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ain’t tore all ta pieces.”
    “I didn’t know there was another way.” Martine switched on her flashlight and shone it around the valley, an orchid-scented space between two leaning shelves of mountain. Above them, glittering with stars, was a rectangle of blue-black sky. “How do you usually get in here?”
    Grace smiled enigmatically. “I have my way, chile, and you have yours.”
    No matter how often she visited it, the Memory Cave never lost its magic for Martine. Its charged air, as dense as that of a frankincense-scented cathedral, filled her lungs with history and carried her back to a time when San Bushmen painted their lives on its granite walls. Images of giraffe and men with lions’ heads and great hunts and feasts chased each other in fiery shades across the cave.
    She and Grace sat down on a low, flat rock that formed a natural bench. Martine was aware of Khan, the leopard she’d helped save in Zimbabwe, stealing up behind them, though she heard no sound. She could picture him stretched out on the rock behind them like a Sphinx, his golden coat with its rosettes of onyx-black shining in the torchlight. She knew he’d be watching her with an expression that was somewhere between love and confusion. Confusion—because what he felt for her went against every one of his predatory instincts.
    Martine, on the hand, simply loved him.
    Tears filled her eyes. Soon all of this would be taken from her. There was some satisfaction in knowing that Reuben James was unlikely ever to find this place, but that was offset by the agony of knowing she would have to say good-bye to Khan and Jemmy. Worse still, she would lose her links with the ancestors who’d written her story on the cave walls.
    Grace handed her a tissue. “Tell me everythin’, from the beginnin’. Leave nothin’ out.”
    So Martine did. She told the woman she’d come to think of as a mentor, guide, friend, and earth-mother about her unsettling first encounter with Reuben James, about Henry Thomas’s debt and the changed will, about Angel’s attack on the chauffeur, about the discovery of her grandfather’s letter with its plea for forgiveness, and about her grandmother flying away to England.
    “So you see, Grace, I don’t have the time to wait for experience to teach me how to read the paintings. I need an answer now. Tonight. We have ten days left to save Sawubona. In ten days, everything we love will be lost.”
    Grace took her time replying. The silence stretched out until Martine, whose nerves were at their breaking point, wanted to scream with impatience. Finally the sangoma heaved herself off the rock bench. She went over to what looked like a splotch on the wall and stared at it for several long minutes. Martine went to Grace’s side and they studied it together.
    “Surely you can’t read any significance into that?” Martine said. “They probably just spilled some paint there or made a mistake.”
    Grace shook her head. “The forefathers did everything for a reason.”
    She moved off across the cave, her large palms roaming over the rock, searching for other clues. Halfway across they halted. Etched into the granite was something that looked a bit like a compass.
    At once, she became agitated. “Come, chile,” she said, “we mus’ go.”
    “Go where?” Martine asked, but Grace’s only answer was to reach over and switch off Martine’s flashlight. Darkness descended like a shutter.
    Much as Martine adored Khan, she was wary of being in a labyrinth with the world’s largest leopard when she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. But the sangoma had no such fears. She took Martine’s hand and led her through a warren of tunnels that twisted like snakes beneath the mountain—tunnels Martine had always been much too afraid to explore on her own.
    How Grace found her way in the blackness Martine had no idea, but the sangoma walked as if she knew these caves like she knew her own home.
    The air became soupy and