Tom looked down at Toby lying on his back on the forest floor, and was moved in some way that Chris had carried him this far, because he didn’t seem in a bad way at all—he seemed to be dead.

Shen crouched down next to him and checked his pulse, then his eyes, then his pulse again, waiting longer than before with his fingers probing Toby’s neck. The rest of them watched, Chris’s face full of confusion and horror, as if he couldn’t quite accept that the person he’d struggled to carry had already embarked on a much longer and much simpler journey.

Shen looked up at Chris. “He’s dead.” He turned to Barney then. “Could it have been a viper? It looks like he went into shock.”

Barney seemed lost in thought, and sounded distracted as he replied. “We didn’t see it, but maybe, yeah—the fang marks look deep. He… yeah.”

Shen studied the wound on Toby’s lower arm as Chris turned to Tom and said, “How crazy is that? I just carried a dead guy.” His face was all nervous tics, his eyes blinking rapidly.

Tom didn’t respond but glanced at Toby and understood that it could have been any one of them, that none of them had definitively survived yet. All it took was a stumble and fall, or to be bitten by something, or any number of other things that could kill them in this environment.

As if he’d heard Tom’s train of thought, Barney said, “Joel needs to understand how dangerous it is here.”

Chris seemed to think the comment had been addressed specifically to him and said, “Yeah, I’ll talk to him.” He looked at the body. “We’ll have to take him back and bury him.”

Shen raised his eyebrows. “With what, and where? We don’t have tools, and this soil…” He stamped on the ground. “We won’t be able to dig deep enough.”

“We can’t just leave him.”

Tom said, “You left the people in the plane.”

“That was different. They were all charred and…”

“Not all of them,” said Barney. He looked at Tom, his voice wavering as he added, “I mean, they were all dead. Absolutely. But they weren’t all burned. It might have been better if… if they had been.”

Chris nodded, agreeing with him, and it was clear both of them had been left disturbed by the sight of all those broken bodies, that seeing Toby die had only magnified it.

Tom said, “It doesn’t matter. You left them because you had to, and we’re leaving him. If we get rescued we can tell them where to look.”

“You’re right,” said Chris, though he didn’t sound sure of it. “Should we say a few words?”