The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

to split apart, the ground trembling beneath his feet as it was hers – but he was unhappy about what had to happen.

Her blood rushed with a speed that felt dizzying. She could hear it blasting through her head as a feeling of impotence flooded her limbs. So that was it? They just waited for something terrible to happen to him? Alex’s ambition was going to get the better of him after all. The revenge she had dreamed of in those early years after his betrayal was now going to find a form and hurt him in ways she could not. She didn’t doubt that it would. She wouldn’t have believed in such a thing before this week. A curse? She wouldn’t have given it a moment’s credence. But she had been in that boat, in that river. She had felt it for herself.

She closed her eyes, trying to control her raging emotions, but she was weakened by exhaustion, pain and now fear. Her mind was in torment, going around in circles. How could he fight a curse? Should he even be told? She staggered through the mud, struggling to keep her footing and her mind straight. He would laugh at her if she told him. He was a scientist, like her.

William, ten or so steps ahead, was partly obscured from her view by the reaching branches of ferns, vines dangling down like gym ropes, so that she had to negotiate her way through a slack weave of foliage. She saw that he had stopped walking, his back as erect as a twenty-year-old’s as he stared at something ahead. Instinctively she faltered, approaching carefully from behind. William was still and clearly hyper-alert. He seemed woven into the fabric of the cloud forest, an intrinsic part of its daily rhythms.

‘Stay back,’ he said in a low voice as she reached him.

‘What’s . . .?’ But her voice faded into silence as she saw what he was looking at.

The sight was shocking. Horrific. A vast expanse of nothingness, stretched out before them – no colour, no life, no sound. Just acres of desolation, an unsightly scar upon the most pristine landscape, an open wound left to fester. No pictures, no amount of foreknowledge could have prepared her for the reality of the sight. She knew ranchers and farmers and loggers illegally cleared land in protected areas – of course she did – but to be faced with the merciless violence of it, the sheer scale of the destruction . . . She had spent the best part of the last week living 24/7 in these jungle and rainforest habitats; it was so all-encompassing that at times she had felt claustrophobic. There was no let-up, ever, in the sounds and noise and humidity; nothing was ever easy out here and she had felt trapped in a giant green biosphere with no way out. She had longed to be clear of their shaded embrace, to have a view that stretched for miles, to see any colour so long as it wasn’t green . . .

Or, she thought she had.

But to be suddenly faced with this brutal, wanton reality prompted a reaction that was visceral and completely primal. She understood now that what she had seen in William’s body language was in hers, too; his wasn’t a tribesman’s response, just a human one. This wasn’t the middle of nowhere – it was the middle of Everywhere. This wasn’t just the beating heart of the planet but its pumping lungs too, and for something so immaculate and ancient to be pillaged like this . . . It somehow seemed worse that one or two toppled trees remained on the ground: abandoned, unnecessary, surplus to requirements but felled anyway. The mud that remained was a bright, bilious red-yellow, like guts had been pulled up. Great sheets of water were running unimpeded over the face of it, not even tree roots remaining to catch, break up and redirect flow. The scene felt apocalyptic, like the end of time. A desecration.

‘No.’ His voice was a whisper and she looked to see what he was seeing, for it wasn’t just the carnage. His keen eyes read detail far more astutely than she and he had seen – barely visible, several hundred metres away down the steep slope – emerging from the tree cover lower down . . . a man.

Tara’s brain processed the sight with a slow-dawning disbelief. He was still wearing the same torn, filthy, ragged clothes she had last seen him in. Even from here, she could see he now had a beard. Behind him was the microlight.

‘Alex?’ The cry burst from her, a sob that contained her sorrow and fury at this desolate site, her relief at seeing him, her amazement that he had found her here.

She saw his face turn up and search for her in the trees. Find her. ‘Tara?!’

There was a moment in which they stared at one another in amazement. Could it really be? Then he began running up the wall of clag; she saw how he slipped, his hands planting straight down into the mud as he sank to his ankles. He got up again but could find no traction, his feet sliding away from him at every step.

‘Alex, wait! I’m coming down!’ she shouted.

‘Tara—!’ William spoke again, his arm reaching out towards her, too late. She was already running along the side of the treeline but it scooped away from her, away from Alex, and she began to cut across the wasteland instead to get to him faster. Suddenly every minute mattered. The years they had lost together, the decade of their lives gone forever, bore down upon her with an urgent realization that nothing else could be delayed. Not for a moment.

‘No!’

William’s voice was like a flare in the sky, interrupting the instincts that were propelling her over the scarred earth towards the man she loved to hate. She stopped and looked back. The expression on his face brought an arrow of sheer terror to her heart, for it was more than fear she saw there. It was