Note: Author commentary at the end of the chapter. This commentary is exclusive to the Cacao Muse; you won’t see it on Amazon, my author site, or printed inside the wrappers of my favorite chocolate bars.
Max was completely lost. His sense of direction was buried by overlapping layers of light and shade, his sense of time overwhelmed by the sounds and scents of this living world that enveloped him with all of its breathtaking power and beauty. Unaware of its nascent and plentiful dangers, Max knew just enough to be nervous but not quite enough to turn back. He felt safe here with Itzel. For her part, Itzel knew the rainforest too well and respected it too much to feel fear. She carried in her heart words her father passed down to her from ancient generations of the Itzà people: Respect the jungle and it will respect you.
As they wound their way through the forest, the rays of the sun high above followed them, slipping through layers of leaves, branches and flowering buds, setting the rich organic dust floating about on fire, flashing miniature windows into the intimate rhythms of this vast green biome. Here everything was bigger, greener, wetter, darker, and more alive than any other forest Max had ever experienced.
In silence they continued, Max following Itzel and she making sure he was never far behind. She was responsible for him, having taken him into the jungle without the knowledge of his parents. Here and there she extended her hand to help him over a massive tree root or through a ball of lianas. Max marveled at Itzel’s ability to navigate through this endless expanse of green life at a speed that defied his own most valiant efforts to identify, mark, or even simply distinguish one tree, one overhanging branch, one exposed root, from another.
Suddenly Max froze. He’d paused to look at a curiously shaped vine hugging a sapling, and something had slid over his foot. No, something was still sliding over his foot. Not daring to look, he looked anyway.
Those tell-tale triangular markings on a long, winding body, scales glistening intermittently in the shreds of sunlight. A barba amarilla. She sure was taking her time.
He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t call out to Itzel to wait. Blood ran cold, human panicked versus reptile routine.
The serpent stopped, the scales on her body rippling in tight. Max’s stomach dropped out from under him. Was she going to strike? The image of Juan’s bubbling scar flashed in front of his eyes. Yet in that breathless, consuming moment of terror, Max dropped into another form of awareness. His eyes, dilated by fear, could see every detail of the millions of years of engineering that had built this latticework of muscle, bone and scale working in perfect unison to transport the serpent without the aid of legs, fins, or wings. His ears, attuned to their most acute, flooded with an ocean of sound, detecting every chirp, flutter, coo, hiss, sigh, and buzz around him. His skin electrified, responding to the most minute fluctuations in temperature and microcurrents of air.
And then, as if some unseen red traffic light down in the brambles turned green, the serpent moved. In a split second she was out of sight.
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