Lara awoke with Vines shaking her by either shoulder. It took a significant form of willpower not to club him in the mouth out of instinct.
"How long have I-"
"An hour, hour and a half, give or take? I'm not sure, my watch is broken. Yours too."
She looked at her wrist. A huge knot was swelling up around either side of the band, and the quartz face had been shattered, sending thin slivers of glass on either side of her skin. She brush off the glass and the crusted blood.
Lara glanced to Vines's wrist, and found the same knot, the same cuts. It would have been easy to snap a rifle butt along their hand while they lay unconscious.
"They want us disoriented. Awfully damn thorough, I will say," Lara said.
Rainclouds had already mottled the sky's dim blue tint into a vague misshapen blot, clusters of clouds visible only beyond the waves of thin rain and endlessly tall canopy. She was soaked to the bone, clothes clinging to every contour and feeling vividly, miserably cold in the process. The cool air that drifted between the wooden obelisks that surrounded them was a vicious insult to what had already been significant injury. Rainfall was tumbling off the tips of heart-shaped appendages providing them with the barest glimpse of shelter, so dense was the roof of vegetation about their heads, but the multitude of veined runnel waterways draining down and forming more thick streams from their points of origin made it almost impossible to talk without swallowing water.
"Dumb creatures think if they break our watches," Vines said, "we can't find them?"
Lara found her footing, however shaky it may have been. "I imagine it's a bit less transparent, or simple, as that." She looked about, surprised by how close the feeling of being hungover was to her current state. "I don't understand. Why didn't they just kill us?"
"Hm?" Vines paused, looked bitter, and looked back at her. "Of all the things you could complain about-"
"They had to have a reason," Lara said, "or we'd be dead."
She stopped, feeling the last syllable taper out of her mouth without thought to the surrounding rationale.
"We need a plan."
"I'm all ears," Vines said.
She looked about. Their supplies had been upended in the marshy body of water that their plane laid in like carrion, the waterfront dotted with crates and small parcels. Their backpacks had been tossed in, likewise. Neither of them were armed any longer.
When Lara tried to bend down and examine one of the broken packages that had once been a form of ration, her ribs expanded fresh misery to her chest. Everything in the region hurt. Her breasts, her spine, shoulderblades. She wondered, between fits of groaning and with Vines at her side, whether or not she had ever been kicked that hard before. Still, once the initial pain had subsided, she forced it on herself again to picked up the food.
"You going to be okay? Need anything?" Vines, from a cursory observation, had his own problems. His watch had been more durable than his, and as such his wrist looked much worse than hers. The hand it was attached to lay limp and discoloured. A fracture was likely. His face was scratched all along one cheek, the impression of pebbles and dirty soil still clinging to some points of his flesh and in his hair.
"A warm bath and dry clothes would be nice, but until then I'll have to be. You should wash your face off, make sure to do what you can for the cuts. They left us our canteens at least."
As Vines followed her advice, Lara began casting about the ground for a trail, and found it unsurprisingly difficult to follow. If she hadn't known to look for hoofprints, they wouldn't had stood out. They'd been riding over gravel, stepping on the roots of trees, essentially anything that would hesitate to leave a trail behind. It obfuscated the trail but not completely.
What caused its disappearance was how the trail led very clearly directly into the marshes.
"I don't understand, how can they manage this? A horse is over a thousand pounds, empirical, right? Wouldn't it be extraordinarily dangerous to lead an equine into water like that?"
"It is," Vines said, standing upright from having lightly hosed off his hair. "But they're used to the terrain, and horses are phenomenal swimmers. I'm sure they know which marshes and lakes are free of aquatic predators and which aren't."
"I suppose so. Anyway, this can wait. I want us to get after Hal as soon as we can. You and Sn-"
She stopped.
Snake.
The gunfire in the distance, before they'd been ambushed.
The radio Merlose had received in Portuguese.
"Shit," she said.
Lara looked about rapidly for anything she might need. "We've got to find Snake and Ellie."
Vines went to the waterline snatched at the satchel of things, and anything that might have been left from its discard, and jammed them still dripping into his backpack, then threw the useless harness that had once held his assault rifle into the river as an exchange. "Snake seemed like a strong man, and Ellie's smart. I know the way they would have taken. Ellie and I charted it out so that Snake could have the map on the trip back."
"Good, that's a place to start." Vines handed her the map, and Lara took a minute or two to study it intently. It was topographical, but she memorised points she would recognise intrinsically, like valleys, or large swatches of elevated terrain, or rivers that had shaped scar through the elevation levels of the earth. She took to one knee after she was done, reaffirming her bootlaces. "Think you can keep up? I won't be able to slow for you."
"I'll do what I can. If this is a trap-"
"It isn't. No point, they could've knocked us off the playing field earlier."
"-still, you need to be careful. We're not so much as armed. We've got to play this damned close, alright? You're going to need some type of weapon if we were to take anybody or anything on."
"No," she said, feeling an anger simmer in the burning muscle between her ribs. "I won't."
"It's going to be uphill, mostly. Watch out for-"
"Yes, yes, are you ready to go."
Vines looked at her, mouth buttoned in a skeptical downwards tilt, eyes determined but still wary of her. " Lara. They could have killed us, we were way too outnumbered. You really think they're still-"
"Yes," she lied.
When they arrived at the cliffside, Lara's eyes blurred from the sight of the bodies.
The trees had slowly given way to a rocky escarpment dividing a thick valley, with the rockwall alternating with its face covered in wind-gnarled branches and vines jutting out in search of life, and the brilliant clay-and-soil colours co mingling in a marbled shade of swirled orange-pink with deep auburn closer to treebases. The cliff's edge had allowed the trees to recede in a jaggedly orderly fashion, with grass and mossy stones close enough to the lip they were constantly ebbing from gentle breeze over the edge and dropping into the river below, soundlessly save for their whispering tumbling.
The run had taken an oblong hour, with Lara less leading and more exhausting of Vines, and his ragged breath slowly receded until she had completely lost the sound of him behind her, following in the desperate wake of their decidedly expedited rendezvous. The Jeep came and went, looking blasted out and gutted by the fall, foliage buried into the intestines of its capsized undercarriage. It lay dead on one side, with only sign of Snake and Ellie's pilgrimage a discarded hairband and a single cigarette butt jammed into what would have been the hubcap. Lara waited almost ten minutes, an agonising exhibition in patience, for Vines to catch up, and once he had, she'd taken off again, calmling somewhat and allowing him to keep pace. Their progress was swift enough they might have traversed the same space as Snake and Ellie in half the time; Lara thought ruefully she could have done it in forty five minutes had she not waited for Vines.
Soon, the types of plants began a gentle chance demarcating what could have been an entirely different ecosystem. As they had approached, Lara's deepening sense of dread threatened an upgrade to panic as she began to find ragged footfalls, a lost tennis shoe, and the leavings of automatic rifle fire. The air had held close the cordite's scent in it humid breath and gave the impression of exhalation only once they'd disturbed the air where it had taken place, ever ascending up what became an increasingly difficult slope. Splatterings of rifle shells, cast off and oily, littered the ground, and Lara stopped when she came to the first body.
The corpse was garbed in almost the same gear and outfit as their attackers, and his rifle lay slack around his body. Lara picked it off him with some inner disgust drowned out by a deepening apprehension of what else they would find.
Behind her, Vines sprinted upward. His rapid hitching intake of oxygen reminded her of the agony she'd been fighting through during the majority of their run.
Vines spoke under his breath. "No," he said, "they couldn't have."
"Vines," Lara said. She knew what was coming. His face was contorting, his mouth learning a horror. "Don't, we don't know who's still-"
It was too late, and Vines was already shouting. "Ellie! Ellie, it's Malcolm!" Vines breath came out hoarse and agonised, "Ellie, we're here, come on! Stop being daft!"
Lara knew there was no point in trying to stop him, and continued making her way up the awful proceeds. Another body paired with a female soldier, both dead from gunshot wounds at the base of a tree, guns in-hand. She took a pistol from one of their side holsters, crossed herself for the second time, and placed it in her own. They were reaching the cliff's edge, and she could see beyond cyclopean fronds the crisscrossing lines of metal wirework that allowed passage, however dangerous, beyond the gorge.
They proceeded, and the pickings became increasingly violent and distinctly more aggressive. A body, two, four. Another set of three, with stab wounds. Exit wounds in the back, in the chest, in heads and in limbs. One man looked as though he had fallen on a grenade.
Lara looked at the patterns in shells, in bodies, in bootprints. It was a skillset she'd used countless times before but for precisely more academic purposes. This made her feel ill in its detective proximity.
When she came to a behemoth of a tree, its enormous girth towering up and its brances extending over the cliff's edge, she was reminded of how bonsai trees are made to look as real as their inspiration. In its life, she saw the vastness of that inspiration, and was certain its webwork of roots were keeping the soil together beneath their feet rather than a barren form of earth that let out nothing beneath them save for arid, collapsing soil. It was a sort of Alpha amongst so many other points of beauty, and it provided a distraction inside her.
She also saw all of the wounds it had endured for the man who had taken shelter behind it.
The part of the tree facing the forest was ruined by blasts big and small. Gunfire had blown out such massive amounts of its trunk it could only be described as having hemorrhaged splinters. It was riddled with these wounds, and as she neared it to examine the bulk of such damage, she spotted the glimmering pile of handgun and rifle shells that surrounded the vast roots at its base, and the empty rifle that sat amongst them, left like carcass amongst carcass.
From the first to the cairn of shells she found at its base, there were maybe fifteen bodies in all. The story told was clear enough. Lara needed no close examination to see the narrative presented.
It was the largest tree closest to the edge, and beyond the tree a year was only the dimming thickness of grass and one bleeding, final body without so much as a weed sprouted anywhere close to him. His face was inches from the edge.
The bandanna was fluttering and his body splayed, head limp to one side.