I let myself back into the house and was just getting ready to thank Marisol again when I realized there wasn’t any noise in the room.
I looked up and froze. Three men with assault rifles had come into the house at some point. One held Carter at gunpoint, one stood over Marisol and her grandmother by the bed, and one kept watch over the street from the front door.
My eyes flashed to Carter as my training kicked in. I tried not to notice the worry and silent apology in his eyes.
“What’s going on?” I asked in English, holding my arms a little out from my sides to reassure them I was no threat. The bag with my clothes, sat phone, and weapon hung uselessly from my grip.
“El doctor viene con nosotros,” the man holding Carter’s biceps barked. The doctor is coming with us. “No sigas.”
Don’t follow? Was he crazy?
If he thought I was going to let him take Carter without following them, he was mistaken.
6
Carter
“No, no, for real,” I told the frail woman in the bed. “No es mi novio.”
Riggs was so not my boyfriend. Half the time, the man couldn’t stand me. And thank God he was outside showering where he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I wasn’t sure whether the translation app was failing me or if Luz was feeling well enough to tease me, but either way, her face creased with a tired smile that said she didn’t believe it.
“El estarà pronto, entonces,” Luz said as Marisol walked back into the room. “Veo en la forma que él te miró.”
The third woman—Marisol’s mother, I assumed—nodded her agreement, then murmured something to Marisol and left.
I felt my face turn pink, and I busied myself reorganizing my backpack of trauma supplies by laying everything out at the end of the bed before repacking them. I was pretty sure she’d said something about the way I looked at Riggs, and the idea that my mooning over the man was so obvious that even an elderly woman having a cardiac incident and her worried relatives would notice it was mortifying.
“She says he will be soon,” Marisol translated helpfully. “She says she can see it in the way he looks at you.”
“Yes, well. I—” I looked up at her quickly. “Wait, the way he looks at me?”
“Si. It’s very like…” She widened her eyes and blinked her lashes rapidly. “He never takes his eyes from you.”
“No,” I said firmly. I moved around the bed so I could check Luz’s pulse and listen to her heart. “No, something is definitely getting lost in translation.”
Marisol chuckled softly and said something to her grandmother that I couldn’t catch. She took a seat on the end of the bed and pointed at my Horn of Glory, which was sitting on top of my open backpack.
“You play this?” she asked.
I nodded. “With my cousin from back home.” In fact, I’d managed a very brief conversation with Kev that morning on my way up the mountain, in which he’d recounted his adventures defeating a marauding group of pirates and also deplored the way inflation had driven up rutabaga shares.
“20 pips for a single seed is OutRaGeOuS!!!!!” he’d written, like a perfect hybrid of a teenager and our grandfather when he went on one of his tirades about what things were like back in his day. “Doesn’t even pay to try farming anymore. I’d better find the magic seed soon so I’ll be able to skip levels and earn my pips doing ADVENTURES! Hey, don’t forget to harvest our kumquats!”
I had almost no idea what he was talking about, but the fact that he was safe, healthy, and relatively happy was what counted. So I’d taken the time to harvest kumquats, even though I couldn’t have cared less about them.
Horn of Glory was Kev’s love language, and I was about as fluent in that as I was in Spanish, but I kept trying.
Marisol turned the device over in her hand. “I didn’t know they came in this color.”
“They don’t.” I grinned. “My cousin fixed it up so he and I could send text messages to each other even when I’m in the jungle.”
“¡Qué bueno! Remember, tomorrow is the, uh… ¿como se dice? The piña day.”
“Piña? Oh! No, we don’t grow pineapples on our homestead… wait, do you have a Horn?” There was almost definitely no internet connection around here, but there was an option to play in solo mode. It was just that the solo option was, as Kev would say, “utterly lame.”
Marisol shook her head. “Not me, but Yul does. His friends got him a brand-new orange one a few weeks ago, and he showed me how to play.”
“Wow. Nice friends.” The Horns weren’t prohibitively expensive back home—a basic model was only around $60, which was why it sometimes seemed like everyone and their brother (or socially anxious cousin) was playing it—but that seemed somehow exorbitant in a rural hillside village like this one.