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limited Wi-Fi in the Galápagos. I literally told him on the phone, yesterday, before we were cut off. Plus, the guidebooks all mention it as a caveat and say your best bet is spotty service at your hotel…or suggest turning off your phone, and simply enjoying your vacation. To Finn and me, that sounded like heaven. But that was when we thought we would be together inside this bubble of solitude.
    If it were the other way around—if he were the one who was stuck somewhere without cell service—I would be worried. I console myself with a pep talk: he knows I landed safely; it has been only a day; I will figure out a way to reach him tomorrow.
    By the time I’ve walked for twenty minutes, it’s nearly sunset. The jaunty arms of the cacti re-form in the low light into strangers following me; when iguanas scissor in front of me I jump. I should turn around before it’s too dark for me to find my way back. I am about to resign myself to going to bed hungry when I see a little shed further up the road. I squint, but I can’t quite make out the sign.
    By the time I can read it, I know that it’s not a restaurant or a convenience store. CENTRO DE CRIANZA DE TORTUGAS GIGANTES . There is a translation in English— GIANT TORTOISE BREEDING CENTER —and just to be extra clear, a picture of a tortoise hatching from an egg.
    There is no gate, so I wander into the open-air courtyard. The main building is closed up for the night (or longer?), but a horseshoe of enclosures surrounds me. Each pen is gated by a concrete wall that is a few feet high—certainly big enough for me to lean over, but too high for the tortoises to escape.
    I approach one wall and find myself face-to-face with a prehistoric-looking tortoise. Its slitted eyes stare at me as it moves closer on padded feet and stretches its neck up from the hump of its shell. I look at its flat head and dinosaur skin, the black ridges of its toes, its Voldemort nose. It opens its mouth and sticks out a spear of tongue.
    Delighted, I lean down on my elbows and watch it turn away, loping across the dusty ground toward another tortoise in the distance. With lumbering underwater movements, it crawls up the shell of the second tortoise, anchoring her so they can mate. The male I’ve been watching curves his neck toward his partner, tendons stretching. His thick arms look like they are covered in chain mail. He grunts, the only sound he’ll make in his life.
    “You go, buddy,” I murmur, and I turn away to give them privacy.
    In the other enclosures are hundreds of tortoises of varying sizes. They look, heaped, like a collection of army helmets. Some sleep, some are surprisingly limber. Others seem world-weary, as they crawl out of a puddle electric green with algae, or maneuver stalks of food into their mouths. Even the smallest ones remind me of old men, with the wrinkled skin of their throats and bald pates.
    In one of the enclosures, a few of the tortoises are chewing on apples. The apples are small and green and seem to have fallen from a tree beyond the concrete pen. I watch the reptiles use their powerful jaws to grind.
    My stomach rumbles, and I glance at the tree.
    I’m not the kind of person who eats berries off random trees; I’m a New Yorker, for God’s sake, and most of nature looks like a hazard to me. But if the tortoises are eating these, then they have to be safe, right?
    I can’t quite reach the fruit. The branches that hang into the pen have already been stripped by the greedy tortoises, so I find myself climbing onto the little wall to grasp an apple.
    “Cuidado!”
    I turn, almost toppling into the tortoise pen with surprise. The dark has settled like a net, casting shadows, so I can’t see who’s calling to me. I hesitate, and then turn back to the apple tree.
    My fingers have just brushed against the skin of the apple when I am yanked off the wall and lose my balance, then find myself sprawled on the dusty ground with a man looming over me. He is