Twenty Minutes

Valentina had three bars of signal by the shelter and had already called her father, who was a forester and knew the reserve and knew people. She was on a second call when Seren arrived, speaking rapid Spanish, and she held up one finger: one moment. Seren used the moment to photograph Rodrigo's final notebook entry and the sketch, for the record.

Valentina ended the call. "My father is contacting the reserve director directly, not the general authority, the director personally, who he has known for twenty years. He says twenty minutes."

She looked at Seren. "He also says we are to stay at the shelter and not go back to the clearing."

"We're at the shelter," said Seren.

"We will remain at the shelter," said Valentina, with the tone of someone making a decision with full awareness that it is the correct one.

They remained at the shelter. Seren used the time to write down everything she had observed, in the systematic way her science teacher had taught her: time, location, what was seen, in what order, with what level of certainty. She had been to the clearing, she had seen the crates, she had counted the men, she had photographed everything. She wrote all of this clearly.

Valentina sat on the camp stool and looked at the forest and was quiet in the way of someone doing something difficult on the inside.

"He'll be all right," said Seren. "He was sitting up, he was moving normally. He's not hurt."

"I know," said Valentina. "I'm not worried about that." She paused. "I'm thinking about the plants."

Seren looked at her.

"Those crates," Valentina said. "Thirty crates of plants extracted from this reserve. Some of those species are found nowhere else. Some of them are epiphytes that take twenty years to reach maturity. You cannot replace them. If they leave the reserve, most of them will die in transit, and the ones that survive will end up in private collections where they contribute nothing to the ecosystem they came from." She looked at her hands. "Rodrigo has been documenting this for two years. He has the data. But data doesn't stop a lorry at the reserve boundary."

Seren thought about this. She looked at the photograph on her camera. "The labels on the crates,"

she said. "I photographed them. Some of them had text on them, company names or reference numbers. If those can be traced, it connects the plants to a buyer, not just an extractor. That makes prosecution significantly more likely."

Valentina looked at the camera. "Can I see?"

Seren handed it over. Valentina enlarged the photograph and read the label text carefully, and her expression shifted. "I recognise one of these," she said. "This reference code. Rodrigo mentioned it in his notes three months ago. He said it was connected to an export company operating out of San José." She looked up. "This is the link he was trying to establish. This is what he needed."

The reserve director arrived in eighteen minutes, not twenty, with two park rangers and a police officer. They had come in from the reserve boundary by a service road that Seren had not known existed, which accounted for their speed. The director was a brisk, efficient woman who listened to Seren's account without interrupting, examined the photographs with focused attention, and sent the rangers into the forest in the direction of the clearing before Seren had finished speaking.

What happened at the clearing, Seren and Valentina did not directly witness. They heard, at some point in the following thirty minutes, raised voices and then quiet. Then the sound of movement through the forest. And then Rodrigo appeared on the trail to the shelter, walking under his own power, dusty and tired and with several days of beard, and Valentina made a sound that was not quite a word and went to meet him.

He had been held at the clearing for four days. Not violently, but firmly, while the extraction team decided what to do about the researcher they had found with his notebook full of their activities. They had taken his phone but had not taken his notebook, which Seren thought suggested they perhaps had not looked at it carefully.

He looked at the shelter, at the weather station, at the notebook in Seren's hands. He looked at Seren herself. "You found all of this," he said, in careful English.

"Valentina found you," said Seren. "I just knew where to walk."

Rodrigo shook his head slightly. He looked at the photographs on Seren's camera when Valentina showed him, and something in his face became still and focused when he reached the crate labels. "This is what I was trying to get," he said quietly. "I had everything else. This was the piece I was missing."

"It was in your shelter all along," said Seren. "Just needed a different angle."