The Cloud Atlas

She looked at me, eyes instantly full of tears. “No,” she hissed. “I told you before, he left as soon as we got out here. I could feel it; I knew it. No-this is different. Not a plane. This is a balloon.” She took a step closer to me, and looked over my shoulder to Gurley and the boat. “But there's something…” She twisted her neck to look back into the interior of the island.

“Not Saburo?” I asked.

She looked around, as if searching out someone who would better understand her. “Something,” she finally said to me. “You have to believe me. He has to believe me. We have to go-to follow-”

I could hear Gurley walking up behind us.

“What's this?” he asked, never more brittle. “Whisper, whisper.”

“I'm not sure it's safe out here, Captain,” I said, trying hard not to exchange a look with Lily.

“A hunch, Sergeant?” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “Don't tell me that you've caught the soothsaying bug, too?” He smirked. “Quite a night in the ol' tent. Sorry I missed it. Finish loading, Sergeant.”

I did, and as I did, I watched Lily lead Gurley into another whispered conversation. I couldn't hear them, but I could see them. I could see Lily pointing, gesturing. I could see Gurley standing tall, and then, after a few minutes, just slightly-easing. And I thought I could see why. The tiniest part of him really did believe her-not just about her sense of where to go next, but about her need to convince him, to connect with him. That is to say, he had started to believe that she really did care for him. And the strangest thing about that to me was that I sensed he was right.

I thought about it as I finished loading the boat. I replayed the trip we'd taken in my head, and I stopped the film whenever I saw them exchange a glance, or better yet, when their eyes didn't meet; when just one of them was stealing a look at the other.

I don't know what had happened, or what was happening, but clearly there was something working on all of us-more of Lily's magic, I suppose-and when we got back into the boat, Gurley returned Lily to the bow and me to the stern, and pointed ahead. “Onward, Belk,” he said to the air, and then turned back to me. “Follow that woman in the bow wherever she tells us to go.” Then he took out his handkerchief and let it rest on his knee while reaching down with his other hand to unsnap, once more, his holster.

CHAPTER 18

THE CLOUDS RETURNED, THIS TIME TO STAY. A SLOW, STEADY rain seemed to follow us down the Kuskokwim, and no arrangement of tarps and ponchos could keep us all from getting soaked through.

Occasionally, the rain would lift, but then the mosquitoes would descend. They took a particular interest in Gurley which I enjoyed except for those times when he had his gun out. He'd been obsessively removing it, cleaning and polishing it with the handkerchief, then replacing it and starting again thirty minutes later. But whenever the mosquitoes wreathed his head, Lily and I would be treated to the terrifying display of him wildly swatting at them, gun in hand.

Gurley had put his faith in Lily to lead us through the delta, but ever since then, she had grown more hesitant and unsure. She would point us one way, then another. She let her hand drift along in the water outside the boat. She studied the skies. And with each passing hour, she grew more anxious.

When Gurley suggested we stop for lunch, she just shook her head. Gurley looked at me and rolled his eyes-a standard gesture of his, but darker, somehow, out here alone in the bush. He and I tore into some C rations that had been stowed, and we continued on.

About one o'clock, the engine sputtered, coughed out a few mouthfuls of smoke, and died. While Gurley and Lily looked on with great concern, I uncoupled the gas line from the primary tank and inserted it into the reserve. Then I started the engine again. Miraculous. My passengers turned away, satisfied. I thought to joke that we'd need Lily to use her powers of divination to find us a gas depot eventually, but it wasn't a joke-we would.

I was the first to see it. I had been following the contortions of an ever-widening waterway, wondering if we'd made it back into the main channel of the Kuskokwim. Even though it was wet, Gurley was slumped in the floor of the boat, sleeping or pretending to. Lily was looking at him, and I was trying to catch her eye when something downriver caught mine.

Of course, I thought I was hallucinating. There had been the strange appearance of that fire balloon my last night in Anchorage, but to actually see a balloon, in flight-that hadn't happened since Shuyak, and that whole episode had seemed like a kind of dream anyway. But now, here one was, drifting along, not fifty feet above the ground, bright as the moon.