And for a moment he was sure that he was indeed drowning.

With a soft popping sound, it released him and his face thudded to the dirt. His mouth was open, and he could taste the earth, but as far as he was concerned, he was dead.

TANYA SHRIVELED in the corner, unraveling. Twice now the lights had stuttered to life in her mind, each time revealing the same blue sky and the same clearing below. The images came suddenly, like the flash of a bulb hung buzzing in her brain for a minute or two and then vanishing. She imagined a monk in a monastery cellar pulling a huge switch, like on a Frankenstein movie she’d seen once at Shannon’s house. Maybe that was her, Lady Frankenstein, only when the switch was pulled, her body didn’t rise from the table. Instead she saw visions.

Now they came again.

Her father was down there again, working diligently, this time setting those beams that had almost fallen on him. Otherwise the scene appeared the same as the two previous episodes. A bulldozer chugged in surreal silence, the hammer swung by her father, the spinning of a saw—none with sound. And always bright blue skies and vivid green jungle. Flocks of parrots drifted above the canopy.

A voice rose to her. “Remember, always look past your own eyes.” She looked down and saw that her father had lifted his chin to her. Well, what does that mean, Father? But she couldn’t ask, because she wasn’t really there with him. She was a bird or something, flying around.

But the scene had a sense of truth with it, as if she were looking at her father, months before she’d come to Venezuela. As if what she saw in the framed house was actually how he’d built it.

Now a memory joined her thoughts. She was sitting at the table of their newly constructed home and Father was telling them about how God had kept him safe those three months. And more specifically, he was telling them a story of how he’d almost been smashed by a falling beam. But a dove from the sky had screeched and he’d looked up just in time to see the beam.

It was the voice of God, he’d said.

Tanya twitched in the corner of the box and pulled her knees closer. Heavens! That really happened, she thought. That wasn’t part of my dream—Father told us that story. And now I’m hallucinating that it was me in the form of some bird— maybe a dove—that warned him.

Maybe the mind played these kinds of tricks just before it died. Or maybe she was actually there, watching.

Either way, Father was telling her to look past her own eyes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHANNON CAME to his senses ten minutes later. But they weren’t really his senses at all, were they? Well, yes, they were his, but his senses had changed, hadn’t they?

He pushed himself to his knees, and then to his feet. The taste of copper filled his mouth—blood from the fall. He swallowed and shivered with a sudden passion. At first he didn’t know what had changed—he only knew that he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. He had to get out of this cave and up the cliffs.