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began to
fidget, craning his neck and staring into the jungle, though anyone standing
just a few feet behind the trees would be completely hidden from view. He
looked at his watch, then scanned the jungle again,
his gaze moving nervously from left to right. Jane felt the tension in the man
standing beside her, tension that was echoed in the hand that held her
shoulder. What was wrong? What was he looking for, and why was he waiting? He
was as motionless as a jaguar lying in wait for its prey to pass beneath its
tree limb.
                  "This sucks," he muttered abruptly,
easing deeper into the jungle and dragging her with him.
                  Jane sputtered at the inelegant expression.
"It does? Why? What's wrong?"
                  "Stay here." He pushed her to the
ground, deep in the green-black shadow of the buttressed roots of an enormous
tree.
                  Startled, she took a moment to realize that
she'd been abandoned. He had simply melted into the jungle, so silently and
swiftly that she wasn't certain which way he'd gone. She twisted around but
could see nothing that indicated his direction; no swaying vines or limbs.
                  She wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs
and propped her chin on her knees, staring thoughtfully at the ground. A green
stick with legs was dragging a large spider off to be devoured. What if he
didn't come back… whoever he was. Why hadn't she asked
him his name? If something happened to him, she'd like to know his name, so she
could tell someone—assuming that she could manage to get out of the jungle
herself. Well, she wasn't any worse off now than she had been before. She was
away from Turego , and that was what counted.
                  Wait here, he'd said. For
how long? Until lunch? Sundown? Her next birthday? Men gave such inexact instructions!
Of course, this particular man seemed a little limited in the conversation
department. Shut up, Stay here and Stay put seemed to be the highlights of his
repertoire. This was quite a tree he'd parked her by. The bottom of the trunk
flared into buttressed roots, forming enormous wings that wrapped around her
almost like arms. If she sat back against the tree, the wings would shield her
completely from the view of someone approaching at any angle except head on.
The straps of her backpack were irritating her shoulders, so she slid it off
and stretched, feeling remarkably lighter. She hauled the pack around and
opened it, then began digging for her hairbrush. Finding this backpack had been
a stroke of luck, she thought, though Turego's soldiers really should be a little more careful with their belongings. Without
it, she'd have had to wrap things up in a blanket, which would have been
awkward.
                  Finally locating the hairbrush, she diligently
worked through the mass of tangles that had accumulated in her long hair during
the night. A small monkey with an indignant expression hung from a branch
overhead. It scolded her throughout the operation, evidently angry that she had
intruded on its territory. She waved at it.
                  Congratulating herself for her foresight, she
pinned her hair up and pulled a black baseball cap out of the pack. She jammed
the cap on and tugged the bill down low over her eyes, then shoved it back up.
There wasn't any sun down here. Staring upward, she could see bright pinpoints
of sun high in the trees, but only a muted green light filtered down to the
floor. She'd have been better off with some of those fancy goggles that.
What's-his-name had.
                  How long had she been sitting there? Was he in
trouble?
                  Her legs were going to sleep, so she stood and
stomped around to get her blood flowing again. The longer she waited, the more
uneasy she became, and she had the feeling that a time would come when she'd
better be able to move fast. Jane was an instinctive