“I think I’ll walk at the back with you. Too much chatter farther up the line.”

Tom said, “Then you’ve come to the right place—we don’t do chatter.”

She smiled and they set off. They didn’t talk much, either, even when the path was open enough to walk side by side. The column also became quieter but progress was faster than it had been before.

They walked through an area that was deeply dappled in the shade of the canopy, and it was only when they emerged into a more open stretch that Tom saw the murkiness hadn’t been caused by the trees alone. The sky had shifted away from blue to a hazy reddish orange.

Chris called back, saying, “I didn’t think we’d been walking that long.”

“We haven’t,” said George. “It’s not the sun going down, it’s something in the atmosphere.”

Alice said, “Might be a fire from forest clearance.”

Chris looked up into the sunset hue of the sky. “Could be a volcanic eruption. That’d be just our luck.”

Tom turned to Alice. “I’d count surviving a plane crash and a volcano as pretty lucky, wouldn’t you?”

“Pretty lucky, yeah, unless we’re all killed in a tsunami.”

Chris said, “You shouldn’t joke about things like that—I had a dream that I was caught in a tsunami.”

“Christian,” she said in admonishment, though she was smiling, a clear affection still lingering from their shared childhood. Seeing her expression produced a pang of loneliness in Tom that he couldn’t quite narrow down to specifics.

The sky continued to deepen as they walked, an orange mist hanging above them and, now and then, a faint acrid edge to it, suggestive of burning. Even from his place at the back, Tom could hear people talking about it, speculating, because burning still allowed for a lot of different possibilities.

Tom thought Alice was probably right, that it was the result of forest clearance, maybe hundreds of miles away, but there was definitely something eerie about it too. Even the jungle itself seemed to become more hushed as the ceiling of mist sank lower and wrapped itself around the treetops.

They stopped for a second time, but there were no clearings so they all sat where they were on the path. Drinks moved up and down the line, but no food this time.

Chris was sitting high on the boat’s carrying case, so everyone looked up in his direction when he said, “You know, you’ll probably all shout me down because that’s what you do, even though I was right about the plane.” There was a murmur in response, and he laughed. “Okay, I made up the stuff about the plane. But what if the plane didn’t crash?”

Oscar called, “What!”