The second I get back to my bungalow, I call Lana.
“You’re never going to believe this,” I say the instant my best friend picks up.
“What?” Lana asks, with a hint of playful curiosity in her voice.
“Guess who the esteemed expedition leader who incidentally hates women is?”
“Who?”
“Naked Dummy,” I say, collapsing on the bed.
“I take it the introductions didn’t go well?” she asks, now definitely amused. Easy for her to laugh; she doesn’t have to spend the next month trekking through the Thai jungle with Satan. “And how come he hates women?”
I sigh. “Maybe ‘hate’ is a strong word.” I rest my back against the headboard and tuck my knees close to my chest. “It was more the attitude sailors used to have about women onboard ships.”
“And what was that?”
“That we’re bad luck or something. What an insufferable, dumb snob.”
“If he’s leading such an important expedition, he can’t be that stupid. Didn’t you say you’re after a legendary lost city?”
My heart does a little guilty flip. Satan’s words ringing in my ears: “…the nature of this expedition is confidential… no loose talk about a lost city of gold.”
The dude’s so paranoid he even made everyone sign NDAs about it. Agreements I might have broken by telling Lana about the real reason we’re in Thailand. But I honestly don’t see what the big deal is with all this secrecy, and she’s my best friend, so she doesn’t count.
“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” I say, deflecting Lana’s question. And trust me he can be that dumb.”
“Mm,” Lana says nothing, but still sounds as if she’s enjoying herself.
“You don’t seem sympathetic.”
“No, sorry. It’s just that I haven’t heard you so worked up about someone, well… ever.”
“I know! He’s the most annoying, arrogant bastard―”
“Does he have a name?” Lana interrupts my rant.
“Logan.”
“Kind of a sexy name to go with a sexy ass.”
“Oh, pwhff, please. I take back everything nice I ever said about his anatomy. He doesn’t deserve it. And from now on we’re referring to him as Satan.”
“How’s the face that goes with the ass?” Lana asks. “I couldn’t see over the phone; is he ugly?”
“He’s a type,” I say neutrally.
“What type?”
“Thick brown hair, hazel-green eyes, full lips, slight chin cleft, a few freckles…”
“Sounds like everyone’s type.”
I scoff. “If you enjoy watching a constant scowl. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter if he’s not repellent, physically, he’s still evil inside. Most beautiful things in nature are. Like, you wouldn’t kiss a cobra or eat a moonflower.”
“So kissing Satan would never cross your mind?”
“Haven’t you been listening? Of course it wouldn’t.”
“I have been paying attention, that’s why I’m asking. You’re the one who brought up kissing, not me.”
“You don’t get it…!”
“What? That your boss―so to speak―is tall, handsome… presumably smart―”
“And arrogant, and full of himself, definitely evil, and I hate his guts.”
“Whoa, he really crossed you, considering you only spent, what, an hour with him?”
“You should’ve seen him.” I use my mocking voice again: “We should all dress appropriately for the jungle, as if he expected me to show up in a skirt and heels.”
“Guess Logan is not used to having a bombshell as a member of his team.”
“Satan,” I correct her. “And bombshell, me? That’s Summer. I’m the tomboy.”
“You’re identical twins, who share 99.99 percent of your DNA.”
“Still, we couldn’t be more different. Speaking of evil twins… Sorry for monopolizing the conversation, but I needed to vent.”
“No worries.”
“So, Summer.” I go back to the topic Lana meant to discuss earlier. “Tell me everything. Did you speak with her in person?”
“Yeah, she called, asked if I wanted to grab a coffee and talk.”
“You’re a much bigger person; if I’d caught her screwing my boyfriend I’d never talk to her again, even if she’s my sister.”
“You still sound angrier than I am,” Lana notes.
“I told you, you’re the better person. Plus, you have the Sexiest Man Alive to distract you as a consequence of what Summer pulled. I don’t.”
Lana chuckles. “Ah, you have a point. Without Christian in my life, I wouldn’t be so Zen about everything. But, you’re right, Summer’s actions resulted in me being the happiest I’ve ever been, while she… Your sister isn’t in good shape, to be honest.”
Some deep, ancestral bond makes my insides twinge with worry. Summer might be the evil twin, but she’s my evil twin.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Nothing obvious on the outside, but it’s like she’s had her spirit broken. She was a ghost of her former self. Promise you’ll go see her when you come back. If I can forgive her, you should, too.”
“You forgave her?”
“As much as I know how. Our friendship won’t ever be the same as before, but I saw no point in holding a grudge forever…”
“Doesn’t the fact that she’s in a relationship with your ex bother you?”
“She and John broke up.”
“What?” I say, straightening up. This is huge. “How? When?”
“After he sold the story to the press, his sorry version of it. She cut him loose after reading the feature.”
“But that was a month ago!”
“You haven’t talked to her in that long?”
“No,” I admit, guilt gnawing at my sides. Summer and I have never had a fight that lasted months. “It’s been easier not to call her since I’ve been away.”
The new job starts tomorrow, but I’ve spent the past four weeks in Bangkok on another assignment.
“Anyway,” Lana continues. “Summer told me she was completely blindsided by the magazine piece. John didn’t tell her before going to the press, and she felt like he’d sold her dignity for ten thousand dollars. He didn’t consider for a second what the article would do to her, to her reputation… She also said she hated the way he spoke about me—revolting, to quote her.”
“Well…” I relax my back against the pillows again. “’Cause he is a disgusting piece of shit.”
“I guess.”
“My sister threw away a twenty-five-year friendship for a three-month affair. I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
“She had broken up with Robert only a few months before. Maybe the separation hit her harder than we thought.”
“How can you make justifications for her?”
Lana lets a few seconds pass before answering. “I thought seeing her at rock bottom would give me satisfaction, but it really didn’t. Honestly, I’m gutted for her, but I can’t be there to help her, I don’t have it in me, not yet. I just wish you were here. How much longer are you gone for?”
Again, guilt kicks around in my guts. “A few weeks at least, possibly more. Why do you think she reached out to you today? Why wait a month after she broke up with Johnathan?”
“She read the Vanity Fair feature about Christian and me being back together. She thought I’d be more willing to hear her out since I was so happy.”
“Which I guess you were.”
“Yup. Speaking of…” Lana pauses. “Christian just got back in.”
“I’ll let you go, then.”
“Will you be reachable in the next days?”
“Afraid not, we’re moving inland tomorrow, no service there.”
“Please call Summer today, then, before you go off the grid.”
“You’re really an angel.”
“Am not. And you’d do the same if it were me. Remember when I kissed Peter Gomez in the locker room and Summer didn’t talk to me for a week? You were there to advocate for me.”
“That was the eleventh grade.”
“It doesn’t matter. Promise you’ll call your sister.”
“Okay, I promise. Love you.”
“Love you.”
We hang up, and I remain motionless on the bed looking at my phone for the longest time.
Why am I being so stubborn? Why am I still so mad at Summer? If Lana can forgive her, I should be able to as well.
Maybe I shouldn’t ask myself to make peace with my twin all at once.
Right!
Baby steps.
I unlock my phone and tap her contact before I can change my mind.
Summer picks up after five long rings.
“Hello?”
Her voice sounds broken, as if she… “Are you crying?”
“A little,” she says. “But nothing serious. I’m just watching Notting Hill, the bit where Julia Roberts goes back to the shop and tells Hugh Grant she’s just a girl…”
My sister getting sentimental over romantic comedies? Lana was right, the situation is major.
“Where are you?” Summer asks. “The line sounds weird.”
“Thailand, near the coast. But I’m leaving for the jungle tomorrow. Thought I’d give you a call, as I won’t have service for a few weeks.”
Summer instantly calls bullshit on my story. “Lana told you to check in on me, didn’t she?”
“She did,” I admit.
“Guess you’re up to date on all the big news, then.”
“I am, and to be honest, I’m glad you’ve broken up with Johnathan. He’s a cockroach who never deserved you or Lana.”
“True. Which only makes me feel worse…” Her voice cracks again.
I swallow back all the harsh retorts that pop into my head and try to be conciliatory.
“At least now it’s over,” I say.
I’m not being the most uplifting, but… I’m trying.
“Can we… not talk about any of that, please?” Summer pleads. “Tell me about your trip. How’s the team? Mom’s worried because you’ve never worked with any of them before…”
That’s all the encouragement I need to tell my sister how I ended up working for Satan.
“He sounds like a handful…” Summer chuckles when I’m done. And that deep part of me that is linked to her for life whoops with joy that I could cheer her up a little. “How about the rest of the team? Anyone interesting?”
“Bah, the security team guys are all buffs, but they take themselves too seriously. The only fascinating fella is the topographer.”
“Fascinating how?”
“Think tall Viking warrior with dirty-blond hair and ice-blue eyes that stand out against his tan skin. Oh, and did I mention? The man has a beard.”
“Ew. I hate beards.”
“Just because you’ve never kissed one; his looks like the soft type.”
“Well, enjoy your bearded Viking.” Summer yawns. “I’ll let Mom know your team is cool.”
Leader aside, I think, but only say, “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
I have no response, and she doesn’t say anything else. Suddenly our easy flow of conversation is gone, and things become super awkward again.
After a few seconds, Summer yawns, a bit too loudly to be genuine. “Well, the movie’s over, and I have to go if I want to wake up at a decent hour tomorrow…”
“Yeah, right. Of course.”
“Thanks for calling.”
For a few brief, wonderful minutes we’ve been the Knowles twins again, inseparable from birth. But now we’re back to walking on eggshells around each other. I still haven’t forgiven Summer for what she did, and she knows it. A conversation, no matter how nice, isn’t enough to mend our relationship.
But, as I said: baby steps.
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll let you get to sleep. Night.”
“Night.”
When the line goes dead, I drop the phone on the nightstand and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.
Lana was right: holding a grudge is no good. Now that I’ve talked to Summer, I feel a million times better, at least mentally.
Physically, I’m about to melt. The room has gotten too hot; the air conditioning is crap and does nothing against the midday Thai heat. Good thing there’s an ocean just a few yards away. I change back into my bikini and go for a swim.
“Man,” I say to Archie, snapping my fingers. “I’m talking to you.”
Archie, Tucker, and I are seated outside at a table in the shade under the giant wooden hut where the resort serves breakfast and lunch. We’re discussing more in detail the laser-scanned images of the area we are to explore on foot and the difficulties we might encounter reaching it. But it seems I’m the only person interested in the topic. My two friends are staring behind my shoulders like two hypnotized dummies.
“Sorry.” Archie’s ice-blue eyes flicker to me. “I was enjoying the view.”
A twitch of his mustached upper lip lets me know he’s not talking about the ocean.
I turn toward the beach just in time to see Miss Pain-in-my-ass Knowles walk out of the sea with the same sex appeal of a Bond girl in a 007 movie: wet hair swept back, water dripping down her body, wearing a bikini so skimpy it makes the shorts she had on before look like nun-ware.
If that wasn’t enough, she walks straight to the beach shower.
“Tucker,” Archie says. “Please tell me there’s going to be open showers at our camp.”
I turn back and find both of them still staring like imbeciles.
“No,” Tucker says. “But if we ration drinking water we could make one just for her.”
“I’m ready to die a happy, thirsty man,” Archie replies without removing his eyes from the photographer.
See? See? That’s why I didn’t want a woman on board. It’s objectively disrupting. And a woman like that…
I throw another furtive stare behind my shoulder just as Winter closes the water faucet and walks back to the beach to go lie down on a chaise lounge by the shore, finally out of sight.
“Okay,” I say. “Now that the show’s over, can we please concentrate?”
“You should learn how to appreciate the small joys of life, Logie Bear,” Archie says, using my college-football-playing-days nickname.
“A groundbreaking discovery of an ancient, untouched city is what would give me joy.” I flare my nostrils and point at the open maps on the table. “You were saying we won’t have a clear path of approach?”
Archie throws me another don’t-be-such-a-spoilsport look before he continues. “What these images tell us is that beyond this position”—he points at the red-circled area Tucker has selected as our base camp—“we will have to hack our way through every inch of jungle to reach across”—he moves his finger to the other red circle on the map identifying our destination, code-named Area X—“to here. It’s a jungle stretch just shy of fifteen miles that will take us at least seven or eight days to clear.”
“Tucker,” I say. “What is your suggested approach? Should we advance each day, leaving enough time to circle back to the main camp, or should we set up secondary, one-night-only camps as we go? I’d prefer this second solution; it’d save us time.”
“I’d rather circle back to base, at least for the first few days. Unless you want to get eaten by a tiger, that is.” He stares down at the aerial pictures, where only thick green vegetation is visible. If it weren’t for the correlated laser scans, no one could’ve guessed the jungle harbors more than just vines and trees. “The place we’re going is so wild, the animals there must’ve never seen a man.”
“That’s why we hired a security team. I’m sure they can scare off a few big cats,” I counter. “Those military guys don’t look like they’re joking around.”
Archie scoffs sarcastically. “Aye, aye.”
“Still,” Tucker says. “We have no idea what’s waiting for us out there, and I’d rather we all got back in one piece. It’s not an everyday thing to reach one of the last unexplored regions on Earth.”
Archie pulls at his short beard. “Let’s hope we actually find something when we get to Area X.”
We have to. I’ve put everything on the line to organize this trip. My career, my reputation… I can’t fail.
The legend of a lost city made of gold and hidden in the thick of the Thai jungle has haunted me since I first heard it the summer of my freshman year in college, when I spent a month backpacking in this country. Since then, finding the legendary city has become an obsession of mine. I’ve spent years collecting every scrap of research I could find on the topic.
But the area the various rumors pointed at had always been too vast to grant any real hope of success. Until I heard of a new technology that could take an aerial scan of even the thickest forest and reveal what lay hidden underneath. A city.
But will it truly be the legend I’ve spent years tracking and obsessing over?