“Have you ever killed a jaguar?”

“No, but I’ve seen a puma. A huge one. Sleeping in a tree down by the Tortoise Beach, back when I was a little girl.”

“Were you scared?”

She laughed. “Well, I didn’t wait around till he woke up. But he was really passed out, he had a bellyful of tortoise eggs, so I just snuck away.”

“What are puma like?”

“Puma smell you and circle around behind you, and you’re dead. They’ll kill you just to kill you. Jaguars don’t make the effort unless they’re hungry. But the one that took my boy is different. This one is angry.” She wiped her eyes and squinted into the velvet, wet darkness. “This one’s going to come back.”

TWENTY

“You never told me you were a shaman,” Omar said, grinning. Taped-together glasses halfway down his nose, he sat cross-legged between the grain sacks on the shelf in the storeroom, his Spanish-to-English workbook open on his lap, the baby macaws snuffling and chirping in their burlap bed. After sleeping in neighboring hammocks in the longhouse the last several nights, we’d agreed the storeroom was the best place—temporarily—to have privacy together.

I sat across from him on a bag of rice, the morning sun already baking us through the open window. “You never asked.”

“Okay, what am I thinking?” Still smiling, he closed his eyes.

“Knock it off, Ohms.”

His eyes popped open. “I was thinking how much I missed you out there. How much you would have loved it. Parts of it, anyway.”

“You don’t believe me. About Beya.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looked out the window. “First of all, Lily, I’m trying not to be furious that you went in the jungle by yourself. You promised me you’d never—”

“Sorry. I wanted to thank her, and I could hear her donkey braying, and smell her sage burning and her cooking fire—”

He held up one hand. “So I’m going to ask you again. I don’t care how bored you get. How badly you want something out there. Will you please, God, never, never—”

I got up and paced the room. “Okay, all right.” Charlotte opened one eye and got up to trail my every step, clomping along behind me on the creaking plywood floor. She’d already grown out of the piglet stage: I fed her well.

“And second of all, sure, I believe Beya spoke inside your mind. It’s called shining. It’s the vieja lengua, the old language. You’ve got a dozen tribes in a twenty-kilometer range, all speaking different languages. So that’s how they communicated, sometimes just with images—about predators, poachers, what fruits are in bloom and where, everything. Now only a shaman can do it, but not every shaman remembers. Lily, it’s an honor.”

“Why me, though?”

“Maybe she’s lonely. She doesn’t want anything to do with us anymore. We’ve all let her down. Her brother, Splitfoot, let her down. You were open to it, somehow. Anything is possible in this place.”