Sorry I took a while to update! I've been really busy and it's hard to find time to write. But don't worry, since I made you wait a while, I made the chapter extra long to make up for it. I hope you enjoy! Read & Review!

Disclaimer: I don't own anything. All story rights go to Jessica Khoury.

He yells. I yell. We both hit the ground, him on his back and me landing smack on top of him. For a moment, all we can do is stare, astonished at one another. His eyes were wide, and startlingly colorful. The hair on the back of my neck stands on end, like Duma's hackles.

A boy.

Our noses are inches apart. I feel very warm from head to toe, and my abdomen clenches as If I swallowed one of those torches from my party.

A boy.

I have never seen such beautiful eyes. They were hazel-brown, yet they had flecks of blue and green and yellow. It's as if his eyes reflected every color in the jungle.

I bolt upright, every muscle tense and alarmed, ready to flee in a heartbeat, as Duma springs from midair and lands on top of the boy, pinning him to the ground. The boy is chattering away in a strange language that's nothing like English, but when he sees the jaguar's fangs inches from his nose, he falls silent.

"Who are you?" I demand, my voice shaking.

He's still gaping at the jaguar when I shine the flashlight right in his face, and winces and holds up a hand between himself and Duma, as if that could protect him if Duma decided to bite.

"Jaguar," he gasps. "You have a jaguar!"

"I asked who you are!" I hold my flashlight with both hands, angled at him like a gun.

The boy, still holding up his hand and never taking his eyes from Duma, replies, "Call away the cat, and I will tell you."

I hesitate a moment, then call for Duma. He hisses, spraying spit across the boy's face, then slips to my side.

The boy climbs to his feet, keeping a watchful eye on the jaguar. "My name is Austin. Who are you?"

"Ally." I take a step back as he reaches his full height, my flashlight still aimed at his face. "What do you want with me? Where-where are you from?"

"You're the one who crashed into me." He is taller than me, and though he is thin, he is very muscular. I can tell because he's half-naked. He's wearing khaki shorts and necklace which holds a jaguar carved into jade, but nothing else, not even shoes. His skin is fairly tan, probably from spending many days in the jungle under the hot sun. His hair is as blonde as the light of the sun itself, and thick with tangles. There is something vaguely familiar about his face, but I can't think of what it is. That's very disconcerting for me, since I forget nothing. If I had seen this boy before, I would remember it. And not just because my memory is perfect. I'd remember those eyes, that sculpted chest...the definition of his abdomen...

I snap my eyes back up to his face, whipping my thoughts back into line. My initial fear gives way to anger. "What are you doing out here anyway? It's the middle of the night. Where are your clothes?"

He replies, remarkably calmly, "You've wandered far from your cage Ally bird."

"What?" I ask blankly.

"The dress," he says, nodding at it. "It makes you look like a bird. The kind we Ai'oa like to keep on our shoulders. But that's not a good thing to be running around the jungle in."

I look down at my torn dress. "It's my birthday." Furious, I glare at him, refusing to let him distract me. Again. "Ai'oa? What is that?"

He presses a hand to his bare chest. "We are a who, not a what."

"Are you native?"

"I'm Ai'oan. Only the scientists call us natives." He cocks his he'd curiously. "Are you a scientist? I think you must be, because you are from the Little Cam village."

"No. Yes. I mean, I will be one soon. How do you know where I'm from? Have you been to Little Cam?" Fear had turned to anger, but my anger now transforms into fascination. I've never spoken with anyone outside of Little Cam. Dr. Fires doesn't count because she's part of Little Cam now too.

"I've seen it," he says, "but only from the trees. I've seen you too. It is no place for the Ai'oa. Kapukiri says there's evil in the village of the scientists."

"Little Cam isn't evil," I reply, bristling. "What do you know about it?"

"Only why Kapukiri says." He kneels and stares curiously at Duma. "He obeys your command and follows where you go. Incredible. Truly, you are blessed to have such a companion."

His words soften me, and I warm a little. "Is your village close?"

Austin's eyes narrow suspiciously. "Why? What do you want with Ai'oa?"

"I want to see it," I say on a whim. "Show it to me.

"I don't know..." He frowns.

"That smoke I smell, is it from Ai'oa?" I close my eyes and breathe deeply. "It's coming from...that direction." I open my eye and follow the scent. When I look back, Austin is staring at me with wide eyes.

"You..." He runs to catch up with me. "You can smell it from here?"

"Ah..." I swallow and backpedal a bit. "Well can't you?"

Uncertainty plays openly across his face. But he throws the thought aside and goes back to my previous suggestion. "I guess I can show you my village...if you promise not to wake everyone."

"I swear."

"Well...okay." He still seems uneasy. I take it that visitors aren't often invited to Ai'oa.

I follow him over fallen logs made soft with mosses and under low-hanging vines and limbs. I wonder how he'll see where he's going, but he seems to feel his way rather than see it. I thought I moved silently through the jungle, but Austin seems to float over the ground rather than walk on it. He moves as sinuously as a snake and as lightly as a butterfly. Duma stays between us at all times, showing his mistrust in his hackles and rigid tail.

Before long I smell smoke, then I see the fires from which it comes. They burn low, more embers than flames, several dozens of them. Around the fires are huts made of four poles and thatched with palm leaves. They have no walls. When we reach the edge of the village, Austin stops me.

"They're sleeping. It's never good to wake what is sleeping. Stay here and look, but don't wake them." He tells me in a hushed tone.

"You're awake." I point out.

"I couldn't sleep. I heard a jaguar and went looking for it." He looks down at Duma.

I remember Duma's roar as we escaped through the fence. "Why try to hunt jaguars? It seems to me like they'd end up hunting you."

Austin sits on a mossy rock, arms crossed over his bare chest. "I don't want to catch one! I just want to see it. It's a powerful sign, the glimpse of a jaguar."

"I see a jaguar every day," I say, reaching down to rub Duma's ears.

"It's a thing unheard of." He shakes his head. "In the jungle, the jaguar is king. He follows no one but himself, and we Ai'oans fear and respect him and call him guardian."

"Duma's just a big baby really." I say, continuing to rub him.

Austin gives a short laugh. "Of course. That's why he tried to bite the nose off my face!"

I just rolled my eyes and changed the subject. "How do you know English? Uncle Preston told me that natives were ignorant about everything outside their villages."

"I'm not ignorant," Austin objects. "It is you who are ignorant, Ally bird. My father taught me English."

"Your father?" I question.

"He is a scientist like you, in Little Cam." He admits.

"Really?!" I blink and stare at him with astonishment. Well, well, someone's been hiding a really big secret..."Who is it? What's his name?" I think of all the scientists, wondering who it could be.

"To me, he is only Papi. He comes and teaches me English, math and writing." He tells me.

"Well what does he look like?" I ask, now suddenly very curious about this boy and his village.

Austin shrugs. "Ugly, like all scientists."

I frown. "You think I'm ugly?"

"Of course." He says, staring towards his village.

I feel my face flush with anger. "That's the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me! I'm not ugly! I'm..." I look down at muddy, bedraggled dress, and my voice falls to an embarrassed whisper. "I'm perfect."

"Perfect? Is that why you're running around in the jungle, as lost as a lion in the rainforest, in a dress that has seen much better days?" He asks with a smirk.

"I-it's my birthday...I wanted to see the jungle. I've never been outside Little Cam before. I wanted to feel what it was like to be outside, in the wild." I protested.

"Are you a prisoner, Ally bird?" He looks to me.

"No," I say, startled.

"Why have you never left, then?" He shoots back.

"I-they say it's dangerous. Anacondas." I lie, though it's not entirely false.

"Anacondas! I have killed an anaconda." He says, sitting up proudly.

"You have?" I wonder what it looked like, or how big it was.

"Yes. It was as long as I am tall, and I made its skin into a belt for Papi." Austin explains.

"I have only seen an anaconda once. But it was young, and dead. Uncle Timothy shot it with a gun." I say, remembering the event.

"With a gun?" He says, frowning a little.

"Of course with a gun!" I say, shocked.

"I don't like guns. I hunt with a dart and spear and arrow. These are silent and won't scare away your prey like a stupid gun." He argues.

As I look around, the night has grown much darker. "I should go back now." It's been much, much longer than an hour. My delirious rush of adrenaline leaves me weary and nervous. I want to get back, to change and shower before my absence is noticed. If it hasn't been noticed already.

"I will take you back." Austin announces, rising to his feet.

"I can find the way." I say.

"I will take you back," he repeats in a firmer tone. "It's not good for a woman to walk alone in the jungle without a man to protect her."

He thinks I am a woman. I stand a little taller. "Well, all right. If you want."

As we walk, he begins telling me all the names of the plants we pass. I already know their names, but I don't tell him that. He seems to think that scientists always want to know the names of things, and so I guess he thinks he's being helpful. Anyway, I like listening to his voice. It's deep and a little hoarse, as if he's been yelling all day, and he has a slight accent that makes every word sound new and exciting, as if he's speaking another language I don't have to strain to understand.

"Here is annatto, for repelling insects and curing snake bites. The girls say it makes a love potion, but I don't believe them. They have all tried it on me, and I don't love any of them." He explains.

I stay quiet, listening to his words and stories as he continues.

"Look, here is suma. It helps the blood and muscles and the memory, very good to eat. Over there is Curare. We use it to poison our arrows. It is a strong poison, but not as strong as yresa."

Unlike the others, that name is unfamiliar. "What's yresa?"

"There is none here. In all of the world, there is only one place where the yresa grows." Austin frowns. "That place was very sacred to the Ai'oa, but we cannot go there anymore. The scientists forbid it with their guns."

I now have a feeling I know what this yresa is, but I don't say so. There is no warmth in Austin's voice when he talk about the scientists taking the flowers away from his people, and I don't want him to think that it was my decision. For some reason, I want this strange, wild boy to think better of me than that.

I watch his every move with fascination. Questions surge to my lips, batter at my teeth. I want to know everything about him. Where does he sleep? What does he eat? Has he been to a city? Does he have friends? But I feel unusually shy and don't know what to say. Or even how to say it. In just the minutes I've known him, he's shown himself to be entirely different from anyone in Little Cam.

"Look," Austin says, stopping by a tall, slender tree. "Know what this is?"

I tap the bark. I examine it and think quickly through the names and species I know to find the right one. "Mauritia flexuosa."

"No." He looks at me like I'm crazy. "It's aguaje."

"That's what I said. I just used the formal categorization." I retorted.

He shakes his head. "Wait here. I'll get you some."

Before I can say a word, Austin grabs the branch of a different tree and hauls himself up. Within seconds, he's twenty feet in the air and still climbing. I watch him with wide eyes, waiting for him to slip at any moment and crash to the ground.

Soon he's lost to sight, hidden by leaves. I stare for a long minute and start to wonder if he changed his mind about walking me home and just abandoned me in the middle of the jungle. Then I hear a rustle and shout behind me, and I whirl to see him sliding to the ground on a thick vine. He lands slightly, knees bent, with a string of aguaje draped over his shoulder.

With a smile that can only be described as cocky, he deftly skins the fruit and hands it to me. I discover that I'm grinning like an idiot. "Thanks, I guess." I say. The fruit is mildly tangy, not my favorite of local produce, but what can I say when the boy climbed a hundred feet to pick it? "Aren't you going to eat some too?"

He laughs. "No! Aguaje is for girls. If a man eats too much of it, he starts to look like a woman."

"That's the most unscientific thing I've ever heard." I say, shaking my head.

"Then you haven't met my cousin Jacari." Austin swings the string of fruit back and forth. "Too much aguaje. Now the mothers use him as a wet nurse."

My mouth freezes mid-bite, and I stare at him. "You're teasing me."

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "Maybe."

I throw the aguaje pit at him, and he laughs again and catches it. His laughter is infectious. I can't stop smiling. Everything he does, each movement, each word, is so vivid and strange. I feel like I've discovered some fascinating new species.

He picks another aguaje from the vine and tosses it up and down, watching me with his head tilted and his eyes curious. "How old are you?" He asks me.

"Seventeen. How old are you?"

"Almost eighteen."

"Do you have brothers and sisters?" I've always been enchanted by the idea of siblings. As a rule, members of my family tree could never have more than one child, for the sake of population control-though that rule had backfired on them when the Accident happened.

"Not by blood." He says. "But by heart."

"What does that mean? If not by blood, then they're not really siblings." I tell him.

He frowns and catches the aguaje again, rubbing his thumb over its scaly skin. "Shows what you know about family."

"I've spent months of my life studying genetics." I say. "I think I know all there is to know about family."

"Genetics." Austin repeats thoughtfully.

"It's the study of-" I start.

"I know what it is." He cuts me off. "But that's just a part of what family is, at least in Ai'oa. And it's a very small part."

I open my mouth, and shut it again. My brain does a somersault and lands with its fists raised. "It's everything. My genetic heritage was handpicked, designed by the best scientists in the world-" I stop before I go too far and tell him what I really am.

Austin gives me a sad smile. "You really are a scientist. Whenever we contradict one of you, that wall comes up in your eyes. We have a word for it in Ai'oa. Akangitá. Head like a rock."

My mouth drops. "Head like a rock!" I clamp my jaw shut, whirl on my heel, and march off toward Little Cam in a huff. At first I hear nothing behind me, and I almost slow and stop, but then I hear Austin hurrying I catch up. I wipe the smile from my face before he sees it. He skips around me and blocks my path.

"Sorry. If it makes you feel better, everyone in Ai'oa calls me Akangbytu." He tells me.

"What does that mean?"

He thinks for a moment. "Head full of wind."

My indignation, already thin, shatters. I laugh. "Head full of wind! Perfect. How do you say mouth?"

"You would say îuru." He frowns. "Why?"

"So if I called you Îurubytu..." I trail off, letting him put the pieces together.

He gives me a dark look. "Mouth of wind. Ha ha. Îurukay."

"What's that?"

"I said you speak with fire, Ally bird. Your words scorch." He smirks.

I smile. "Tell me more."

As we walk, I name words, and Austin tells me their Ai'oan translation, which I file away in my memory. He is stunned by how quickly I remember things and how easily I string the words together into sentences.

"It took me years to speak English this well," he says. "You speak my language as if it were planted in your heart."

I smile and wonder if he can see the warmth in my cheeks. Suddenly the fence appears, and we're not far from the escape hole. I see the fallen ceiba tree only a few dozen yards to the right. The heat melts from my face. I wish I had walked slower.

"Thank you for walking me back," I say, because it feels like the right thing to do.

"Ally..." He looks down at his feet suddenly, seeming almost embarrassed. "I must tell you something. I told you a lie."

"You didn't kill an anaconda after all?" I tease.

"No!" He retorts indignantly. "I did kill the anaconda! I lied when I said you were ugly. It is not true. You..." He scrubs at his hair, and his discomfort makes me smile. "You are in fact very beautiful. More beautiful than any girl I know. Because I lied to you, I must give you a gift. It is the Ai'oan way. I took the truth away from you, now I must give something back." He extends his hand, and I see he is holding a flower. It is as big as both of my hands, a lovely pink and purple passionflower.

I stare at it as my heart tumbles over itself and my tongue ties itself up in knots.

"Will you come again?" He asks. "In the daytime? You are not like the other scientists, who come and try to bully us, showing off their guns and motorboats." He snorts. "If it wasn't for Ai'oa, your scientists wouldn't know half of what they know about this jungle. But you are...still young and not so ugly. I can teach you more of my language. And I can show you Ai'oa."

I swallow the shard of ice that's formed in my throat. "I...can't, Austin."

"What are you so afraid of?" He stares at me defiantly, his jungle eyes cutting right to my heart.

I repeat my promise to myself to never leave Little Cam again, but my thoughts get muddled, and all I can think of is the jade jaguar on Austin's necklace. "Okay...I will."

A slow smile spreads to his lips, revealing a row of beautiful white teeth. He takes the passionflower and tucks it into my hair, his eyes not leaving mine once. Then he leans down to Duma, sliding a hand down his back. "Farewell guardian."

He nods to me as he rises, and then he is gone, blending into the dappled night like smoke.

Three chapters down, however many more to go. :P I really don't know how long this is going to end up being. I dont plan on it being hugely long, but anyway, do you have any comments? Reviews are life, so yeah, tell me what you think. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated!

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