He sounded intrigued, even awestruck, and the faces of the others seemed split between horror and fascination. Tom didn’t think any of those responses were appropriate, but nor was he sure what the correct response should have been. The one thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t like those stares—he’d just started to feel he belonged, with some of them at least, and now he felt like an outsider all over again.

But it was Alice who answered anyway, saying, “It wasn’t like that. Chris is exaggerating again.”

To his credit, Chris shrugged and said, “Okay, maybe, a little. But I was the one who said the plane would crash.”

That brought some laughter and lighthearted derision, all of which Chris took gamely on the chin in his attempt to undo his revelations of a minute before. It seemed to work to some extent, in that people kept talking to him and Joel in the same way, but Tom caught a few more intrigued stares in his direction and it was clear that none of them believed Chris had exaggerated entirely.

Tom turned back to the others and said, “What’s the food situation?”

Shen nodded, as though he’d been waiting for the question. “It took a while to develop a technique, but Kate managed to catch a couple of fish. We cooked them over the fire this afternoon. She thinks we’ll catch more tomorrow.”

“We will,” said George. “Now that we know how to do it. She’s a natural.”

“I know it,” said Tom.

“And we’re lucky there don’t seem to be any anacondas or caimans on this stretch, so the fish are plentiful.”

“How do you know there aren’t any?”

“We don’t know for sure, but we were there all afternoon and no thirty-foot snakes or alligator-type things came flying out at us.” George laughed. “It’s good news, anyway. It means we can save the remaining snacks until we’re in the boats.”

“Yeah, sure, and the sooner we get in those boats, the better.”

George looked at Tom for a moment and asked, “What really happened back there?”

Kate came back over as Tom started talking. “Pretty much what Chris said. It was some sort of cocaine factory, drug cartel, or rebels. Joel thought the two of them could just walk in there and tell them they were lost. Alice tried to warn them, but…”

“But what was that he said about you killing everyone?”

Tom thought of the young guard emptying the scraps of his dinner for the dog, thought of him trying to act tough in front of the older guys. He thought too of the white-haired man, and for some reason wondered in retrospect if he’d been the cook—he wasn’t sure why he thought that, and it hardly mattered because they were all dead.