I nodded again. “What’s your plan now?”
“Got me,” Sanders said. “It’s not like you have a lot of activities here. I might go back and stare at a wall until dinner. Why?”
“Well,” I said. “It’s fair to say you’ve had a disappointing day, yes?”
“Yes. So?”
“Let me make it up to you.”
“How?”
“Let me deal with this,” I said, motioning to my cart. “Then let’s go for a walk.”
* * *
“Are we going to get in trouble for this?” Sanders asked, as we tromped down the stairs to the jungle floor. We could have taken the elevator, but several weeks constantly schlepping things around the base plus six months of delivering food to East Village walk-ups meant stairs were not an issue for me. Sanders was beginning to look a little winded, however, and this was us walking down.
“Not at all,” I said. “If you had stuck to your original schedule, I would have taken you down here tomorrow anyway. Since you chucked that schedule, this was no longer on it. I’m just putting it back on.”
“Maybe we should have told Tipton,” Sanders said.
“Nah. He’s been here how many times before? I think he’s probably seen this bit.” We got to the landing, and I stood before the bolted door. “For you, this is all new. Ready?”
“Ready,” Sanders said, panting. I unbolted and opened the door, turned on the screamer I had in my pocket, and we went out onto the jungle floor.
“This is amazing,” Sanders said, looking around.
“It is,” I agreed.
“Is it safe?”
“Safe is a word we don’t much use here,” I said. “But this is as safe as it gets. Just, you know. Don’t wander off too far from me, please.”
Sanders grinned. “You’re my bodyguard, then.”
“Something like that,” I agreed again.
We wandered out some distance from the door, toward the trees. As we got closer, I reached into my pocket and turned off the screamer. About ten seconds later, the first crab popped around a tree and pointed its antennae at us.
“Whoa,” Sanders said, and then the jackass actually reached out to the thing. I turned the screamer back on, and the thing scuttled away. “Did you see that?”
“I did see that,” I said.
“What are those?”
“Tree crabs is what we call them. Not very imaginative, I know.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“They’re venomous,” I said. In the time since my first encounter with them, I learned that tree crab venom is mostly harmless to humans; it’s painful, and enough of it will make you miserable for a day, but it probably won’t kill you. It’s one reason why Riddu Tagaq used them to scare the shit out of new people. I wasn’t telling Sanders that at the moment, however.
“So, I probably shouldn’t have tried to touch one,” he said.
I turned the screamer off. “You do you,” I said, and motioned toward the tree, where the crab had scuttled back around again. This time, Sanders backed away from it, and slightly away from me as well.
I quietly took a step in the other direction, away from Sanders and the tree. “Careful,” I said.
“Why?”
“They travel in packs.” I pointed to the tree, on which three more tree crabs had scuttled into view.
“Okay, I think I’ve seen enough,” Sanders declared. He wasn’t taking his eyes off the tree crabs, who, to be fair, weren’t taking their antennae off of him.
I took another quiet step away from Sanders and the tree. “Rob?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you want to land out there at the site?” I asked. “Really, I mean.”
“I already said why,” he said. More tree crabs had appeared at this point, and they had begun chittering among each other.
“No,” I said. “You lied about why, and when they asked me, I deflected enough that they believed your lie. But I know you’re lying.”
“Yeah? How do you know that?” Sanders looked at me when he said that, and one of the tree crabs took that opportunity to scuttle down the tree to the jungle ground. It tapped the ground gingerly with one leg, as if testing it for solidity. Sanders caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and brought all his attention back to the tree full of crabs.
“Because you wanted to make one of your damn ‘Duke bets’ about it,” I said. “You went in confident that you could get Martin to do what you wanted. Which means to me you probably planned it. Which means you had a plan.”