Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (13 page)

But that’s not what she says. She just says “Mad,” and lifts her finger, and points.

Ahead of us, the trail peters out into a patch of jungle that looks, if you can believe it, lusher and more brilliant than the whole rest of the jungle. Trees heavy with bunches of red bananas. Fat yellow mangoes dangling down. Flowers in a hundred different colors. It’s as strange and shimmery as something from a myth, this glowing jungle grove crouched here between two cliffs, one falling away below and one stretching way up above.

“I
knew
it!” Roo whispers. I’m glad she at least knows to whisper. This definitely isn’t the kind of place where you want to draw attention to yourself. “I
knew
there was something up here! Yesterday, when I came a little ways up the secret path, I
knew
, but then I had to turn around ’cause I thought you guys might be starting to worry, plus La Lluvia was coming.”

“Well, cool,” I whisper to Roo, relieved that we can go back down now that we’ve reached the end of Invisible Path and seen what there is to see. I guess Kyle made us swear not to come up here because he was worried about us on the steep cliff. Which is very cute of him. So, in honor of him, we’ll be sure to take it extra slow on the way down. “Do you want to lead the way?”

But Roo starts walking
toward
the grove.

“Uh, Roo?” I say. “I meant the way
down
.”

She ignores me.

“Uh,
Roo
?” I say again, trying to sound bossy without raising my voice.

As wonderful/beautiful/amazing/et cetera as this may be, it’s simply not the kind of place you walk into. You just enjoy it from a distance for a few minutes and then head home.

Not Roo, though. Roo runs right up to where the path ends.

I notice a weird ringing sound in my ears. Maybe it’s my own blood rushing around, but I have this feeling like it’s the moan of the jungle, warning intruders to KEEP OUT.

I follow Roo to the end of the path. “Let’s get out of this freaky place,” I whisper.

But she’s staring thoughtfully into the pathless muddle of leaves and vines and tree trunks. It looks like there’s no way, absolutely no way, to go even a step farther.

From here I can see that the mangoes are actually more golden than yellow, and that the red bananas practically glitter among the shiny leaves. I spot a flower that’s neon green, truly neon. I’ve never seen such a crazy flower before—it looks sort of like an iris but three times larger than normal. I’m wondering if that chocolatey smell is coming from the neon flower when Roo suddenly hurls herself forward into the grove and vanishes.

“Hey!” I croak. Roo! I can’t lose Roo!

I whack forward through a patch of high ferns—probably rubbing up against tons of bugs and other poisonous things—just in time to see Roo’s little bum waggling its way between a pair of moss-encrusted tree trunks.

Jeez. My sister really is brave sometimes. And idiotic.

There’s barely enough of a gap between the trees to let a nine-year-old body squeeze through. I’m not at all optimistic about a twelve-year-old body. Besides, I have zero—let me repeat,
zero
—interest in bashing my way into a totally wild part of the jungle that’s obviously abnormal or enchanted or haunted or
something
.

So I pause there, frozen, waiting for Roo to squeeze her way back to me so we can return to the Selva Lodge and, I don’t know, go swimming or drink
licuados
.

But then Roo’s face appears again, on the other side, staring back at me between the gap in the tree trunks. And for the first time ever, I spot a look of terror in her eyes. She quickly covers it.

“Hey,” she whispers, “that was
fun
! Come on!”

If it weren’t for how terrified Roo looked for that one instant, I might have said I’ll just wait out here, thank you very much, Miss Fearless, because part of me has this paranoid feeling that once I go in I’ll never come out.

But because of that expression I glimpsed on Roo’s face, I find myself sighing and stepping forward and sucking in my breath and shoving myself between the trunks (skinning a knee, getting smeared with moss) to follow Roo into this weirdness.

When I emerge on the other side, Roo doesn’t even thank me. She just gives a quick nod and forges ahead.

The mangoes seem to ripen before our eyes as we press our way through layers of leaves—leaves bigger than kites, than elephant ears, than sixth graders! Flowers bloom at our feet and at waist-level and face-level too, flowers tower above us and reach out to brush against us. These have nothing in common with the pretty little pastel flowers you might see in a florist shop in Denver. They’re all strong colors, orange and mustard and maroon, purple and brown and black. They all look poisonous. And they all release rich, peculiar smells—chocolate and chile, dirt and honey, nutmeg and curry.

The magnetic force that pulled Roo between the trees—I start to feel it pulling me too as I follow her inward, slipping over roots and ducking beneath vines. From outside, the grove didn’t look so large, hovering between the cliffs, but now that we’re in here it feels
endless. I’m still scared—terrified, really—but for some reason the terror starts to feel farther and farther away, as though it’s floating ten feet above my head.

After who knows how long, we come to a big hunk of volcanic rock with a trickle of steaming red water running down it. I have this half-second thought—Wait, is that
blood
?—before I realize it’s just that the rock is reddish, probably from rust or minerals. Roo is reaching out to touch the steaming water when my strange calmness vanishes, because suddenly I hear something coming,
something coming!
—a rustling on the other side of the rock, plus that water definitely looks hot enough to burn, so in super-bossy Roo-style I yank her away from the water and back into the underbrush, where I pull one of those ginormous leaves across to hide us.

I’m not just imagining things—there
is
something coming. Roo hears it too, and looks up at me, and for the second time I see terror in her eyes. I hug her with my free arm and feel her shaking, or maybe it’s me shaking. Or probably both of us, trembling about whatever’s going to happen next. What volcano monster is going to appear from behind the rock? What jungle witch is going to come claim Roo as her daughter?

It’s hard to believe we’re still on the same planet as the Selva Lodge, as Ken/Neth and his dumb jokes, as piña coladas and miniature decorative umbrellas and coconut sunblock and yoga retreats and Denver.

Here it comes, here it comes, whatever it is. I squeeze my eyes shut and cling to our leaf.

But then Roo pokes at me and I open my eyes and peek around our leaf and what do I see but two men in safari hats and those white jackets doctors and scientists wear, standing about eight feet away from us, on the other side of the steaming water.

Relief washes over me. It’s just people. People I can handle—it’s
monsters I’m scared of. Still, we’ve got to stay hidden, because it’s pretty obvious that we should
not
be here.

Their backs are to us. The taller one reaches upward, and it’s only as he shoves his hands into what looks like pure jungle that I realize there’s something there, camouflaged among the leaves. I can just make out its boxlike form amid the layers of green.

Taller pulls a metal cage-thing down.

“Zip, zero, zilch,” he says to the shorter guy, shaking the box. “Big surprise. And that movie star wants someone’s head, I hear.”

“A trap is useless and irrelevant in this situation,” Shorter says, so softly I can barely hear him.

“
You’re
one to talk!” Taller retorts. “
We’re
just trying to do everything we possibly can!”

Shorter doesn’t reply.

“You’ve
gotta
find another,” Taller continues. His voice is annoying. It pretends to be friendly. “Gotta, gotta, gotta. If you don’t find a new one by the gala—”

Shorter nods sharply.

“Look,” Taller says in this snobby way, as though he thinks Shorter is pretty darn stupid, “Chevalier’s under some major pressure, clients on one side, investors on the other, the old rock-and-hard-place routine. The investors have no idea where it comes from, and we gotta keep it that way. And the sorts of clients we’re getting around here these days! Who could’ve guessed. But nowadays, these last nine months or whatever it is, ever since that loudmouth rock star, everyone who’s anyone wants what we got. And these people are not familiar with the word
no
. So she’s got all kinds of super-rich folks from all over the world breathing down her neck. And when she feels the squeeze,
we
get quadruple-squeezed, okay?”

Shorter nods even more sharply.

“Hey,” Taller says, “I’m not saying this isn’t a bit of a slipshod operation. Yeah, people have gotten in over their heads. But this is just what you gotta do when this kind of opportunity comes along. We never planned to stumble into a gold mine, and sure, there’s some scrambling going on now. But there’s a heck of a lot of money at stake, so it’s do what you gotta do, you know?”

Roo pokes me, hard. But I can’t take my eyes off this scene.

“Sometime in the next four days,” Taller says in his mean, friendly way, “you gotta. Or we’re going to be dealing with a crowd of extremely angry extremely rich people. A royal PR disaster. It’s all on you, buddy. We’re just asking you for one right now. Just so that all the right people are happy at the big bash. Besides”—Taller pauses, seeming to relish the drama—“you know what’ll happen if you don’t find it.”

Shorter stops nodding and just freezes. Roo keeps poking me. I keep ignoring her.

“Well. There you have it,” Taller says, reaching up to put the trap back in the tree. “Before Saturday. It has to be. We can’t shut down. Do you realize how much we stand to lose each week we’re closed?”

But it’s not really a question.

“Millions of dollars.
Millions
of dollars,” Taller tells Shorter. “Mix your current failure with no progress at all on the synthesis or cloning, and we’re getting close to being up a creek.”

“It’ll be months if not years on the synthesis and cloning,” Shorter murmurs. “Lab wizardry like that requires patience. Time and patience.” He has a wonderful, calm voice.

“Thanks, genius,” Taller says nastily. He’s the worst kind of person. “Soon you’re going to be informing me that it’s impossible to locate any eggs, and even more impossible to locate any females, and totally impossible to mate them in captivity.”

Poke, poke, poke from Roo.

“We’ve gotta keep our eyes on the prize, buddy,” Taller announces. “For now just find us another to tide us over. And keep imagining the day when you and I and a number of others will be rich as God.”

I watch a shiver run down Shorter’s spine.

“That could very well have been the last one,” Shorter says quietly, intensely. “You know that as well as I do.”

Such a wonderful voice.

A wonderful,
familiar
voice.

Dad?

Of course—Dad!

I look over at Roo—so
that’s
what she was poking me about—and we grin at each other.

“We have our eyes all over them,” Taller says in his awful way. “You know that as well as I do.”

Dad’s head droops forward.

“You gotta put in dawn-to-dusk days,” Taller tells Dad.

“
Before
dawn tomorrow,” Dad murmurs. “At the east trail, as usual.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Taller says. But he smiles meanly when he calls Dad boss.

“Pip-pip-pip!” Roo chirps beside me.

What the
heck
? Roo!

Both men spin around to stare at the layers of underbrush where we’re hiding. I freeze, clinging to our leaf, willing myself not to tremble. I hold my breath and beside me I can feel Roo doing the same. Yes, it’s Dad for sure, Dad! But I’ve never seen him looking the way he does now, which is scary—his voice may sound more normal than it did when we saw him at La Lava, but his eyes look
frightened.
Dad
is frightened. It seems impossible, but I can see that it’s true.

I’m so worried about Dad that for half a second I forget to be worried about what will happen if Taller pushes through the vines and lifts up the big leaf and sees us there. But thankfully he turns back around.

“Unusual birdcall, eh?” Taller says.

Dad is still staring right at our leaf. I have to work really hard to stop my hand from waving at him. Roo squeezes my wrist and I squeeze hers. This doesn’t seem like the best time to have a little reunion with Dad.

“Think that was one of ’em, Dr. Wade?” Taller jokes as he strolls around to the other side of the volcanic rock. “Mr. Bird Guy,” he sneers, “Mr. Bird Guy!”

Dad turns away, tiredly following Taller, and I finally feel like I can breathe. I’m just releasing my held breath when suddenly there’s a hand cupping my mouth. Beside me Roo starts to squirm—so whoever it is has grabbed both of us.

Panicking, I twist around to get a look. Our captor is wearing a mask, which seems to be made from a green T-shirt with eyeholes cut in it. He’s also wearing a green T-shirt on his body, and a pair of jeans. He’s strong, and drags/pulls both of us through the underbrush, still cupping our mouths so we can’t make any noise. I’m sure Roo’s slobbering all over his palm to annoy him, and extra sure she’s trying to bite him, but he’s really tough, and after a while both of us stop squirming. Strangely, the second we stop squirming he lets go of our mouths and grabs our wrists, still pulling us through the jungle.

“Wha—” Roo starts.

“SHHH!” he says sharply. Since we don’t want him to grab our mouths again, we stay quiet.

The incredible thing is that he leads us right back to the gap in the trees where we entered the grove, and I almost want to be like,
Thanks!
because I seriously don’t think Roo—and definitely not I—could have refound this spot.

He lets go of us so we can wiggle through the mossy gap, first Roo and then me, and as soon as I’m through Roo takes off running and I follow her while the guy in the mask works on squeezing his way between the trees. He’s bigger than we are, and I really do think he might get stuck, not that I’m going to hang around to find out. We’re free!