when she looks up, she sees that the whole sky is dark and full of rain.
It takes less than a minute for this rain to turn into a hammering tropical downpour, falling in thick ropes from the canopy trees, reducing the earth to muck. Veronica is grateful for it. She cranes her neck back and lets the delicious water drip down her throat, easing her thirst. Better yet, it is slowing their progress considerably, they move no faster than a crawl as they slip and stumble onwards through the rain and the mud.
Slowly her head begins to clear a little. Her drenched clothes chafe uncomfortably, and the wet rope on her arms is painful, a ring of blisters has erupted around her wrists. She realizes their abductors' sense of tense urgency has vanished; they are now laughing and joking with one another as they herd their captives onwards. Veronica moans with comprehension. No one will follow their trail across this melting earth; no helicopter can fly through this torrential storm. The rain has erased any chance of pursuit and rescue.
Jacob falls again. It takes him some time to struggle back to his feet, with shaking muscles and unseeing eyes. Diane is still half-naked, her shirt still clumped around her wrists, she has been like that all day. She limps mindlessly onwards, her face blank, like she is no longer really here in any way that matters. Michael behind her stares out at the world as if all he can see is ghosts.
The trail changes, becomes wide and flat and well-worn. The trees too are different, they are all the same kind now, peeling brown trunks from which clusters of enormous tear-shaped leaves erupt like frozen green fireworks. Furled purple flowers dangle obscenely from the tops of the trunks, and tight clumps of bananas hang beneath the leaves. A banana plantation. They have left the wild Impenetrable Forest and entered the settled lands of the eastern Congo. If it makes any sense to call this land of blood and bullets 'settled.'
The rain begins to dissipate. Bolts of brilliant sunlight shine through rents in the dark clouds. The trail leads them up a steep ridge. They are allowed to climb it at their own slow pace, but they are not allowed to stop, and the gruelling ascent reduces Veronica to desperation; by the time she finally reaches the summit, she is groaning with every painful step, wobbling on both legs. At the top the one-eyed man calls a halt.
Veronica blinks tears from her eyes and tries to catch her breath. The plantation ends at the ridgetop, and she can see westward for several miles, across undulating hills partitioned into a madman's checkerboard of brown and green, cultivated plots and stands of banana trees. None of the plots are large; this is subsistence farming. She sees a few figures moving in the distance, working the fields. In the distance a tin roof glitters in a shaft of sunlight. Much closer, on the downslope of the ridge, stands the most basic human structure she has ever seen, a misshapen one-person hut made of heaped mud and leaves.
The one-eyed man waits inside the plantation's treeline, watching the sky carefully, listening. Then he hustles them further onwards. The trail leads between fields of some knee-high, grassy crop. A little past the mud igloo they veer into the fields, down and then along the base of a steep and stony incline that eventually becomes a sheer rock face punctuated by a pale waterfall. They are led up to and then straight through this curtain of water. Veronica has no strength left with which to be surprised. She barely feels herself getting wet again.
There is a cave behind the water, a stone chamber the size of a ballroom. The light that filters through the water is dim and flickering. The cave is carpeted by unstable rocks the size of grapefruits, and Veronica falls almost immediately, bruising her hip. She struggles desperately back to her feet. The captives are led stumbling to the back wall. There is nowhere left to go, but Veronica stands uncomprehending for a long time, dazed and soaked, before she begins to understand that their awful journey is over, that this cave is their destination and their prison.
* * *
The gunmen sit in a tight circle near the waterfall. The eight captives sit in line near the back wall of the cave, as far from their abductors as possible. At first Veronica focuses on regaining