Gina’s hair was in a twisted nest of a ponytail. Her arms and face were covered in dirt. Worst of all, one of her eyes was blackened.

Rix asked, “Who is with her?”

“Four soldiers and three white dudes.”

“The Belippa guys?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” Rix asked.

“For one, I don’t think they’re the Nsé-Eja.” I described what I saw.

“That doesn’t sound like them,” Diego said.

I clapped him on the shoulder and said, “So no curses to deal with.”

But we still had to deal with twenty Indian warriors, plus Gina’s captors.

“Okay,” Rix said. “How do you want to do this?”

“Hard and fast,” I said.

“Hard and fast,” Rix echoed.

≈

“Hands up!” Rix and I yelled as we sprinted across fifty yards of open space into the center of the village. Diego was a half-step behind us, racing to keep up.

The villagers fell to their knees. In doing so, they revealed Gina and her captors standing behind them.

Gina’s mouth opened wide, and her hands flew up. “Thomas?” she cried, unbelievingly. “Thomas!”

“Don’t move,” I said, swiveling the shotgun across Gina’s seven captors. The seven of them glanced nervously at one another. I didn’t see any firearms on them, but if one of them so much as blinked, I was prepared to put a bullet through their chest.

They remained still.

Gina ran toward me, tears dripping down her cheeks. She collapsed into my arms, pressing her head into my chest. After a long breath, she glanced up at me, moisture clinging at the edges of her eyes, and said, “I knew you would come.”

I wiped a tear running down her cheek and said, “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”

She sniffed.

I gently thumbed the fading bruise around her eye and asked, “Who did this to you?”

She turned and pointed at the handsome, dark-haired American with rough, pockmarked cheeks. “Him.”

“Patrick Sewall,” I said.

Lacy had described to me what he looked like via text.

“You figured it out?” Gina said, obviously impressed. “That this was all about the cure for cancer.”

I stepped back a few inches.

“What?” she asked.

I shook my head. “This isn’t about cancer. It never was.”

“What are you talking about?”

When I texted Lacy a day earlier, I asked her to do some research for me on the internet. I was still trying to figure out the Venn Diagram. How did three different groups end up in the exact same place in the Amazon jungle?

One name kept pinging my brain.

It was from when I sat down with Jonathan Roth and questioned him about who else could have known the golden jaguar’s exact location. I was more interested in the tentacles stemming from Roth, when I should have been thinking about the tentacle that was Roth. Where he got the image from.

Jordan Mae and Yewed Global.