Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Read Free Page A

dawn. Took his translator and the only working satellite phone with him, too. How’re we supposed to talk to the Tabna without a translator? Whole day likely gone to rot.” Kevin spat. “Bureaucrats.”
    Jake reached into his pocket and pulled out his translator. He ’d brought two—one for himself, one for Joaquin. Mawgis already had one the Salesians had left. When negotiations were finished, Jake would return them all to World United.
    He walked toward the young woman he ’d admired yesterday, the tiny machine visible in his flattened palm. She shook her head and turned her back to him. With a beseeching look in his eyes, he approached the women mending the sacks. One of them shook her head, but another stood up and came over, smiling nervously. Jake gently fitted the translator in her ear—a simple thing to do, since she was his height. He found himself smiling back at her, an easy, comfortable smile, enjoying the pleasure of being among people his own size, even as he worried and asked her where Mawgis and the other men were.
    She spoke. He tapped his own ear and then touched hers, in sign that he needed the translator back. She giggled slightly, then removed the machine and handed it over.
    “ Gone hunting,” the translator voiced, turning her words into English.
    He took the machine from his ear and held it out for her. She gingerly set it in place again.
    “ For how long?” he asked, and immediately regretted the unanswerable question.
    The woman gave him a blank look, handed back the translator , and turned away. She resettled herself and went back to her sack mending. The other women and girls looked at her with curiosity, but she only bent her head and concentrated on her task.
    Jake blew out a breath. Mawgis might indeed be hunting, but it wasn ’t only meat for the pot he was after. His absence was about power, about making him wait. Jake knew it, and he was sure Mawgis knew that he knew.

Two
     
    “ Jake. Jake. Jake. Jake.”
    He woke exhausted and confused, his brain foggy from too little sleep in a restless night mostly spent worrying about the success of the mission. Mawgis held the tent door aside with one shoulder, leaning in, grinning at him. The pale yellow light of early dawn framed the Tabna chief like an aura. The opened door let in the wet heat already ratcheting up for the day. Mawgis motioned with a softly fisted hand for Jake to follow him. Jake didn’t move.
    He knew more about the Tabna now, about Mawgis. The women had told him some useful things while he ’d busied himself translating for the film crew—the little machine whispering in his ear hour after hour while he kept half an eye on the trees around the camp, watching for Mawgis’s return. He’d learned about the Tabna tradition of one-upmanship—a game devised by the first ancestors when they’d arrived in the forest, to trick knowledge from ignorant natives. These days the Tabna played the game among themselves, and with youngsters stolen from other tribes—to find the cleverest among them, as potential mates. Jake had wondered what happened to the less clever. Were they sent back? Abandoned when the nomadic tribe moved on, or left to fend for themselves? He hadn’t asked, since it would have meant trading the translator again. The Tabna liked to talk, but moving the translator back and forth seemed to weary them. They lost interest if he asked them to switch too often.
    The Tabna believed that playing the game with anyone who wasn ’t of their tribe was a gift—a way to teach an “other” about life, and to make the other a better person. Sauleen, the woman most willing to wear the translator and talk, had said the depth of the game Mawgis played with Jake was an honor. He could have done without the favor.
    And now here was Mawgis, motioning again with his fist that Jake should come with him. Jake lay on the sleeping bag, his eyes locked on those of the older man.
    Mawgis opened his curled fingers like a hammy