Expect regular updates as of September.

I'm back. Thanks for waiting.

~Jack.

When Lara spotted his body, she stopped dead, staring, before screaming. "VINES! Get over here now!"

The two of them ran to Snake's side. The first thing she spotted was a knife, looking deranged, still jammed into one of his thighs. The next was the archipelago of bruises that had traipsed lumpy islets across his face, small knots beneath his skin where blows from rifle butts or iron knuckles might have struck him. In between those islets were undercurrents of purpling blood, blued and mauve from burst crimson vessels and thin scrapes connecting them with crusted scarlet fibres. One eye had swollen shut, and there was a tear along his bandanna that ran rich with his blood. Any other wounds were covered by his clothing, which, while now filthy and muddy from the scuffle, was still primarily about his body save for the points where knife swipes had made their signatures.

Vines had run to her side, and they took to one bent knee at either side of Snake at the same moment.

She reached out to touch him, looked at his wounds, and thought better of it. The feeling of withdrawing her hand was more difficult than she believed it would have been.

"What can we do?" Lara said. "Is he alright?"

"I'm not sure and no, in that order. " Vines gingerly appraised his body, feeling about him with the utmost care. The examination was thorough, routine, but not at all cavalier. He squeezed his muscles, his chest, his back and his limbs. He rifled through his hair. "Fuck."

"What? What is it?"

"He was beaten into unconsciousness." Vines lifted one hand, clad in fingerless gloves. "There's burst capillaries all along his knuckles. He was still at it when they brought him down. And in his hair, there's a bunch of small abrasions, some of them bleeding, most of them the size of a golfball."

She reached out her hand to his face. "God."

"Trust me, God doesn't have anything to do with this. If they were hitting him with their rifles this hard, this many times, they could have killed him." Vines gently shook him. "Have you any idea how hard it is to beat a man into unconsciousness?"

Lara looked at the somewhat misshapen features his face had taken on. She could imagine.

"There's no softness to his head, so if I had to guess, there's no fractures, but the closest MRI machine is twenty miles out from even village bus." He wiped his hands on his pants, and turned to her. "Lara. What do you want to do?" Vines said.

"Would it be safe to try and wake him?"

"There doesn't seem to be any back trauma, and he's definitely not comatose. I've got smelling salts in my pack, albeit a little wet. I'd prefer he were awake before I yank the knife."

"How come?"

"I don't think a major artery was hit, judging by just the colour of his face,-"

"He's not pale, right, right-"

"-but if it was, he could bleed to death right here, right now. I'm going to need some gauze after pulling this knife out, too. "

"Then let him rest for a moment. We'll need to know whatever he can tell us, amongst other things, but I don't want you two tied up if it turns out we're not alone."

"You really think there's someone else still here?"

"No, but I'd rather not prove myself wrong. Just a sec." Lara crouched, running a smooth hand along the ground, its hardpan soil packed tight as it neared the cliff's edge into an arid mass of reddish brown earth. If she were to hazard a guess, it was devoid of nutrients caused by the frequent foot traffic over years of persistent traversal to and from the ziplines that hung dangerously slack from their side of the river to beyond it.

She stood up, looking about the ground nearby, making an attempt to navigate the impossible lei lines their bootprints had created. They created loose geometrical hell in the dirt, barely present for the weight of their bodies having left almost nothing in the densely packed ground.

When she spotted them lead to U-shapes in the dust, then retreat into the forest, she turned back to Vines.

"I think we're clear. Wake him up."

In a moment, Vines had produced a small plastic container like an eyedropper, and squeezed it slightly just below Snake's nostril. In a moment, he jerked to consciousness, eyes wildly aware for just a moment before pain flooded into his senses stronger than the sensory alert he'd withstood. Then, in a grimace, he closed his eyes again, breathing normally but visibly pained.

Lara's lungs deflated. She hadn't noticed she'd been holding her breath.

Snake groaned, and Vines laughed, a sound jaggedly similar to a hyena.

She took to one knee at his side, put a hand on his chest.

"Snake, it's Lara. Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah. Christ." One hand went to his head, and his body curled with the pain, like the whole of him were one muscle clenching in an effort to halve his aches. "My whole everything hurts."

"We can tell." Lara put a hand on his neck. "Vines, do you have any-"

"Sure." He produced a transparent baggy from his satchel, tied closed with hemp on one end. "Take two of these, and I'll give you some coca leaves to chew."

Vines put them in his hand, and Lara helped him sit up, hands around his torso, propping him up into her lap. She poured water into his mouth, and even as he swallowed, he grimaced in pain.

"I know you're probably not up to it, but what the hell happened?" Vines said. "And where's Ellie? We can't find her any-"

Snake moved with a speed neither of them expected, forcing Vines to jump back on his haunches and land on his back in the process, Lara knocked to one side. In a heartbeat, Snake was making an attempt to stand, face flashing agony when his body reminded him of the knife still in one leg.

"No!" Crashing to the ground, Snake pushed off again from on all fours, limping to the edge of the cliff, hands reaching for the tight coils of metal hung across the gorge. "Ellie, she's-"

Vines was staring at him, then at the cliff, then at Snake. "No."

Lara reached for Vines, but it didn't matter. He was already out of reach, taking to his boots and darting to the cliffside along with Snake. He shouted "ELLIE!"

By the time Lara took her stance abreast the two men, Vines had already turned away. As she crested the hill, she saw the body too.

"We were getting ready to cross the ravine," Snake said, "when they appeared. Two units, one on horseback. We were surrounded before we had a chance to react. I took out as many as I could, but they weren't..." Snake's head dipped to his chest.

"Taking prisoners, Snake?" Lara reached out to him. Snake shrugged off her touch angrily. She winced, and did not make a second attempt, her hand retreating to rub the back of her neck.

"Ellie fought off a few of them. Pulled the pin on one of their grenades, no less. Eventually, though, it didn't matter."

Lara looked close at the small, broken form in the distance. Regardless of the distance, she could see the body's green shirt dark with blood, tattered. Ellie's body was facedown, and lay crumpled on a shelf along the furthest cliff face. Her limbs were tangled and bent in ways they did not belong.

"I was still fighting when she made for the wires, thinking maybe she could cross."

"Ellen," Vines said, almost a whisper.

From where Ellie had fallen, she had almost made the trip across. If Lara was right, she would have been within just a few metres.

The wind snapped at their hair, their clothes, yanking at the trees with miserable petulance. It was bitter and fragrantly cool, a mingling scent of moss and black mold driven from one of the frigid caves littering the waterline below.

When Vines turned to look at Snake, his jaw was set. His eyes were wide, and with what Lara could not tell. He did not look boyish, with or without the blonde hair that kicked around his brow. There was no quiver in his face, no tremble of the lips or threat of tears. Just a hardness she'd seen in Snake, in herself. She did not have to wonder how he felt.

For a moment, Lara waited for the blow to strike, a lance shot out from Vines' periphery. But when none did, and he simply hung his head, Lara tried tugging slightly on his pouch to get his attention.

"Vines?" No response. "Malcolm? Please, I know this must be hard, I probably know it more than you'd think, but we can't... well, we can't wait. We need to get Snake cared for, and get moving. There's still someone else who needs us."

Vines scoffed. "Who? You three? Leave it to a Brit and pair of Americans to be this narcissistic, you self-centered-"

Lara did not let her anger bleed through at his selfishness.

"No. The rest of Bolivia. The people the ICRA helps. Remember?"

"Maybe the rest of South America." Snake said. He was still looking over the cliffside after Vines sight had drifted away. "We've got to get down there, as soon as we can. Vines."

He turned to look once more at Snake's eyes. Lara found the view less pleasant than she remembered.

"Vines, if you're with us," Snake said, "We could use the help, but if not, we're going anyway. I'm not going to let these people walk into a city with whatever the hell they're building out here. I can't turn away from this sort of thing anymore." He looked to Lara. "Both of you. Please?"

While Lara and Snake sat back near the ruined mass of tree that the firefight had made refuse of, Vines stayed stock still.

As she was preparing the meager supplies she'd had in her pack, both Snake and Lara's attention turned to Vines, as he began vomiting and shaking, having to lean against the wire post for support. His breath came in ragged, awful retching hitches, then he vomited again, then he would struggle for air again until he was dry heaving.

Lara went to him with a canteen.

For a while they stood mute, in epitaph.

Then they went to work on Snake's body.

"Lay back." Vines took a moment to spit water off to the side, then take another mouthful. He poured some of the canteen's water on his hands. "Lara, hold him."

She did.

Snake looked at her apprehensively. "This is going to be bad, isn't it?"

Vines took a moment to disinfect his hands with small alcohol wipes, then began cutting into his pants a larger hole where the knife had entered his leg. Normally Lara might have mouthed off about seeing more of Snake's skin, but any mirth had been wrung out of her.

Vines took to removing the knife.

For a time, there was Snake's muted scream.

Somewhere in the cage between her ribs, where her muscles met her bone, there was a deep, vagrant ache like a wound. The sound of his pain was like fury, or hate, or decay. It was an infection that came in through her ears, searing out the sound of the frogs and the wind and the dull, pattering rain that came from no cloud at all, falling with thick taps on the verdant fingertips of trees.

She watched Snake's hand dig into the ground, fingertips burrowing into the earth, five anemic craters beneath his palm made from the shared pain between the two men.

When Snake's hand reached hers, she took it, and said nothing. Nothing of the calloused skin on his palm, or the burns, or the scars she saw run up his wrist like photographs of scampering insects that hated the flesh they'd scour for nourishment.

She looked briefly at Vines. His eyebrows angled together towards his nose, his upper lips pulled back in an unconscious dedication to the task at hand. She thought it half-hatred, half-habit. He looked as though he did not relish anything. He looked like he might enjoy the pain Snake was exhibiting.

Vines pressed his hand to Snake's thigh, the wound gaping and suddenly flush with red confluence. Lara was reminded sickly of cherry pie filling, the clot a miasma of tangled red cells.

Snake let out a howl. His eyes were wide, Lara gazing carefully at the canines beneath his lips, the sharp hints of biscupid agony.

Lara felt a pain that she could not have quantified. It would only be repeated twice more in her life.

"He's counting on us," Snake said, between ragged grasps for breath.

"Yes," she said, "He is."

She placed her palm at his forehead. He felt like someone had placed a furnace beneath the plate of skull encasing his mind.

Vines looked dispassionately at Snake. "Tell me this is worth it."

Snake thrashed his chin from left, to right, to left again. His cheeks were stained with splinters of beaten wood. There was stubble growing in like moss on his jawline. Lara reached out her hand to still him, feeling the stubble along her fingers, her palm. It was like a small forest. "Snake, please."

The older man reached his hand forward and took Vines' shoulder, stabled his gaze. In it, Lara saw something vicious that nauseated her, then made something visceral clench and ache with need.

"Yes," Snake said. "It was worth it."

Vines said nothing between the stitches his hands made war with.

"It's worth all of us," Snake said.

Vines seemed to spot something, and poured another bout of alcohol on the wound.

Snake groaned, his eyes fluttering, his lips curling to reveal sharp enamel, and he laid still, eyes shut.

"It's better like this," Vines said. "He won't remember the worst of it."

Vines dug into another wound adjacent to the first in his thigh with his fingers, dousing both in alcohol.

Snake shook, however unconscious he may have been.

"Will he be alright," Lara asked.

"Yes," Vines said. "Presuming he doesn't get infected, or that there isn't presence of a parasite, which seems unlikely, yes."

Vines threaded a final stitch on the first wound, then began on the second, a much smaller point of entry but big enough to fit a pair of fingers in.

"He didn't cause this. Neither did I," Lara said.

"Yeah. Of course not," Vines said.

"If it wasn't us—"

"Yeah, it would have been someone else."

They said nothing.

"Vines," she said.

"They're going to kill us, aren't they?" Vines asked.

"Yes, I think so." Lara paused, thought about it. Thought about a thousand different questions she'd thought of her life. Thought of the desperation of simply trying to make a fire when those who had loved her, whom she had loved. How difficult it had been. "But only if we let them. We're not victims. We're here because we chose to be. Because some part of us wants to. Do you understand?"

Vines said nothing. Then, after a long pause, he nodded.

"Look," Lara said. "If you had the chance to change everything, how the world worked, how we worked, who you were. Wouldn't you take it? Is it worth it to make sure that we are who we want to be, that there's not a cloud hovering over us?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do. He's laying here right now because he knows. I think I know, too. And so do you."

"Ellie's dead."

"Yes, Malcolm. She is. But you're not."

Lara saw something pained cross through Vines face, reminding her of how close they were in age. How distant the pain had been. It looked on Vines like a child being whipped, or an animal lapping its blood out of its fur. "I'm not." His breath hitched. He stared distantly at the gauze wrapping itself around Snake's thigh. "I'm not."

"You aren't, no." She reached out to him. "What we're doing is bigger than any of us. Bigger than Snake, or Hal, or me. Please."

Vines lack of speech was filled by the forest. It spoke for him, in hushed murmurs, the rustle of rainforest lives lived vicariously, osmosis made into survival. Mammals positioned their bodies for the birds. Birds waited for the insects, and they colluded against the reptiles. Reptiles shifted because of the sun, the sun because of the earth, waiting for its salvation.

"Yes," he said.

"Then you're in? Not in by lack of choice, but really, really in?"

"Yes," he said, "I suppose I am. Do I have a choice?"

Snake's eyelids shimmered open. They pinned Vines with a red-veined intensity that scared the both of them.

"You always have a choice," Snake said.

Then he laid still, and they were quiet again, until they left.