Uncharted by Robyn Nyx

Author:Robyn Nyx [Nyx, Robyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635553260
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Chase broke away from Rayne, startled. She glanced to her right to see an arrow level with her eye line. Warning shot. “Put your arms out, splay your hands, and reach for the sky…very slowly,” Chase whispered, beginning to do as she’d instructed herself.

Rayne’s eyes opened gradually. “What did they say?”

Chase shook her head. “Don’t speak. And no sudden moves, okay?”

Rayne blinked instead of nodding and raised her hands precisely as Chase had advised.

“Friends,” Chase said in Tupi-Guarani, hoping their language sat within that family of tongues. She sidestepped Rayne to face a line of six Indians, each of them with arrows nocked and strings at half tension. “Friends.”

The one in the center of the line lowered his bow and came two steps closer to her. He said a string of words extremely fast and pointed to the machetes hanging from Chase’s belt and on a strap across Rayne’s chest.

Chase nodded and lowered her eyes, not wanting to appear confrontational. “Take off your blade and place it on the ground, slow enough for moss to grow on you,” she whispered. Chase unbuckled her belt, slid the sheath from it, and squatted to the floor to discard her knife.

The leader waved his hand decisively. Chase took it as a demand to stay down so she went to her knees and laced her fingers behind her head. Rayne followed suit. Chase’s heart, already racing for different reasons, was now banging against her chest like it wanted to escape. Wait in line.

Two of the others approached, lowered their bows, and collected their weapons one-handed. They stuffed the sheathed blades inside the waist of body wraps around their butts and upper thighs that looked only slightly thicker than paper. The leader barked another instruction, directed at the two closest to them. Chase made out the words, rope and bind.

“Don’t struggle. Let them tie you up. Everything’s going to be fine.” Chase made sure her voice sounded calm though she knew Rayne wasn’t someone who panicked. If the Indians were inclined to instant violence against brancos she and Rayne had jumped the first hurdle. Now she had to hope she could convince them that, unlike most white people they crossed paths with, their intentions were good.

Chase had a theory that, despite their tendency to span across thirty plus thousand square miles of the rain forest, they somehow communicated across tribes to keep each other safe. She hypothesized that all of the Indians were from a single original tribe, and the names given to them by white intruders or FUNAI protectors were crude misunderstandings of the interlinked nature of the whole indigenous population. If her postulations were correct, this unexpected meeting would turn out to be exactly what they needed to help keep them out of Turner and Owen’s way.

Another of the Indians removed Chase’s backpack, then Rayne’s, and took them back to the leader. He emptied them both of everything, inspected it all, and nodded, apparently satisfied. The other guy repacked them and threw them both over his shoulder.

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