Benecio had taken several steps toward our group, and he shouted at Gina, “¡Bájate de allí! ¡Bájate de allí!” Which I think translated to, “Please, if it isn’t too much trouble, could you please get down off the pole?”

“Keep going!” I shouted.

Gina grunted her way up another foot. Then another. She was two feet from the top.

Benecio waved his gun at her. He glanced over his shoulder. I could read his thoughts: Where are they?

“You’re almost there!” I said.

Gina shimmied her hands to within four inches of the top of the pole. From six feet above me, I could hear her heavy breathing.

I said, “You got this!”

Once Gina freed herself, I was going to yell at her to hop her way into the jungle and get away. She’d fight me on it—she’d want to rescue me—but in the end, I hoped I’d be able to convince her to save herself.

Gina’s hands were centimeters from the top of the pole when Benecio ran forward and yanked down on her legs. She lost the tension in her arms and she slid down seven feet, slamming back to the ground.

“Ugh,” she groaned, her eyes squeezed shut.

Benecio yelled something at her in Spanish, then he retreated to the center of the village.

I gave her a few seconds with her pain, and then I said, “I told you he wouldn’t shoot you.”

She opened one eye and glared at me.

That’s when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I craned my neck as far to the right as possible until I was looking over my shoulder. Something was on the ground fifteen feet behind me. And it was moving closer.

I blinked my eyes several times, but it was still there.

I must be hallucinating.

That’s when I realized my fever must have returned.

Silly dengue.

“Gina,” I said.

She was still recovering from her plummet, doing a deep-breathing exercise to take her mind off a heavily bruised tailbone.

“Gina, can you feel my head?”

She scrunched her thin eyebrows. “Feel your head?”

“Do I have a fever?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“I think my fever is back.”

“That can happen with dengue.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Gina leaned her head in as far as she could and touched her forehead to mine. “You feel fine.”

“In that case, look over your shoulder and tell me what you see.”

She did. Her eyes opened wide, and she said, “Is that a—a—sloth?”

But it wasn’t just any old sloth. It was the cutest, most precious sloth in the whole wide world.

“That’s Camila,” I said.

She was twelve feet behind us, crawling forward with a large grin on her face.

“Camila?”