She smiled, but it waned quickly and she said, “I think Joel still sees himself leading everyone out of here.”

“Let him.” She looked puzzled, maybe wondering why he was so willing to defer to Joel. “It’s like I just said to the boys, as long as he’s taking us where we want to go anyway, let him lead.”

“I like that.” She smiled again. “I’ll go and make up with Chloe.”

She walked out and Tom took his half-empty backpack to the galley, then followed Alice outside. A lot of them were still sitting exhausted by the fire, but a few were scavenging for wood along the edges of the gouged path up the slope.

Tom joined in, taking it easy in the intense heat, watching everyone else as they drifted about, packing their backpacks with essentials as they’d been told, helping to collect wood. He noticed Chloe speaking to Barney at one point, what appeared to be a friendly conversation.

On the surface of it, things seemed no different from the way they’d been since they arrived, and yet there was something strange and expectant about the atmosphere. Tom couldn’t pinpoint it, but it felt like something was wrong, some distortion in the air or in the background noise of the jungle, like a held breath, waiting.

It was late in the afternoon when he heard a puzzled and panicked, “Freddie?”

He turned and saw Freddie kneeling on the ground in the middle of the slope. Jess was standing above him, trying to pull him up by the arm. It was Jess whose voice he’d heard and it occurred to him now that he’d never heard either of them speak.

Freddie started to stand but there was something troubling about his face, flushed red, his expression that of someone who was locked away in some other place. He got to his feet but immediately staggered and fell forward again.

Jess cried out with more anguish, “Freddie!”

Tom dropped the wood he was carrying and started over to them but stopped after just a couple of paces, grateful that other people were nearer and got there first. Very quickly there was a small group surrounding the pair, a chorus of encouraging but increasingly frantic voices, and Jess’s in the middle of it, reduced to a series of anguished and garbled cries, her distress so intense that it was difficult to listen to.

Tom picked up the wood again and carried it back to the fire. By the time he turned, they were carrying Freddie back. Mila rushed past, crying silently, and Tom noticed she was limping slightly, which made him think in turn about the number of minor injuries that might slow their progress the next day. She was calling Shen before she got to the plane and he came out, followed by Barney.