Our Hearts. Chapter Eighteen. The Shrine

The forest had different eyes—deep, subterranean, woven from tangled threads of mycelium, ancient Precambrian strata, wet lichen, and rotting foliage that absorbed every drop of stagnant water.

The jungle felt the weight of the walking man’s boots, the rhythmic spasm of his muscles, the chemical trail of his sweat—agitated, white, steeped in bitter coffee, antibiotics, and distant Boston snow. The jungle remembered.

Because a similar footstep had echoed here recently. Another white man—fragile, fine-boned, smelling of medicinal phenol, road dust, and convulsive fright—had passed through these very ferns, his head brushing the hanging, supple lianas. He had moved away from the gray hill, clutching a massive steel container under his arm, and had not returned. The jungle had accepted his tracks, dissolved his scent into the warm humus, and turned his name into nothing.

And now a second one was making his way through.

He walked differently. His step resonated with a different—seamless, confident—solidity, the way subterranean waters advance along deep drifts. The copper bracelet on his wrist radiated an even, profound warmth into the damp air, and within his chest beat a deep piston whose rhythm the jungle recognized as kin. He carried within him their own, hard-won blight.

The jungle was in no hurry. It remembered everyone who had set foot on this earth—and every one who had never walked out of it.

And Leo pushed on through their thicket.

The massive rusted pickaxe banged against his thigh with every tilt of his torso. The military headlamp thumped against his chest, and the Geiger counter on his neck emitted rare, quiet clicks—a dry, barely audible rustle, akin to the movement of sand in an hourglass.

The underbrush was becoming impenetrable. First came thorny shrubs with small, stiff leaves that scratched his forearms into scarlet streaks. Then—tall wild ferns smelling of musty earth and falling wild mangoes. And finally—gigantic, centuries-old khayas and ficuses, whose intertwined crowns completely extinguished the daylight, dropping only rare, sharp gold coins of piercing sun onto the damp moss.

The moss beneath his feet was soft, elastic—it yielded like living meat—step, step, another step. The air thickened with every stride: the moisture, the smells, the sounds—everything swelled, compressing into a dense, almost tangible medium through which he didn’t just walk, but waded.

It felt as though this air could be drunk. Or, if he dropped the pickaxe, the bag, took off his combat boots, he could dive in and swim. Swim away somewhere far—where no one would find him—where it would be only him and Imani…

Leo felt the bracelet on his right wrist begin to gradually warm up—with an even, deep, living warmth. Like the warmth of hands that hold you, embrace you, dry you off. And you, clean, refreshed, feel their warmth—even here.

Half a kilometer. The mossy carpet ended.

The trees parted, forming a natural amphitheater at the foot of the gray, absolutely bare hill of charred rocky ore.

Here, the earth seemed scorched long before the dawn of man. Not a single stalk, not a single blade of grass—only cracked limestone veiled in gray slag. At the very center of this barren clearing rose an ancient shrine.

Seven basalt effigies, hewn from dark, blue-black stone, stood in a semicircle. Their crowns, worn smooth by rain and centuries, reminded Leo of silent sentinels frozen over an invisible boundary. The entire surface of the basalt was deeply pitted with circular signs, spirals, dots, and parallel lines—resembling that same symbolic alphabet stamped onto his copper bracelet and patterned on traditional wax-print dresses. It was a language that existed before the advent of letters, before man attempted to line up the world into the neat ranks of academic dictionaries.

Behind the semicircle of idols, at the very base of the hill, a dark opening gaped.

Not a man-made drift with wooden supports, but a jagged, natural fissure washed out by millennia of subterranean currents. The edge of the passage looked perfectly smooth, polished, as if the sleek bodies of massive creatures had slithered through it for centuries. A freezing, cellar-like draft wafted from the depths, mingling a sharp ammoniac tang, the smell of raw lime, and a subtle, intoxicating note of night-blooming costus.

Leo clicked the switch on his headlamp. A narrow, blinding beam illuminated the slippery walls coated with a mineral bloom.

He took a step inside.

The dosimeter immediately sprang to life.

The quiet background crackle gave way to an insistent, rapid clicking. The device’s needle twitched to the left and steadily crept toward the red marks. Two hundred. Three hundred. Four hundred microroentgens per hour. The earth beneath his feet radiated a dense, resilient heat.

The fissure narrowed. Leo moved forward, his shoulders nearly brushing the damp stone outcroppings. The pressure mounted, saturating with the smells of iron, raw loam, and subterranean moisture.

Beneath his boots, something squelched with a heavy, visceral slop.

Leo lowered the beam of his flashlight.

A thin, viscous rivulet flowed across the polished floor of the cave—dark burgundy, with an insane, pearlescent opaline sheen. It was not blood, nor was it ordinary rust. It was that same thick mineral emulsion—cinnabar, mercury sulfides, thorium oxides, and uranium salts seeping from the Precambrian monolith. Leo stepped right into it: the sticky liquid clung to his soles, trailing thin crimson threads behind his boots.

The Geiger counter broke into a rapid drumroll. Six hundred. Seven hundred microroentgens.

Leo rounded a bend in the passage and stepped into a natural grotto. The vaults here rose to the height of two men; the walls were covered with the same carved signs—spirals, deep dots, and closed rings.

And at that moment, the space filled with sound.

Not footsteps, nor the howling of the wind. Not the clatter of crumbling rocks.

A barely audible, silky rustle. The susurration of multitudes of leathery membranes slowly folding in the dark.

Leo raised the beam of his headlamp to the ceiling.

Just beneath the vault, clinging with curved claws to the cracks in the limestone, hung fruit bats. Dozens of massive hammer-headed bats with velvet wingspans of over a meter. They were not asleep. Their wrinkled, blunt muzzles with fleshy outgrowths turned toward the light, and their blind eyes, completely filmed over with a cloudy milky membrane, fixed upon his presence.

In that sightless, focused gaze there was neither fright nor feral aggression.

A profound, non-human recognition seeped through it. They looked at him the way one looks at a creature carrying in its blood that exact same ancient, radioactive alchemy that fueled their own veins beneath the vaults of this grotto. Not a single beast twitched, nor let out an ultrasonic squeak. They hung in total silence, following the white man with the pickaxe with motionless, age-old attention.

The dosimeter escalated into an alarming squeal. Eight hundred. Nine hundred. A thousand microroentgens.

And then Leo caught a scent.

Not guano. Not ammonia. Not raw loam.

The smell of a hospital ward.

Absolute, seared into his memory down to the last molecule. Chloramine. Quartz-sterilized plastic. An impeccably clean floor. And beneath it—the barely perceptible, cloyingly sweet ghost of irradiated, decaying flesh.

Boston. Mass General Hospital. He was six years old.

His father led him by the hand down a long, echoing corridor where the linoleum yielded a barely audible squeak beneath their feet. The air in the hallway smelled exactly like this—of medical ozone and melting radiation.

Room four hundred and twelve.

His mother lay on a narrow white bed. Her once-thick hair had been completely shaved, a translucent stubble breaking through the skin, and deep bluish hollows had settled beneath her eyes. Brachytherapy. Stereotactic radiosurgery and teletherapy had failed to halt the tumor, so the doctors had implanted radioactive seeds into her brain tissue to burn the disease from within. She emanated that same frightening, stifling heat of a decaying core.

Little Leo stepped up to the bed. His father froze by the door, his arms hanging limp.

His mother turned her head. She did not utter a word—only a quiet, bright smile, exhausted by the illness, touched her cracked lips. There was no fear in it, nor any self-pity, only the infinite tenderness of someone departing. She took his childlike palm and pressed it to her hot, sunken cheek.

“Mom…” Leo exhaled.

She smiled at him one last time. And the world collapsed.

Leo stood in the middle of a cave in Upper Katanga. Hot, salty tears streamed down his cheeks, washing away the dust and mingling with drops of sweat. The Geiger counter squealed at its limit. The sightless fruit bats beneath the vault kept their silence.

He wiped his face with the sleeve of his olive shirt, took a deep breath, and stepped toward the far wall of the grotto.

In a niche between two natural stone flowstones, there it lay.

Pitchblende. Uraninite.

A heavy, blue-black rock with a greasy, resinous luster on a fresh fracture. It ran in a thick, uneven vein through the white limestone, scattering bright yellow-green crusts of secondary uranium minerals along its edges.

Leo brought the counter’s sensor closer to the black seam.

The device roared with a continuous, shrieking hum. The needle instantly went off the scale. Twelve hundred. Fifteen hundred microroentgens per hour. The rock was literally boiling with ionizing radiation.

Leo dropped to his knees right into the warm garnet liquid. He pulled a hammer and chisel from his canvas bag, set the tip against the edge of the vein, and struck with force.

A sharp metallic clink echoed beneath the vaults. A sculpted, hefty chunk of pitchblende the size of a large fist broke away from the wall with a slow crunch. Quickly, with professional precision, Leo wrapped the specimen in three layers of thick canvas cloth and placed it at the bottom of his bag. Then he chiseled off a second, smaller piece and sent it in after.

Buckling the strap of the bag, he raised his eyes to the black vein.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

Not to the cave. Not to the jungle. Not to the ancient gods on their stone effigies.

To Mom.

He turned and walked toward the exit. The fruit bats followed him with that same soundless, blind, age-old gaze. Not a single wing fluttered. They continued to hang beneath the ceiling, like amulets frozen in stone.

Leo stepped out of the sinkhole.

The white, unbearable glare of the tropical day struck his eyes. The green sea of the jungle surged to meet him with the smells of overheated grass, damp leaf litter, and wild honey. The dosimeter on his neck instantly quieted down, returning to its customary dry clicking.

He walked past the basalt idols of the shrine without brushing against the stones, and descended the slope of the hill.

The pickup waited in the clearing. Imani sat on the wooden tailgate of the truck bed, her legs pulled to her chest. Ilunga stood by the hood with his rifle slung over his shoulder. The shaman was frozen in the front seat of the Jeep, clutching his cane between his knees.

Leo emerged from the thicket. His boots were caked in drying orange clay, his shirt was soaked through, and dusty trails from his tears darkened his cheeks. In his hand, he gripped the bag, densely packed with the specimens.

Imani quickly hopped down to the ground. Her eyes read everything without a single word.

“Leo…”

“Everything’s fine,” he said in a dry, hoarse voice. “I found it. Let’s go. We need to drop off Mulenga.”

She dashed over to him and embraced him—fiercely, with her whole body, her fingers digging into his shoulders. Leo pulled her close, burying his face in her hair, breathing in a scent that felt like his own. Her palm came to rest over his right wrist—over the dark copper—and in his chest, his heart answered with a steady, powerful, synchronous thud.

They climbed into the truck bed. With a turn of the key, Ilunga made the diesel engine roar.

The vehicle pulled away, turning around on the narrow track and heading back toward Bata Kolé to drop off the old man.

They drove back to the village. The jungle parted before the hood, closing in behind the stern like water closing behind a boat heading upriver. The light broke through in rare, sharp shards, dropping golden coins onto the dirty windshield.

Leo sat in the back, holding Imani’s hand. Her fingers—slender, strong, with short nails—clasped his palm over the copper bracelet. The cold of the metal and the warmth of her skin—two worlds, a single point.

He watched the road running away behind them. And thought.

He already knew what would come next.

Returning to the concrete bunker at the abandoned base, he would start the generator. He’d pull the chunks of pitchblende from the canvas bag, lay them out on the table next to the activated dosimeter, and take a series of clear photos with geotags linked to the Southbridge Security camp.

Then he would activate the Starlink and log into the Agency’s secure communications terminal.

He wouldn’t write a single word in his report about the virus, the mutations, or the resilient fruit bats. That would force Langley to send mobile biodefense teams, scientists, and Special Forces here—and then the jungle would be drowned in blood.

He would strike at Washington’s primary, systemic phobia.

Leo would provide the exact GPS coordinates of the barracks at the edge of the quarry. He would transmit the coordinates of the hangar where the blue plastic barrels of ion-exchange resins had been unloaded, and of Girard’s underground laboratory behind the steel hermetic door.

And in the operational summary field, he would type out brief lines that left no room for ambiguity:

“Equipment for the primary extraction and enrichment of uranium concentrate has been delivered to the territory of the PMC base working for the IC Waze corporation. Module manufacturer markings: China National Uranium Co., Ltd. (CNUC / SinoU). I confirm the presence of raw material with an anomalously high concentration of Uranium-235. The site is preparing for the illicit supply of enriched materials to the black market. Requesting immediate neutralization of the infrastructure.”

This would be more than enough.

The encrypted packet would go out via satellite. Langley would bring up the target map. Aboard a destroyer, they would run the launch calculations.

The missiles would arrive at dawn. They would destroy the barracks and the laboratory, bury the adit under hundreds of tons of incandescent rock, and incinerate the viral epicenter forever.

Leo squeezed Imani’s fingers tighter. She raised her dark, fathomless eyes to him; there was no fear in them—only the boundless, profound trust of the earth that had accepted him as its own.

“Everything will be fine,” she said with quiet certainty.

Leo looked at the green wall of Katanga closing in behind the tailgate of the pickup and nodded silently.

Everything will be fine.

Chapter Nineteen. The Rain →
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