safe.”
He started to raise her door to seal her inside with herself again. “Don’t,” she said.
He paused.
“Don’t leave.”
“If you need me, I’m here.” He started to zip the door shut again, still outside.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m here, I promise.” His chivalry bewildered her. He meant to sit in the rain like some warrior monk? She needed more.
“Come in.” It was so cold.
Backing inside, he zipped the door closed and sat beside her with his legs crossed.
Her teeth chattered. It finally occurred to him. His palm covered her forehead. “You’re sick.”
“I’m cold.”
“I can’t take you to the fire,” he said. “Not with them like this.”
“Hold me.”
It surprised him. She read his surprise. The halting way he opened his arm for her to lay her head on was like a remembered act. He had forgotten human touch.
She pressed her back to him. He was warm. They didn’t talk. Eventually the gunfire tapered off. She quit shaking and fell asleep in his arms.
27.
The birds woke her.
The rain had stopped. The city waited. She opened her eyes.
Duncan startled her. She startled herself.
During the night, she had twisted. In her sleep, she had thrown one arm across Duncan. She had one ear against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat. His ribs rose and fell in slow waves.
She never woke this way with a man, holding him and being held. It did not happen, even with lovers she trusted. And while he wasn’t a stranger, he wasn’t a lover either. She barely knew him. And yet her sleeping self had folded against him.
Molly lay very still, trying to sort out this new development. He was warm, and she’d been afraid. She remembered the gunfire, and those silhouettes. But they weren’t enough to explain her trust.
He looked almost boyish sleeping in the blue-green light. There was a powerful scent of flowers. Her eyes traveled to his shirt pocket. He’d collected an orchid yesterday.
Part of her wanted to shake him and climb back into the city. They knew their way into the ruins. She had dreamed about them last night, dreamed madly. The city was starting to inhabit her.
But she lingered, reluctant to shatter this remarkable contact. Twice men had proposed marriage to her— seriously proposed—thinking they could overcome her nightmares. As gently as possible, she’d spared them their gallantry. They couldn’t save her. The rape had burned her. Molly had resigned herself to her clenching scars.
What could explain this? She was a serial disbeliever. She required truth, good, bad, or ugly. Offer her a wound for proof and she would plunge her fingers right in. Which had made the search for the bones so fitting. The missing soldiers were an unhealed wound, like a hand-hold, both a story and, deeper, an appeal to her missionary instinct. So how did Duncan fit into that?
It wasn’t that he could protect her from the perils. The plotting brothers and the typhoon and Kleat’s paranoia endangered him as much as her. Was it that she seemed to occupy him the way the ruins occupied her? He had been her welcome to Cambodia. When she was at her weakest, he had shielded her from the sun with his scarf. When the guns started going off last night, his first thought had been for her safekeeping. He’d crawled out into the rain to guard her.
He looked twenty-something this morning. The soft light smoothed his crow’s-feet and softened the hawk profile, but it was something more. Years had melted from his face. His beard line looked…diminished. There was just stubble on his chin and upper lip. His throat was smooth. The jugular throbbed. It was like watching her own heart beat.
A long, welted scar ran in a line above his left ear. She’d never seen it before. Normally his long hair hid it. He’d survived some terrible violence, but had never mentioned it. She’d have to ask him about that someday.
She wondered.
But there were the ruins to decipher. His destiny was here, and hers, too. She felt it powerfully. She had not ended up here by accident.
Her thoughts wheeled pleasantly.
Slowly she noticed the bamboo. It stood on the far side of his face, a slender, glossy green shoot poised almost like a snake. The trespass surprised her. The forest had invaded her tent.
She lifted her head from Duncan’s chest. The bamboo had pierced the tent floor and pushed right through the thin sleeping pad. Its point was hard and sharp, the shaft slick and phallic. They could have been impaled in their sleep. That was too dramatic, of course. They would have woken at its first touch.
Only then did she notice her tent wall. It was deformed. Half caved in. A tree limb must have fallen across them.
A wall tent or pup tent would have collapsed altogether. Her dome tent had spread the weight through a system of poles. The rain must have torn the limb loose from the canopy and it had dropped during the night.
Duncan woke. He started to smile, then jerked his head away from the bamboo. He saw the deformed tent wall. “How could we have slept through that?” he said.
He pushed at the branch with his foot, but that only tightened its pressure. The tent creaked.
“These poles might not hold it,” she said.
Despite the quiet destruction of her tent, Molly was grateful for the quick exit. It was too soon for pillow talk and holding hands. In escaping the tent, they would be escaping any awkwardness.
They couldn’t sit upright. Then they saw more bamboo shoots sticking through the floor. Duncan got over her on his hands and knees, and put his back against the tree limb. She slid between his legs.
Unzipping the door dumped the dome’s remaining strength. One of the long poles snapped, then another. She slid out and helped Duncan crawl from the shambles. They faced the wreckage.
It wasn’t a fallen branch, but a vine. The thing had come untethered from the ledge above and was strapped across the tent. Its tip had burrowed into a joint in the stone. In the space of a few hours, it had muscled down and broken her tent. Molly looked around at the mist and its shapes. A giant god floated with his serene smile, and sank away.
“It’s like a tidal wave, a green tidal wave,” she said. “Do things really grow so fast here?”
“The forest must have been thirsty. The first taste of rain and it takes off like a rocket.” Duncan aimed for levity, but it troubled him.
“I’ll come back for it later.” Who was she kidding? The tent was a write-off. She felt violated and put on notice. This place was not her friend. She jerked her camera bag from the collapsed doorway.
Duncan had to use his Swiss Army knife to free their shoes. A filament of roots had invaded a rip in the floor and corded them to the ground. He pretended it was normal. “Man versus monsoon,” he intoned. “Who will win the primordial struggle?” But it bothered him, she could tell.
They walked along the ledge around little pickets of bamboo growing through the joints, and stepped across cablelike vines. His tent was collapsed as well. Lowering himself to what remained of it, Duncan cut an opening through the side and extracted his steel briefcase.
