They drove for hours, Lett nodding off half the time, as did the rest of them, leaning into one another. Sometimes he looked out the truck. They passed little villages they called barrios. Churches were in the Spanish style, more or less, but of red brick with white rounded columns. The poverty looked as bad as he’d seen anywhere, even in war. Boys sat up in trees for no reason he could make out. People, most of them barefoot, fetched their water from puddles. Ramshackle huts were slapped together from who knew what—corrugated metal, wood flats, pallets, leather, tarp sheets, all of it held together with rope and tar and mud and a whole lot of worry. Fences were just the thickest sticks people could find. Then came more of those vast swamplands along their waterway road, which Jock told him were for rice, and sure enough, rice farmers were standing out in the water tending to their crops. The wind smelled sweet, but it wasn’t from flowers or anything Lett could recall from Hawaii. It had more of a spice or tang to it.

Lett wished he could’ve said good-bye to Kanani before he left. He would’ve warned her not to do anything stupid. He wondered how it was going in that boogie house they had her running. She must be let down by the duty, but if anyone could make it work, it was her. He only wished he didn’t know about the gold.

He couldn’t have told her where he was heading exactly because he didn’t know himself. The vast countryside had opened around them. Hours into the journey, as the sun lowered, green mountain ranges rose higher and tighter on either side. “I know where we are,” Jock told Lett. “This here is all one vast valley. Cagayan Valley. Luzon. North of Bambang, then there’s Manila south of that. To the west you got your Cordillera Range. You know they still got tribes up there wearing loin cloths? East, you got the Sierra Madre, high as hell . . .”

Lett was hardly listening. He worried about Kanani now—because her goal, clearly, was getting at that gold. It was her way out of this world. How many had thought the same? Misled themselves? He knew what it was like to mislead oneself. Once upon a time, an eager orphan had believed that serving in battle would transform him into his own man, dependent no more.

***

The giant beast stared at Lett with its mammoth horns that curved rearward as they tapered and swooped upward at the sharp tips, like bicycle handlebars sculpted by some Baroque master. The blackish brown beast faced Lett, its legs planted like posts, its elongated ears extending parallel to those horns. And it kept staring at Lett.