He kept searching for paths heading off to the right, but the jungle seemed to be conspiring to send him back the way he’d come. They’d walked for many hours from the crash site, but Tom started to have an irrational fear that he’d end up back there, in the empty camp, with only Freddie’s body in a luggage container and the other dead beyond the ridge for company.

The sky seemed to be getting darker, but he checked his watch and figured he still had two or three hours of daylight left. Those hours weren’t much use, though, if he kept moving in the wrong direction and away from the others.

Briefly, his thoughts skipped to the rest of them, to Kate and Shen offering advice, George and Alice reluctantly leaving him behind. But he didn’t want to think of them because it only reminded him how alone he was out here now. He probably wasn’t in much more danger than he had been as part of the group, and yet it felt more dangerous.

He saw something that looked like a trail, or almost a trail, that would take him in the right direction. The vegetation had grown over the path, so it was harder to see what was underfoot, but he set off along it, making as much noise as he could with his steps, hoping to warn off anything that might bite him if disturbed or stepped on.

Twenty minutes later the path seemed to end in a dense thicket of a lush and knotted plant that he knew instinctively to avoid. He stopped, sipped at his water, swiped at an insect that landed on his neck, looked around, and finally edged around the plants before finding an even less promising trail. He thought he was heading the right way, but he seemed to be walking paths that even the large jungle animals avoided.

It became unnerving how much noise he was making crashing through the undergrowth—it might be warning off snakes but it was also making him deaf to the wider jungle beyond with all its other potential threats. Every few minutes he stopped and listened, letting the landscape’s constant seething murmur wash back over him.

On one of those stops he heard a scream somewhere off to his left and froze, feeling the chill even beyond the damp warmth of the T-shirt clinging to his skin. It had been a scream, but not human, and as his heartbeat settled back to normal speed he tried not to think about what it might have been or how close it was.