sit up, but the vine was on top of him; it seemed to be holding him down.

Inside me.

"Jeff…" Mathias was yelling. "Jeff…"

Something had happened, something bad; Eric could hear it in Mathias's voice. Pablo's died, he thought.

"Jeff…"

Someone was standing up, moving toward the tent's flap.

"Oh God," Eric said. He'd pushed his hand down through the vine, was pressing at his chest, just above his wound. He could feel the vine beneath the skin there, a spongy mass covering his rib cage, spreading upward to his sternum. "The knife!" he called. "Get me the knife!"

"What is it? What's happening?" It was Stacy, right beside Eric, her voice sounding sleep-fuzzed, frightened. She clutched at him grabbing his shoulder.

"I need the knife," he said.

"The knife?"

"Hurry!"

From the clearing, Mathias continued to shout. "Jeff…Jeff…"

Eric's hand had moved down to his leg, where it found that same padded growth, just under the skin, climbing over his knee, up his thigh. He heard the flap being zippered open, turned to look. It was still night, but somehow not as dark outside as in. He glimpsed Jeff stepping out into the clearing.

"Wait," he called, "I need-"

But Jeff was already gone.

Jeff knew.

As soon as he heard Mathias begin to shout, he knew. He was up and out into the clearing, everything happening very quickly-too quickly-but not quickly enough to keep the knowledge at bay. It was in Mathias's voice, in the panic he heard there, the urgency. That was all Jeff needed.

Yes, he knew.

Up and out of the tent and across the clearing, all in darkness, with Mathias little more than a shadow, crouched above a second shadow, which was Amy. Jeff dropped to his knees beside them, reached for Amy's hand, her wrist, already cold to the touch. He couldn't make out either of their faces.

"I think it…" Mathias began, fumbling for the words, almost stuttering in his agitation. "I think it smothered her."

Jeff bent closer. The vine had grown across her mouth, her nose. He started to tug at it, the sap burning his hands. It had pushed its way inside her mouth, and he had to dig in with his fingers to pull it free, ignoring the rubbery feel of her lips, so cold-too cold.

From the tent, Eric had begun to shout again. "The knife! Get the knife!"

Not smothered, Jeff thought. Choked . Because he could smell the tequila, the bile, feel the dampness on the vine's leaves. He remembered Amy staggering to her feet, taking that half step toward him, her hand held to her mouth. He'd thought she'd been pressing it there to hold back her nausea, but he'd been wrong. She'd been pulling, he realized now, struggling to rip the plant from her face, to open a passage for her vomit, even as she suffocated upon it, falling to her knees, beckoning to him for help.

When he finished clearing her mouth, he tilted back her head, pinched shut her nostrils, bent his lips to hers-a tight seal, with no gaps. He could taste her vomit, feel the burn of the vine's sap on his tongue. He exhaled, filling her lungs, lifted his mouth free, moved to her chest, felt for her sternum, placed the heels of his hands against it, pressed downward with all his weight, counting in his head with each push-one…two…three…four…five-and then back to her mouth.

"Jeff," Mathias said.

There were stories Jeff could call upon here-false deaths-people pulled pulseless from deep water, blue-lipped, stiff-limbed. There were heart attacks and snakebites and lightning strikes. And choking victims, too-why not? People who ought never to have breathed again, and yet, through some miracle, some physiological quirk, were yanked back into life simply because someone who had no reason to believe, no reason to persist, did so nonetheless, breathing air into a corpse's lungs, pumping blood through a cadaver's heart, resurrecting them-somehow, some way-Lazarus-like, from the grip of their too-soon deaths.

"It's too late," Mathias said.

Jeff had learned CPR in a tenth-grade health class. Early spring in western Massachusetts, flies buzzing and bumping against the big windows, which looked out on the courtyard, with its flagpole, its tiny greenhouse. A short lecture, and then they practiced, the rubber dummy laid out on the linoleum, a female, oddly legless. She'd been given a name, Jeff remembered, but he couldn't recall what it was. Fifteen boys, taking turns with her-there'd been a few halfhearted sexual jokes, which Mr. Kocher frowned into silence. They were all embarrassed, anxious of failure, and trying not to show it. The dummy's lips had tasted of rubbing alcohol. Kneeling beside her head, Jeff had imagined the rescues that might lie in his future. He'd pictured his grandmother collapsed on the kitchen floor, his entire family-sister and parents and cousins and uncles and aunts-all of them frozen, helpless, watching her die; and then Jeff would calmly step forward, pushing his way through them, so that he could kneel beside her and breathe life back into her body, the simplest of gestures, yet God-like, too. A moment of grace-that was how he'd pictured it-full of serenity and self-assurance.

He exhaled, filling Amy's lungs.

Mathias reached, touched his shoulder. "She's not…"

Go to her, he'd thought-he remembered the words in his head. Sitting in the mud beside Pablo's lean-to, watching her stagger, drop to her knees, her hands at her mouth. Do it now. And why hadn't he?

There was movement from the tent, and Stacy appeared, came stumbling toward them. "It's inside him again," she said. "I-" She stopped, stood staring at them through the darkness. "What happened?"

Jeff shifted back to Amy's chest, felt for the sternum.

"Is she-"

My fault: There was no doubt of this, yet Jeff knew he couldn't afford to think on it now, had to resist its pull. Later, he'd have to confront those two words, bear their weight; later, there'd be no escape. But not now.

He began to push: one…two…three…four…five.

Then again, perhaps there wouldn't be a later. Because there was that possibility, too, wasn't there? No later, nothing beyond this place, Amy simply the first of them, with himself and the others soon to follow. And if that were the case, what did it matter, really? This way rather than another, now rather than in the coming days or weeks-couldn't it be a blessing, even, like any other abridgement of suffering?

"Jeff…" Mathias said.

He hadn't known. He hadn't been able to see. She'd been only fifteen feet away, but lost in darkness nonetheless. How could he have known?

Eric was yelling from the tent, calling for Stacy, for the knife, for help.

Not now, Jeff thought, struggling to discipline himself. Later.

"Mathias?" Stacy said, sounding scared. "Is she…"

"Yes."

Babies pulled from trash cans, old women found slumped in their nightgowns, hikers dug out of snowbanks-the main thing was not to give up, not to make assumptions, to act without hesitation, and pray for that miracle, that quirk, that sudden gasp of air.

Stacy took a single step forward. "You mean-"

"Dead."

Jeff ignored them. Back to her mouth: the cold lips, the taste of vomit, the burn of the sap as he forced the air into her chest. Eric kept yelling from the tent. Stacy and Mathias were silent, not moving, watching Jeff work at the body-the lungs, the heart-straining for that moment of grace, which resisted him, fought him, wouldn't come. He gave up long before he stopped, kept at it for an extra handful of minutes out of simple inertia, a terror of what it meant to lift his lips from her mouth, his hands from her chest, with no intention of returning. It was fatigue that finally forced him to a halt, a cramp in his right thigh, a growing sense of light-headedness; he sat back on his heels, struggled to catch his breath.

No one spoke.

She called my name, Jeff thought. He wiped at his mouth; the sap made his lips feel abraded. I heard her call it. He picked up Amy's hand, clasped it in his own, as if trying to warm it.

"Stacy…" Eric shouted.

Jeff lifted his head, peered toward the tent. "What's wrong with him?" he asked. The quietness of his voice astonished him; he'd expected something ragged, something desperate: a howl. He was waiting for tears-he could feel them, just beyond his reach-but they didn't come.

Wouldn't.

Later, he thought.

"It's inside him again," Stacy said, and she, too, spoke softly, almost inaudibly. It was the presence of death, Jeff knew, reducing them all to whispers.

He let go of Amy's hand, laid it carefully across her chest, thinking of that rubber dummy once more, those limp arms. He'd received a certificate for passing the test; his mother had framed it, hung it in his room. He could shut his eyes now and see all those certificates and ribbons and plaques hanging on the walls, the shelves full of trophies. "Someone should go help him," he said.

Mathias stood up without a word, started toward the tent. Jeff and Stacy watched him go, a shadow moving off across the clearing.

Ghostlike, Jeff thought, and then the tears arrived; he couldn't hold them back. No sobs, no gasps-no wailing or moaning or keening-just a half dozen drops of salty water rolling slowly down his cheeks, stinging where the vine's sap had burned his skin.

Stacy couldn't see Jeff's tears. She couldn't see much of anything, actually. She was in bad shape: tired, drunk, aching-in her muscles, in her bones-and thick-headed with fear. It was dark, too dark; it hurt her eyes, the straining to pull things into some semblance of themselves. Amy was lying on her back and Jeff was kneeling beside her-that was all she could see. But she knew, even so, had known as soon as she stepped out of the tent-not how, just the fact of it: She's dead.

She lowered herself into a crouch. She was two feet away from them; she could've touched Amy if she'd only reached out her hand. She knew she ought to do this, too, that it would be the right thing, exactly what Amy would've wanted of her. But she didn't move. She was too scared: Touching her would make it real.

"Are you sure?" she asked Jeff.

"Sure?"

"That she's…" Stacy couldn't bring herself to say it.

But Jeff understood; she sensed him nodding in the darkness.

"How?" she whispered

"How what?"

"How did she…"

"It grew over her mouth. It choked her."

Stacy took a deep breath, reflexively. This can't be happening, she thought. How can this be happening? That campfire smell was in the air again, and it reminded her that there were people at the bottom of the hill. "We have to tell them," she said.

"Who?"

"The Mayans."

She could feel Jeff watching, but he didn't speak. She wished she could make out his expression, because he was part of the unreality here, the not-happening quality-his calmness, his quiet voice, his hidden face. Amy was dead, and they were just sitting beside her, doing nothing.

"We have to tell them what's happened." Stacy's voice rose as she spoke. She could feel it more than hear it, her heart speeding up, burning through the tequila, the sleep, even the terror. "We have to get them to help."

"They're not gonna-"

"They have to."

"Stacy-"

"They have to!"

"Stacy!"

She stopped, blinking at him. She was having a hard time remaining in her crouch, her muscles jumping in her thighs. She wanted to leap up, run down the hill, bring this all to an end. It seemed so simple.

"Shut up," Jeff said, his voice very quiet. "All right?"

She didn't answer, was too startled. Briefly, she felt the urge to scream, to lash out at him, strike him, but then it passed. Everything seemed to collapse in its wake. Her fatigue was back suddenly, and her fear, too. She reached, took Amy's hand. It was cool to the touch, slightly damp. If it had squeezed back, Stacy would've shrieked, and it was this realization more than anything else that finally, unequivocally, brought the truth home.

Dead, Stacy thought She's dead.

"No more talking," Jeff said. "Can you do that? Just be here with me-with her-and not say another word?"

Stacy kept gripping Amy's hand. Somehow this made things easier. She nodded.

And so that was what they did. They remained there together, one on either side of Amy's body, waiting, not speaking, while the earth began its slow tilt toward dawn.

Eric kept begging Mathias to cut him open, but Mathias wouldn't do it, not in the dark.

"We've got to get it out," Eric insisted. "It's spreading everywhere."

"We don't know that."

"Can't you feel it?"

"I can feel that there's swelling."

"It's not swelling. It's the vine. It's-"

Mathias patted at his arm. "Shh," he said. "When it gets light."

It was hot in the tent, musty and humid, and Mathias's hand was slick with sweat. Eric didn't like the feel of it. He pulled away. "I can't wait that long."

"Dawn's almost here."

"Is it because I called you a Nazi?"

Mathias was silent.

"It was just a joke. We were talking about the movie they'll make. When we get back, how they'll turn you into the villain. Because you're German, right? So they'd make you a Nazi." He wasn't thinking straight, he knew, was talking too quickly. He was scared, and it seemed possible he wasn't making perfect sense. But he'd started down this road, and now he couldn't seem to stop himself. "Not that you are one. Just that they'll make you one. Because they'll need a bad guy. They always need one. Though I guess the vine could be the villain, too, couldn't it? So maybe you don't have to be a Nazi. You can be a hero, like Jeff. You'll both be heroes. Do they have Boy Scouts in Germany?"

He heard Mathias sigh. "Eric-"

"Just give me the fucking knife, okay? I'll do it myself."

"I don't have the knife."

"So go get it."

"When it starts to get light-"

"Call Jeff. Jeff'll do it."

"We can't call Jeff."

"Because?"

There was a pause, and Eric could feel Mathias hesitating. "Something bad's happened," he said.

Eric thought of the little lean-to, that stench of urine and shit and rot. He nodded. "I know."

"I don't think you do."

"It's Pablo, isn't it? He's died."

"No. It's not Pablo."

"Then what?"

"It's Amy."

"Amy?" Eric hadn't expected this. "What's wrong with Amy?"

There was that same pause again, that search for the right words. "She's gone."

"She left?"

He sensed Mathias shaking his head in the darkness. "She's dead, Eric. It killed her."

"What're you-"

"It smothered her. In her sleep."

Eric was silent, too shocked to speak. Dead. "Are you sure?" he asked, knowing even as he spoke that it was a stupid question.

"Yes."

Eric felt a spinning sensation in his head, an abrupt loss of traction. Dead. He wanted to get up and go see for himself, but he wasn't certain he had the strength. Someone needed to cut the vine out of his leg first, pull it from his chest. Dead. He knew it was true, yet at the same time he couldn't accept it. Dead. It was silly, but the movie they'd joked about had taken hold of his imagination: Amy was the good girl, the prissy one; she was supposed to survive, was supposed to float away with Jeff in their hot-air balloon.

Dead, dead, dead.

"Jesus," he said.

"I know."

"I mean-"

There was that pat of the hand again, that sweaty touch of skin. "Shh. Don't. There's nothing to say."

Eric let his head fall back onto the tent's floor. He shut his eyes for a while, then opened them, searching for the first hints of light coming through the orange nylon. But there was only darkness-all around him, only darkness.

He closed his eyes again and lay there, waiting for dawn, with that single word echoing through his head.

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead…

Eric started to call from the tent again, as soon as the sun began to rise. He wanted the knife. Mathias stepped out through the little opening, stood in the clearing, staring at Jeff and Stacy. They were still sitting next to Amy's body, one on either side of it. Stacy was holding Amy's hand.

"What?" Jeff asked.

Mathias shrugged, tilted his head. The light hadn't yet gained much strength; it was tinged with pink. Off in the distance, in the jungle, Jeff could hear birds calling out, shrieking and cawing. He couldn't read Mathias's expression: worried, maybe. Or just uncertain. "I think you should come look."

Jeff got up, feeling stiff, heavy-limbed, his reserves running out on him. He followed Mathias back into the tent, leaving Stacy with Amy's body.

Inside, the light was still too dim to see much. Eric was lying on his back. His left leg and most of his abdomen were hidden beneath something, and it took Jeff a moment to realize that it was the vine.

He crouched beside him. "Why haven't you pulled it off?" he asked.

"He's afraid to tear them," Mathias said.

Eric nodded. "If they break off, they can go anywhere. Like worms."

Jeff prodded at the mass of leaves, bending close to see. The vines had pushed themselves into the wounds on Eric's leg and chest, but it was hard to tell how far they'd managed to get. Jeff needed better light. "Can you walk?" he asked.

Eric shook his head. "It'll crush them. They'll burn me."

Jeff considered this; it was probably true, he decided. "Then we'll carry you."

Eric seemed frightened by this. He tried to sit, but he only made it halfway, propping himself up on his elbow. "Where?"

"Outside. It's too dark in here."

There were five tendrils in all, coiling themselves around Eric's body. Three had attacked his leg, each of them entering a different wound. The other two had both pushed their way in through the cut on his chest. Jeff realized they'd need to snap them off from their roots if they wanted to carry him out of there, and he did it quickly, not saying anything, worried that Eric might protest. Then he gestured for Mathias to help him. Mathias took Eric's shoulders, Jeff his feet, and they picked him up. The five tendrils hung off his body, dangling toward the floor of the tent, writhing snakelike in the air, as they carried him out into the clearing.

They set him down in the dirt, midway between Pablo and Amy. Then Jeff stepped across the clearing, picked up the knife. It was a good thing, having a task like this; he could feel it helping him. Just holding the knife in his hand seemed to clear his mind, sharpen his perceptions. He hesitated for a second, staring about their little campsite. They were a desperate-looking bunch: dirty, their clothes falling off them. Mathias's and Eric's faces were thickly stubbled. Eric was covered in dried blood; the vines looked as if they were growing from his wounds rather than into them. Jeff had seen him glance toward Amy as they'd carried him out from the tent, just a quick exploratory peek, before he flinched away. No one had spoken; they all seemed to be waiting for someone else to do it first. They needed a plan, Jeff knew, a path to carry them beyond this present moment, something to occupy their thoughts, and he understood, too, that he would have to be the one to find it.

The light was growing stronger, bringing the first of the day's heat with it. Pablo's breathing-remarkably, unexpectedly-had become much quieter. For an instant, Jeff even thought the Greek might've died. He approached the lean-to, crouched beside it. No, he was still with them. But the phlegmy rattle had vanished; his breathing was steadier now, slower. Jeff touched Pablo's forehead, felt the heat coming off him, the fever still burning within his body. And yet something had changed. When Jeff pulled his hand away, the Greek's eyes eased open, stared up at him. They seemed surprisingly focused, too: alert.

"Hey," Jeff said.

Pablo licked his lips, swallowed dryly. "Potato?" he whispered.

Jeff stared at him, trying to make sense of this. "Potato?"

Pablo nodded, licking his lips again.

"He wants water," Stacy said from across the clearing. "That's Greek for water."

Jeff turned to look at her. "How do you know?"

"He was saying it before."

Eric was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. "The knife, Jeff," he said.

"In a moment."

Mathias was standing over Eric, his arms folded across his chest, as if he were cold. But Jeff could see the sweat on his face, making it seem to shine in the gathering light. Jeff caught his eye, pointed toward the water jug. It was sitting in the dirt beside the tent. Mathias picked it up, brought it to him.

Jeff uncapped the jug, held it in the air above Pablo, pointing. "Potato?" he asked.

Pablo nodded, opened his mouth, his tongue protruding slightly. There was something on his teeth, Jeff noticed, a brownish stain-blood, perhaps. Jeff lowered the jug, brought it to Pablo's lips, tilted a small amount of water onto his tongue. The Greek swallowed, coughing slightly, then opened his mouth for more. Three times, Jeff repeated this ritual. It was a good sign, he knew-this quieting of Pablo's breathing, this return to consciousness, this ability to stomach the water-but Jeff couldn't quite bring himself to accept it. In his mind, Pablo was already dead. He didn't believe that anyone could survive all that had happened to the Greek in the past thirty-six hours, not without elaborate medical intervention. The broken back, the amputated legs, the loss of blood, the almost certain infection-a few mouthfuls of water weren't going to compensate for any of that.