She stood among the hanging roots and gazed mauka, inland and upland, through a break in the forest. Farther up mountain, the forest gave way to desiccated thickets and knotty shrubs as lava earth and old flows reclaimed the terra and turned it scrubby then bare. In the southeast this naked land rose steeply, ever higher to Mauna Loa. In the northeast it rose before mighty Mauna Kea. And straight ahead, in the arid and jagged center of the island, that exposed saddle of vast lava fields stretched between the two volcanoes, on and on until the green earth was reborn near Hilo Side.

She touched a large green oval banyan leaf, like a glossy piece of thin leather, and followed the path up its root and more roots, like a gargantuan ivy. Some haoles liked to figure this was all just ivy gone out of control and immediately conceived ways of cutting it back. How dare they.

They too were getting cut back, each got shafted in their own way. Wendell Lett thought he was coming here to get cured, but they were only using his combat fatigue to remake him into the type of man who didn’t require a conscience. A psychopath. The end stage was killing, he’d told her. The cure is the cause. Wendell had told her about Miss Mae, about the bad things they were training him for. It didn’t surprise her, not after what happened to Faddah.

As for her? They never were going to give her a chance. It was all lip service as usual, just like on Oahu. She could get them something they needed, and they got it. So be it. But she still had her shot at that gold. And then Francisco appeared. He was their new man. It changed everything. Now she had to find a way to neutralize him.

Even Charlie Selfer the climber was getting the shaft. Someone had promised him a big shortcut up the ladder of success, but now he was getting left behind and fast. A bait and switch, the haoles called it—Selfer’s dear old deadbeat for a dad was probably real good at that move. How humiliating for Selfer. He was feeling a grudge at first, but now it was one hell of a panic because the new owners had installed Francisco and for the duration.

Maybe ex-Marine Jock Quinn was the smartest of all, she thought. He had kept his head down. They couldn’t find a way to use him for their own ends—and destroy him in the process.