The first thing he sees when his eyes snap open is the black crucifix on the opposite wall. Below it is a simple wooden table, carrying a long white candle placed on a clay saucer and a miniature statue of the Blessed Virgin, the varnish of her lapis lazuli frock, alligatored and patched, reflecting the flickering light of the candle.

Arthur's first thoughts awake are always physical. He thinks: It's nice to sleep on a bed, not on the rough floor, not on the wet ground, not in a hammock or an airplane armchair, however comfortable it might seem. It's nice to sleep on clean sheets, under a warm comforter, knowing that you won't have to get up and run somewhere as soon as you wake up. Arthur hauls himself up, brushing away the hair that falls into his eyes and looks around the room. On the bed by the window Cobb is waiting for him, quiet and discreet as usual. He is fully dressed, and reading the local newspaper he has, no doubt, brought all the way down from Caracas. It is almost two weeks old. Cobb lifts his eyes from the wrinkled page and looks at Arthur over his reading glasses. It's already morning, the first light is creeping out from under red-and green-painted shutters on a small window. Time to move out.

xxx

If Arthur had to use one word to describe this whole expedition they have set out upon, this word would be 'infuriating'. As soon as Arthur's shoes touched the uneven asphalt covering the runway of Simon Bolivar International Airport, and the humid Venezuelan air enveloped him like a damp cloth, leaving a sheen of moisture on his face and neck, he knew that their journey was a lost cause. They would never find Mal, and if they found her, it would be her bones. However, Arthur was not prone to premonitions and generally only trusted things he could actually see and touch. So, he hoisted his bag from a dust-covered conveyor belt, produced his passport and boarding pass to a frowning, moustached customs official, and went on to hail a taxi.

He found Cobb in the study, crouched over a sea of paper on Mal's desk, his face dark, tanned, covered with a two-day-old stubble. He looked very young and confused. Like a child who got lost in a crowd, Arthur thought, squeezing Cobb's palm in a handshake.

They sat down that night over a bottle of brandy in the living room of the house the Cobbs had rented in a small gated community on the south east edge of Caracas, and Cobb told him his tale of woe. He spoke in a blank, flat voice, and seemed detached, almost numbed by the shock.

Three days before Cobb had got a call from Yusuf Attal, the head of the chemical research lab Mal collaborated with in Caracas. Attal had informed him, a grave concern in his voice, that a small party that was supposed to bring Mal from a remote village in the Amazon where she had been studying the methods of sleep induction used by the local curers, had gotten back without her. Dom called Dr. Cobol, his and Mal's employer, and owner of Somnus Labs. It was midnight in New York, but the call was answered. And Arthur was dispatched, plucked from the comfort of his apartment, from the enjoyable, well-oiled routine of his post as the head of security at Los-Angeles branch of Cobol Engineering. That Los-Angeles office was really just a cover for a group of heavily secured labs in the nowhere lands of San Bernardino County, that over the past three years had been working on the new sedative that could eventually prove to be a breakthrough in medical science.

Dom Cobb had been and still was head of those labs, Arthur's direct superior, the only link between him and Cobol, who owned them all. Mal was Dom's wife and right hand in his research. Rumor had it she, and not Cobb, was the real genius behind the new sedative. To Arthur she was someone he did not really know. Looking back he could not say he knew Cobb that well either in the first place. But knowing Mal was not really necessary for the job. She was nice, and French, and his friend's wife. She called Arthur 'joyeux gamin' when she wanted to please him and 'connard' when she was annoyed. Arthur thought they got on pretty well.

In January of that year he had escorted Mal to her flight for Caracas, and in May he received a call from Jonathan Cobol, telling him to sharpen his sword and get ready to shake off all that fat he had accumulated while relaxing on Somnus' laurels, as he was going to Venezuela to look for Mrs. Cobb.

When they disconnected, Arthur stared at the receiver for a long second, trying to suppress the mild irritation that was swelling in his chest at the thought of all the meetings that had to be postponed or canceled, and all the plans that were ruined for another week, if not weeks. He briefly considered calling back and offering a decent replacement to send to Venezuela in lieu of himself. Then, he thought of the horrifying, vindictive home tyrant that was Mal, and the spineless, mostly indifferent slug that was his boss Dominic, and of the two little impiété-spewing terrors that were Cobbs' children, and he knew he had to go to Caracas. He would not be able to forgive himself if he let them down. Needless to say, Arthur did not own a sword, nor was he any fatter than three years before when he had been first employed by Somnus. So he spent the next few minutes contemplating the advantages of bringing his own guns against acquiring new ones at the point of his destination.

Now back to the evening in Caracas. The things that Cobb told him about Mal's stay there left Arthur scratching his head. Cobb arrived at Mal's house two days before Arthur, he spoke with Attal whom he then called simply 'Yusuf' and learned that over the past few weeks Mal had been staying in the house of a Father Coriolano Esquivo in the small mission of Barlovento, near Brazilian border, where she continued her research, concentrating namely on the potions used by the village's curer, a certain Dona Mercedes. The fact that Dom had learned all that from Yusuf and not from Mal herself told Arthur everything he needed to know about the actual state of Cobb's marriage.

A week before her disappearance, Mal and Dona Mercedes, accompanied by two Yanomami guides set off on a trip to the sacred cave, frequented by curers for the purpose of acquiring divine wisdom and inspiration. The guides were supposed to meet them three days later, at the clearing half a mile north of the mountain. The Yamanomi arrived at the meeting point at the scheduled time and waited for twenty-four hours. Mal and the curer did not appear. The men returned to the village and informed Father Coriolano of the disappearance. They never dared to go and search around the mountain, for they were forbidden by the law from setting foot on the sacred soil. Father Coriolano did not bother informing the police, he phoned Yusuf straight away, and Yusuf alerted their employer, and then Cobb. Such was Dom's story.

At Dom's request, Arthur looked through Mal's notes, handwritten and printed out from the files on her laptop. To say that Arthur was shocked would be an understatement. He noticed that Mal had worked mostly with three curers – two males from Caracas and Dona Mercedes in Barlovento – and the methods the three of them suggested for the cure of, for example, cancer included, among other things, sitting down in a bath full of rubbing alcohol, with a picture of Virgen Maria de Guadalupe and addressing the lady in question in a wholehearted prayer, asking her for deliverance of the pain – and wait for it – lighting up three white candles in her honor afterwards. Arthur had never been the one endowed with vivid imagination, but even he could imagine what might have happened if one of the aforementioned candles fell into the bath full of rubbing alcohol. From that moment on, Arthur's research of Mal's materials turned quite superficial, as he'd realized he was not going to find anything important in her papers.

By morning they had come up with a plan. They were going to fly to the mission, find a guide daring enough to travel with them to the mountain or wherever it was that Mal had disappeared, and there look for the women. It was a good plan, but it encountered some unexpected obstacles.

xxx

They were flown to the village by an overly enthusiastic friend of Yusuf's who tried to show-off the beauty of his land, and in doing so used all the means at his disposal. The sleek, brand-new four-seat Cessna glided over the boundless sea of green with deceptive ease only to descend rapidly and without any warning, as they approached the River, because the pilot wished to demonstrate them the marvels of the wildlife.

Arthur was not interested in crocodiles and giant turtles basking on the shores of the muddy, noisy stream below. He threw up into a sick bag after the first attempt at sightseeing and promised Yusuf's friend to withhold half of the agreed payment if he repeated the trick. The threat worked, and the journey continued without any further misunderstandings.

Over the course of the flight Cobb kept silent in the seat next to Arthur's, the look in his eyes drawn inwards, seemingly unperturbed by the flying technique of their pilot.

They arrived to Barlovento short before lunch. Father Coriolano, a brown-faced, bushy-eyebrowed old man, had been waiting for them in a decrepit old Ford at the end of a cleared, asphalted strip of land. The runway was a bald spot in the middle of the rainforest.

In his broken English, Father Coriolano let them know that a small party of villagers went into the jungle the previous day calling for Dona Mercedes and Mal. They did not set foot on the sacred soil of shamans, but they combed the neighboring forest. As Arthur had expected, the villagers found nothing.

Barlovento was a group of five shabonos, surrounding the village square, in the middle of which stood an ancient church and a small house, home of Father Coriolano. The jungle behind the church had been cleared; hot houses and open vegetable gardens catered to the needs of the village. Less than half a mile to the north of the village a few fishing boats rocked on the murky waters of the River.

The villagers were what Arthur had expected them to be: short, stocky men, often clad in nothing but a loincloth or ragged old pants, some of them strolling around stark naked, their dicks held up by a string tied loosely around the waist; women were also short, and mostly fat, with close cropped sleek hair that made their heads look like bricks. They wore old, worn out dresses or simply went topless, their thick bottoms stuck in makeshift skirts or even men's pants.

They left their bags in Father Coriolano's house and went looking for a guide. This was when they encountered the obstacles. The priest was telling the truth: none of the villagers who usually provided their services to tourists traveling around the Amazon agreed to accompany them to the mountain.

Their last resort, Coriolano said, were 'racionales', former gold miners who had come to the Amazon from all the corners of the world and stayed for good, having lost their souls in the jungle. Arthur wanted to quip about yet another legend, but the look on Cobb's face made him hold his tongue.

The 'Racionales' of the village were four emaciated old men, wearing colorless rags that no Yanomamo would disgrace himself with. They looked European and spoke some sort of distorted Spanish that even Coriolano had trouble understanding. They sat in the sun, propped against the asbestos-covered wall of a remote shabono beyond which began the moving, living sea of the jungle. In contrast to the Yanomami, Arthur had noted, the racionales had absolutely no other occupation, save for smoking pipes and talking, to help them kill time. The sun was hot and high in the sky, the time of siesta fast approaching. They needed to hurry before Barlovento fell into the mandatory three hours of afternoon sleep.

The old men listened to Coriolano, their expressions ranging from perplexed to blank; two of them resumed the conversation they had been having as soon as the priest stopped talking. The oldest of the men simply shook the white-bearded head and sucked on his pipe, and the fourth looked at Cobb and said in French, "Your wife was an idiot. No one goes to the land of shamans. Because if they do, they get killed. Nobody in their right mind will take you there." He pointed his finger at a section of shabono that had a piece of washed-out purple fabric hanging over the entrance. "Go see old Angelica's son. He is short on dope and he has not gone to Caracas for a very long time. He might take you. Junkies are crazy like that."

xxx

When they approached the appointed section of shabono and announced themselves by knocking on the wooden pole supporting the thatched roof, a tiny old woman appeared from behind the purple rag and stared at them short-sightedly, her watery eyes moving from Father Coriolano to Cobb and finally Arthur. She wore a rough-cut dress which was too short on the front and hang low on the back making her look pregnant. Thin white hair covered her head like dandelion fuzz, and her skin was brown and as wrinkled as a baked apple. As the priest began retelling their story, Anjelica groped behind the curtain, took out a half-finished woven basket, and sat down on the porch in front of them. Her small hands worked on the weave as she listened to Coriolano with far greater attention than anyone they had addressed that day.

When the priest was finished, she looked at Cobb and said in Spanish, "I'll ask if my son could help you. He's been lying on his back way too long." Then she put the basket down and gestured them to follow her into the hut.

Anjelica's home was a rectangular space with a slowly burning hearth a few steps away from the entrance. The walls of the hut were made of thatched leaves like the roof of the shabono, voices of women, children crying could be heard from behind the flimsy barrier.

Their hostess led them to the back of the hut, bypassing an old, shabby chest with a pile of clay bowls on it – the kitchen. They entered a small space in the back which probably served as a cellar with hands of dried fruit and cured fish hanging from the hooks and strings on the walls. As they entered the room, Cobb wrinkled his nose and gave Arthur a knowing look. The smell of fish and herbs which had permeated the wall of the cellar was overpowered by a far more potent, acridly sweet stench of a recently smoked joint.

On the bare soil floor, near the back entrance of the hut, spread on a yellow pool float, slept a mop-headed, bearded man of an uncertain age. He was lying on his stomach, snoring loudly and drooling in his sleep. The only article of clothing he had on were faded, blue briefs that hung low on his surprisingly toned ass. He was white, around Arthur's height, maybe a tad taller. His hair was sun bleached and his beard was ginger. The visible part of his left shoulder bore a tattoo of a crucifix with the name 'Kelli' and the date '26.06.2005' incused below.

On the floor in the gap between the wall and the pool float stood a large gray backpack and a shabby blue funboard that in this environment looked as alien as a spaceship. Okay, Arthur thought, here's a guy who likes his colors blue and brings a surfboard to the Amazon rainforest. Interesting.

Anjelica bent down mumbling something under her nose and poked her son on his tanned back. The man snorted in his sleep and simply turned over. The old woman sighed and beckoned to Arthur and Dom. Together they grabbed the sleeper by the shoulders and rolled him over on his back. It wasn't easy as the guy turned out to be heavy and bulky. They both sprang back right away as the smell of old sweat and male musk hit their nostrils. Anjelica drew open the bamboo curtain that covered the back entrance of the hut to let in some fresh air. The direct sunlight fell on the man's body.

And then Arthur froze, because he saw something he didn't like at all.

The guy's chest was covered in more hideous tattoos, one of them namely picturing the Union Jack, but it was his arms and stomach that set off a small alarm in Arthur's head. Arthur hated wounds. He thought allowing yourself to get shot or knifed on duty was the highest degree of unprofessionalism, the sign of stupidity or lack of necessary skill. He was once shot in the leg when he was twenty and reckless. When the weather changed, the bone ached under the scar. As Arthur grew older, he made sure another wound never happened.

Now then, on the chest of the man spread on the floor in front of him, Arthur saw two fresh – not older than a year – scars from gunshot wounds. He wondered where the bullets might have gone in the man's body as he hadn't noticed any exit points on the guy's back or sides. On the left side of his torso, right below the ribs, Arthur saw a long ugly scar that ran from the solar plexus all the way to the back and must have crossed both the man's liver and kidney. And finally, the man's arms were covered with a pale web of small scars, barely visible, that started thick on his hands, and thinned on the forearms only to become more pronounced around his underarms and chest. This is what happens when you get hit by a beehive, while wearing an old design Interceptor, Arthur thought. He had seen plenty of scars like that in his youth. He must have managed to cover the face with his hands before the impact, that's why it's mostly intact. Fascinating.

At this moment Anjelica entered the room carrying in her wiry hands a rusty pail half full of water. She approached the pool float and poured some of the muddy liquid on the sleeper's face. The man yelled, choked on the water and opened his eyes. He squinted at them in the sunlight that fell on his face and asked,"What do you want?" in an accented voice. Australian? Arthur thought, South African?

Anjelica began retelling Cobb's story. As the man listened, his gaze focused briefly on Arthur and then lingered on Cobb's face. He interrupted the old woman mid-sentence, raising his hand. "Too late," he mumbled. "Tomorrow. Come tomorrow." Having said that, he scratched his nose, closed his eyes and yawned which seemed to be more of a nervous tick. Then he turned his back on them and snored.

Arthur and Cobb stared at each other for a second, then Dom reached out for the man, spitting out curses. He was stopped by the old Indian who put a comforting hand on his shoulder. She shook her head and repeated the sleeper's words with startling finality, "Come tomorrow. He promised."

They had to leave and lose several more precious hours, the time they did not really have. Arthur's hands itched for that gray backpack tucked against the thatched wall of the hut. But the moment wasn't right.

Back at Coriolano's house he and Cobb had a brief argument about the possible course of action. Arthur proposed to hire the two villagers who'd served as guides to Mal, let the Indians take them to the meeting point, and from there proceed on their own. Arthur had his guns on him, they had been equipped with several maps of the territory and everything else necessary for a trip to the jungle. Cobb hesitated, which was understandable. They were going to look for two women, they needed to bring them back – be it dead or alive. Another pair of hands and eyes would prove vital under the circumstances.

A decision had to be made, so at dinner Arthur asked Coriolano what he knew about Anjelica's son.

"You mean Dave, her squatter," said the priest, picking crumbs of cassava bread off his plate. "He's been with the mission for three, maybe four months, and he hasn't done anything bad over that period of time. I can say that with certainty. Have you met Mr. Garth? Mr. Garth, he is American like you. He used to mine gold here many years ago. So Mr. Garth lives with a woman from our village in a house up the river. He and Etewa, who happens to be his wife's brother and one of our trackers, found Dave in the jungle on their way back from a Marikitare village. He had a fever. I suspect he had walked through the rainforest from the Colombian side. He said he was on his way to Caracas, when the illness struck him. We have a very well equipped infirmary here, so we kept him. When he got better, we placed him with Anjelica. She used to take care of him in the hospital. Her son, her real son, was killed during the Haximu Massacre back in 1993. This was when she came to live with us. She says Dave reminds her of Milagros to the point that she sometimes thinks he's returned to her. There is some resemblance between them, I agree."

"What is it that he's doing in the village?" Arthur asked sipping on a very bitter, very strong coffee that had been prepared by the priest himself.

"He comes and goes. To Caracas and back."

"Through the jungle?" Arthur doubted.

"There are many white people here who know the jungle." Coriolano said, scratching his chin. "Dave is a tracker and a guide. He and Etewa work for the tourists who come here on hunting trips. But I understand you want to know if he is trustworthy enough to come with you and look for your wife? " He stared questioningly at Cobb.

"If I'm paying someone to guide me through the rainforest I'd like to know everything about them and maybe more," said Dom who had kept silent listening to the conversation from a recliner in the corner."You mentioned he often goes to Caracas. Do you know why?"

"To buy weed," Coriolano said casually, "and to gamble. Barlovento is a small village. Here everything is in the open. Impossible to hide. We see each other clearly. Dave is a good man, with a kind heart. He is a 'racional', but he is one of us."

"'A good man' and 'a kind heart' are too vague the terms, don't you find?" Cobb asked later, when they were smoking on the porch of Coriolano's house. Arthur nodded. Anyway, they would go and try him in the morning. No matter how thin, this was still a chance for Malorie.

xxx

They entered the old woman's hut on a dark drizzly morning of the following day. The place looked deserted, Anjelica's hammock rocked empty in the cold draft. The owner of a kind heart was snoring peacefully where they had left him the previous day, looking like he had never moved, and the half empty pail of water still stood on the floor by the pool float.

Cobb slapped the man on the face several times to no apparent effect. Anjelica's squatter moaned at the slaps, but did not wake up.

This was it. This was fucking it. Arthur had had enough.

With a sure hand he stopped Dom from emptying the pail into the sleeper's face. Instead, he bent over the pool float and grabbed the sturdy gray backpack. He opened it and shook its contents out on the dusty floor. Down fell a toiletry kit spewing out a toothpaste tube and a brush, followed by a black pouch containing something that Arthur nearly mistook for a mobile phone but in reality turned out to be a GPS device, a giant Ziploc bag with clean clothes and a pair of black tennis shoes. On top of it landed an old, shabby passport that belonged to a certain Eames, Peter David, a citizen of New Zealand, born in 1977 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The front spread of the document bore a faded picture of a doe-eyed, big-eared youth in blue plaids who might or might not have been Anjelica's tenant. The rest of it were pages and pages of visas and entry clearances, mostly to the countries of South and Central America, the latest one being a business visa to Colombia which dated three years back.

The insides of the backpack were virginally clean, no trace of dust, not a single crumb. The zipped back compartment of the bag held a Victorinox SwissChamp, old but in a good condition, a black leather sheath with an Indian machete, ancient-looking but well-filed, and finally, yet another giant Ziploc, wrapped lovingly around an original – no thumb safety - SW40, complete with two 10Rounds. Arthur who used the latest Glock chuckled at this find. He searched on the very bottom of the back compartment and took out a neatly folded bundle of maps, held together with an elastic band. They were maps of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil: road maps, printed in English on water-resistant paper, topographic renderings of the rainforest terrains in Spanish and Portuguese, some of them hand-drawn, all of them bearing comments and additions, done in blocky, clumsy handwriting.

Cobb frowned suspiciously at the gun, but Arthur felt unexpectedly relieved as he placed the bundled maps on top of it. His discovery made him feel like he'd dropped a mountain off his shoulders, it also made him pay closer attention to the surroundings. At the bottom end of the pool float he noticed a small pile of clothing that hadn't been there the day before. He fumbled through the pair of ragged jeans and the black t-shirt with a washed-off DMX applique on the chest. The clothes were damp, as if their owner had caught some of the rain that had fallen at night. On the bottom of the heap, stood a pair of worn-out snickers, their soles covered in caking wet mud.

Arthur was slow at the start, but once the decision was made he just moved forward, unstoppable. So he squatted near the pool float, slid his hand under its side that lay a bit higher than the rest of the plastic and pulled out – quite unsurprisingly – another zipped plastic bag, this one full of weed. He took the stash to the front of the hut where the hearth was smoldering at the entrance. He threw the bag on the burning coals and then settled down to wait on a rough wooden bench outside the porch. Dom walked out and sat down next to him, wound up and rubbing his hands nervously.

The smoke from the hearth became a synthetic stench as the plastic melted. It was soon eclipsed by the reek of burning dope. Arthur and Dom both had to cover their noses at the smell; worried heads of the villagers began popping out of the neighboring sections of the hut. Dom raised a calming hand at them, in a gesture imitating smoking. For a few minutes nothing else happened, and Arthur was prepared to admit defeat, go back to the hut and kill the fire before the sleeper died of asphyxiation. At this very moment a naked, bulky figure appeared from the back room, carrying the pail of water from the other day. The man threw the contents of the pail on the coals, stopping the burn. He lingered by the hearth, staring dolefully at the remains of his stash, absent-mindedly pushing his fingers through the scrubland of his beard.

He then walked out on the porch, pulling up the descending briefs as he went, and grimaced reprovingly at Arthur and Dom.

"You've burnt my weed," the guy stated with a philosophical calmness, as his eyes raked over their faces.

This look, cold and analyzing, gave Arthur an impression that each of them was being sized-up and placed in a niche. And thus, Dom was categorized as valuable and worth taking into the account, while Arthur himself was dismissed as unimportant and secondary. Arthur found this new feeling to be not only novel, but also highly irritating.

"The name's Eames," the man said, addressing Dom, "but you can call me Dave."

"Dominic Cobb," Dom shook the offered, tattooed hand. "We came to see you yesterday. We need a guide to take us to the Ashembo Mountain. My wife disappeared there five days ago."
"I know," Eames scratched his beard, "the French girl. She went there with the old hag Mercedes a few days back. I remember you came. Sorry, I wasn't fit."

"The question is are you fit enough now to take us there?" Arthur asked, folding his hands over his chest.

"Oh yes, Coriolano came and spoke to me last night, after you left," the man informed. "I went out to check the routes, and..." He rubbed his mouth thoughtfully, then looked Cobb straight in the eyes.

"Mr. Cobb-," he began.

"Dom, just Dom."

"Dom, you do realize that your wife might be dead. She's been missing for five days. Do you think you'll cope if we don't find her or find her dead body?" he asked, staring at Dom with dark, searching eyes.

"Yes," Dom said, and went morbid white.

"In this case, we will go and look for Mrs. Cobb," Eames said decidedly. " I'll meet you at the boat house on the river in an hour. Wear some sturdy shoes, don't bring anything useless like another set of clothes, bring whatever firearms you might have, enough water for a day, repellents, and mosquito nets, and," – his eyes grazed over the cut of Arthur's jeans - "leave your PA behind."

Arthur felt the corners of his mouth quirk up on their own accord.

"Arthur is coming," Dom said at that somberly.

"And bringing on his lovely person two thousand American dollars – for the weed that he just burned and his own hammock, because I only have one extra," Eames finished, dismissively.

"Speaking of money. How much will you charge for your services?" Arthur asked, and the guide narrowed his eyes at him.

"I won't charge you," he answered,"but we will need a couple hundred dollars to pay my Yanomamo partner, and some more – for the bribes, or possibly ransom."

"What about your partner?" Dom wondered, leveling himself off the bench.

"He's gonna be your bodyguard," Eames said simply. "I went down the path last night. There was blood and some human body parts scattered over the eastern edge. Looks like a war is about to break off between Marikitare from the neighboring village and our folk. Some of our villagers will be missing their heads by the end of today, believe it or not. It's probably a good thing we're going now..."

xxx

"Do you believe what he said about the war?" Arthur asked later when he and Dom were re-packing the bags they were taking with them.

"I don't know what to think," Dom answered, stuffing a calabash with water into the side pocket of his backpack. "To me he looks trustworthy. We'd better ask Coriolano, if he knows anything about this. And where to get a hammock. For you."

It appeared the problem had solved itself, as Coriolano presented Arthur with a hammock and a black sheath with a brand new Gerber machete in it.

"You will need it in the jungle," he said, giving Arthur and Dom his blessing as they were stepping down the porch of his house, "to cut through the bushes, not to dice the heathens, I'm afraid. Locals mostly use arrows and spears, no real chance of close combat." He smiled.

"Is it really a war?" Dom wondered, shaking Coriolano's hand.

"Please understand this. Local tribes are like children. They go to war with each other today to forget the wounds and go hunting together tomorrow. Besides, you're white, you're not embroiled in their quarrels. And if the need arises, you've got Eames who speaks the language. He even speaks Ye'kuana, the tongue of Marikitare tribes. And if all is lost, you can always whip out your gun." He shook Arthur's hand.

"What about the village? Are you going to be alright here?" Dom asked.

"Everything is in the hands of the creator," said Coriolano, "but I assure you we have plenty of strong men, and this is not the first 'war' I'm witnessing here."

xxx

Eames was already waiting for them when they arrived at the riverbank. He was sitting on a boulder, smoking and giggling with a little Indian boy. He didn't move when he saw them, but his posture tensed, as if he gathered himself internally, and his eyes went cold.

He shook Dom's hand and showed two thumbs up at the clothes they wore – sneakers, a t-shirt and old jeans for Dom, cargo pants and a zipper hoodie with an undershirt for Arthur. He also squinted disapprovingly at their stuffed backpacks, but did not comment. He himself wore a camo t-shirt and cargo pants, showing his scratch-covered calves, leather sandals, and on his head – quite characteristically, a blue bandana. The gray backpack looked almost empty and weightless on his back, and the machete sheath was holstered securely to his belt. There was no gun on him, and Arthur suddenly doubted the decision of wearing his Glock to the jungle, even though Eames himself had advised that. Anyway, the 33 was hidden from view by his jacket, and he was in no hustle to remove it then and there.

With a satisfied smirk, Eames took the money from Arthur and, not bothering to count, tossed them to the boy, who caught the bundle and disappeared in the bushes.

"Here's four hundred dollars." Dom then took the bills out of his pocket. "Will it be enough to pay your partner and - for other needs?"

"More than enough," Eames said with a puff as he bent down and from under the boulder produced a small bag of weed which he stuffed into his back pocket. He then wiped the soiled hand against his hip, and took the money from Cobb. "Shall we?"

As they set off through the jungle, the church bell began to chime in the village they left behind, announcing the beginning a morning service.