Chapter One: Descent
The jungle doesn't care if you're scared.
Maya had learned that three days ago, when the helicopter went down and the canopy swallowed the wreckage whole. She'd learned it again yesterday, when Torres stopped answering on the radio. And she was learning it now, crouched in the hollowed roots of a ceiba tree, watching the last pink light bleed out of the sky.
Darkness came fast this close to the equator. One moment the understory glowed amber through a thousand shades of green. The next, the world collapsed into silhouette and shadow. The temperature dropped. Humidity thickened. And for the first time since the crash, Maya felt something almost like relief.
If I can't see, it can't see me.
She adjusted the torn flight suit around her shoulders and checked her watch. 19:47. The luminous hands were the only light for thirty meters in any direction. She cupped her palm over the dial and counted her breaths. Four in, hold, six out. The way her grandmother taught her before sleep.
The jungle around her had gone quiet.
Not silent—silence didn't exist here. But quiet. The screaming howlers had stopped. The macaws were gone. Even the insects had throttled back to a low electric hum, the kind you only noticed when you were trying not to move.
Maya told herself it was normal. Nocturnal shift. Predators waking. Prey hiding.
Nothing to do with her.
She tilted her head and listened.
Somewhere northwest—maybe a kilometer, maybe ten—a river whispered over stone. Closer, something rustled in the leaf litter. A frog burped once, experimentally, and fell silent. And beneath it all, steady and low, she heard her own pulse knocking in her ears.
Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
She slowed her breathing again. Tried to flatten herself against the wood.
The roots formed a natural shelter, a basket of rain-polished buttresses that climbed five meters high and twisted into the canopy. She'd chosen it because it had only one way in. Because the shadows pooled thick. Because she could see the faint game trail twenty meters out and know if anything was coming.
But now the dark had settled, and she couldn't see the trail anymore.
That was fine.
That was better.
She reached down and checked her gear by touch. Knife—still strapped to her calf. Emergency beacon—still blinking its useless SOS into dead air. Canteen—half full. Protein bar—one left, crushed flat.
No gun. No machete. No radio worth a damn.
But she had the dark.
And the dark was enough.
Chapter Two: The Clicking
The clicking started at 20:13.
Faint. Irregular. Like two stones tapping together underwater.
Maya froze.
The sound didn't repeat. She waited, lungs tight, eyes wide and useless in the black. Her night vision had finally started to adjust—she could make out the vague geometry of roots, the lighter void where the trail cut through—but everything else was texture and weight. The jungle pressed in, humid and close, thick with the smell of rot and flowers.
Click. Click-click.
There.
Northwest. Upslope. Maybe fifty meters.
She turned her head slowly, mouth open to equalize pressure in her ears. Her instructors at flight school said the human ear could pinpoint a sound to within fifteen degrees if you gave it time. If you didn't panic.
Maya gave it time.
Click.
Forty meters now. Moving parallel to her position.
Not an animal. Animals didn't move like that—steady, mechanical, purposeful. Animals startled and froze and ran. This thing walked.
Her hand found the knife. Drew it slow.
The clicking stopped.
The jungle breathed.
Maya pressed her spine into the root wall and made herself small. Her instructors also said that movement was what got you killed. Prey animals fled. Predators tracked motion. If you stayed still—if you controlled your breathing and kept your head—you became part of the landscape.
Invisible.
She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.
You're fine. It's a bird. A bat. Some fucking rodent with a rock.
Her pulse hammered.
Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
Sixty seconds passed.
Then ninety.
Then the clicking started again—farther away this time, receding into the canopy.
Maya didn't move for another ten minutes.
When she finally let herself breathe, the air tasted like copper.
Chapter Three: Rain and Heat
She didn't sleep.
At 02:30, the rain came. Warm and heavy, drumming on the canopy and filtering down in fat drops that exploded on the leaves. The jungle came alive again—frogs shrieking, water sluicing through vines, the whole understory hissing like static.
Maya tilted her head back and let the rain wash over her face. It pooled in her collarbone. Soaked her hair. Diluted the sweat that had been crusting her skin since the crash.
She filled the canteen and drank.
The rain tasted like bark and dust and gasoline—probably residue from the wreck, still coating her clothes—but it was cold and clean and real. She drank until her stomach cramped, then drank more.
When the rain stopped, the silence returned.
And with it, the smell.
Faint. Acrid. Chemical.
Maya's nose wrinkled. She knew that smell. Aviation fuel, maybe. Or burning plastic. Something that didn't belong in a jungle.
She scanned the darkness.
Nothing.
Just the soft drip-drip of water falling from the leaves.
And then, maybe thirty meters out, something moved.
Not sound. Not sight.
Heat.
A flicker of warmth against the cool backdrop of rain-soaked air, like standing near a stove that had just been turned off. She felt it on her skin before she understood what it was. A presence. Dense. Localized.
Watching.
Maya held her breath.
The heat drifted left. Paused. Drifted right.
And then it was gone.
Chapter Four: First Light
Dawn came at 06:04.
The jungle didn't announce it. No sunrise, no golden light breaking through the trees. Just a slow, grudging shift from black to grey to the green-grey gloom of the understory. Enough to see shapes. Enough to navigate.
Maya stood on stiff legs and stepped out of the roots.
The trail was empty.
The mud was churned and pocked with rain, but there were no prints. No broken branches. No sign that anything had passed through in the night.
She looked back at the ceiba.
The roots were scarred—old gouges, long healed, where something with claws had climbed or marked territory. But nothing fresh. Nothing human.
You're fine. You imagined it.
But her hands were shaking.
And when she looked down at the mud near the trail, she saw it:
A single depression. Too regular to be natural. Too large to be a boot.
Three toes. Splayed wide. Deep.
Maya stared at it for a long time.
Then she picked up her pack and started walking.
The jungle swallowed her in silence.