Our Hearts. Chapter Three. Cartography of a Wound

The Cessna 208 Caravan flew low.

Single-engine, with a blunt nose and a propeller that bit into the saturated tropical air with a monotonous, dogged persistence, it had been carrying them over the green desert for the fourth hour now. In the cramped cabin hung a thick, acrid blend of aviation kerosene, sun-baked plastic, antiseptic, and human sweat. The space between the seats up to the very ceiling was packed with cardboard boxes of reagents, sealed biohazard containers, portable centrifuges, and rolls of thick insulating film.

Leo sat by the left window, pressing his forehead against the warm, vibrating plastic, and looked down.

The jungle beneath them seemed endless. The canopy of the continuous green mass, thick, dark, impenetrable, stretched to the very horizon, merging with the pale tropical sky into a barely distinguishable line. And this canopy breathed—not metaphorically, but physically: the ascending currents of scorching air heaved it in slow waves, like the measured rise and fall of the colossal chest of a slumbering giant. The forest slept. Or pretended to sleep.

And then the scars began.

The first appeared on the right, almost under the wing—an elongated, rusty-red incision in the green thicket, several hundred meters wide and stretching beyond the limits of sight. A quarry. The exposed clay, turned inside out from beneath the turf like subcutaneous fat from beneath a slashed skin, glistened in the sun with a wet, reddish-brown surface. Along the edges of the cut stuck out uprooted trees—their roots, white, exposed, looking like the bones of an old skeleton, pointing at the sky. Next to the quarry snaked dirt roads cut by the tracks of heavy machinery—bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks—and these roads, narrow, winding, merged into an ugly web entangling the open wound.

The second scar was further south. Bigger. Deeper. It no longer looked like an incision; it was a massive crater, gouged into the earth with such brutal efficiency that even from an altitude of eight hundred meters Leo could see the stepped terraces spiraling downward—like a snail shell turned inside out. At the very bottom of the crater stood murky, greenish-yellow water, resembling pus. Around it, like ants around a crushed fruit, swarmed the yellow dots of excavators.

A third. A fourth. A fifth.

The wounds multiplied, alternating with untouched patches of forest—and in this alternation there was some sinister regularity, the rhythm of senseless, repetitive violence. The forest tried to heal the damage: along the edges of the quarries crept the first, timid shoots—light green, pitiful, misplaced—but it was a child’s band-aid on an amputation.

“The bowels of the Congo,” Remy sat opposite, sickeningly pale, his seatbelt pulled tight, which he hadn’t unfastened since takeoff. The Frenchman wasn’t looking out the window: he had closed his eyes and was pressing a wad of cotton soaked in ammonia to his nose—against motion sickness. “Cobalt, copper, uranium, coltan. The earth here is pregnant with metals, and it gets ripped open, like a stomach gets ripped open in a C-section. Only they don’t pull a child out of it.”

“Remy, shut up,” Sarah Huybrechts sat behind them, by the right window, and spoke this calmly, without irritation, the way one issues a command to someone whose habits have long become predictable.

Sarah. Fifty-two years old—she had said it herself at their first meeting at N’djili Airport, without any embarrassment, offering Leo her large, calloused palm: “Fifty-two, survived Ebola twice, malaria with a coma once, a divorce once. Consider that no infection in the world can take me down.” Originally from Bruges. Flemish. Short, broad-shouldered, with short gray hair and a face that the tropical sun of twenty years of work in Africa had turned into an old leather map: wrinkles, age spots, abrasions—but beneath this map hid a cartilaginous, unbending structure. She looked at the world through the eyes of someone who had long ceased to be surprised and had simply begun to count: the number of corpses, the fatality rate, the dosage, the coordinates.

Sarah had flown into Kinshasa a week before Leo and Remy—from Goma, where she was wrapping up a previous WHO project—and had spent those days at the Ministry of Health, securing permits, transport, and lab reagents. She already knew Haut-Katanga: in two thousand nineteen, she had worked at an outbreak in Manono, where Ebola took two hundred and twelve lives in three months. She remembered everyone by name.

“Seventeen quarries,” Sarah leaned forward, peering into her window. Her voice was steady, surgical. “I’ve counted seventeen since we flew over the Lualaba. Of those, at least five are unregistered. Artisanal mining. No licenses, no ecological protocols. Contraband.”

The pilot—a local, silent guy in a crumpled uniform shirt with a UN patch—banked sharply to the right, and the jungle swayed beyond the window like a green funnel. Leo felt the copper bracelet on his right wrist slowly slide, striking his wristbone. He mechanically covered it with his palm—the metal was cold, unnaturally icy, as if all morning it had been absorbing not only the heat but also a deafening chill.

The jungle ended.

It happened suddenly, almost cynically: in a matter of seconds, the solid green wall parted, exposing a flat, scorched patch of earth—and in the middle of this patch, like a pale scar on dark skin, lay an airstrip. Narrow, short, with cracked asphalt and rusty, heat-blackened barrels marking the edges of the runway. Around the airfield—no village, no house, only sparse, termite-gnawed stumps and a scattering of shell casings gleaming in the dust.

The landing was rough. The landing gear slammed into the broken asphalt, the Cessna bounced, skidded, roared its brakes, and came to a halt thirty meters from a hangar structure—a concrete cube from which a rusty antenna protruded.

Leo unfastened his belt and looked out the window.

At the edge of the runway stood three men in military uniform—camouflage, combat boots, Kalashnikov rifles slung across their backs. One held a walkie-talkie, the other two simply stood, motionless, rooted to the spot, in the shade of the only tree—a pathetic, crooked baobab, the only living creature that had agreed to grow on this scorched patch. They drilled the arrivals with gloomy, unfriendly glares.

“Military?” Leo turned to Sarah.

She was already standing in the aisle, pulling her worn backpack from the overhead bin.

“FARDC,” she tossed back without turning around. “Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Inasmuch as you can call it an army. Here, Leo, the government doesn’t trust the locals, the locals don’t trust the government, and neither of them trusts us. During the last outbreak, a crowd with machetes burned a field hospital to the ground because a rumor was started that the WHO was deliberately infecting the wells to clear land for the mines. So without a military escort, a white doctor in Haut-Katanga is a target, not a humanitarian. These guys are here so we don’t get torn to pieces before we manage to take our first blood swab.”

Remy, pale, with a sweat-drenched forehead, squeezed past her outside and greedily inhaled the hot air smelling of grass and exhaust fumes.

“Welcome to paradise, Gonzales,” he swayed, grabbing the door frame. “Official, certified paradise. With armed guards.”

The military man with the walkie-talkie—a captain, judging by his stripes—approached them unsmilingly and began speaking in French. Fast, guttural, with dropped endings. Leo didn’t catch everything, but enough: escort, security, follow them, do not stray from the convoy, no photos.

Meanwhile, the two soldiers and four civilians who had appeared from somewhere behind the hangar were already unloading containers of equipment from the Cessna’s cargo hold. Lab suitcases, sealed plastic crates of reagents, a folding table, a portable sequencer, a freezer unit—all of this migrated into the back of a green military Mercedes-Benz truck of an old, Belgian-era modification, with a torn awning and rusty sides. The soldiers worked in silence, with a practiced seriousness, as if every container might explode.

“Gonzales!” the captain called out, pointing to a dirty beige 70-series Toyota Land Cruiser standing in the shadow of the hangar. The diesel engine purred at idle, the car reeked of diesel and stale leather. “Your transport.”

Leo climbed into the back seat next to Sarah. Remy got in front, next to the driver—a local guy of about twenty, with a flat, inscrutable face and muscular forearms covered in thin white scars—these weren’t from injuries, more likely ritual cuts. The guy didn’t turn around, didn’t introduce himself. He just put it in gear, and the Cruiser set off along the dusty rut, passing through the airfield gates.

The drive took about an hour of agonizing jolting along a potholed track slicing through a continuous green tunnel of jungle. Trees hung over the hood, weaving their canopies into a solid, breathing corridor. Light broke through in rare, prickly shards, dropping golden coins onto the dirty hood. The dust kicked up by the tires got stuck in this green funnel, refusing to dissipate, settling on the leaves in a gray veil.

Then the trees parted—again, like walls parting—and before them opened up Bata Kolé.

It wasn’t a village and it wasn’t a city. It was something in between—an unwanted, unplanned settlement that life had thrown to the surface, the way a body rejects a foreign object—out of some monstrous, mechanical necessity, rather than good will. A mining camp. Two rows of concrete buildings roofed with corrugated slate—barracks built back in Mobutu’s time—were interspersed with makeshift huts of unfired brick, corrugated iron, and burlap. Between them, in the dirty, trampled alleyways, roamed chickens and naked children. A thin, acrid smell of burnt rubber and sour water hung in the air like a film blocking clean oxygen.

And beyond the settlement, on a hill cleared of thickets, lay the camp.

They hadn’t set up a full-fledged hospital here yet. Four white tents stretched over aluminum frames, with scarlet crosses on the canvas walls—the red zone, surrounded by a double cordon of bright yellow plastic netting. Nearby were two smaller tents, unmarked, with weighted entrances, which emanated the smell of phenol and bleach—the morgue, above which a diesel generator powering the refrigerator hummed heavily and incessantly. And off to the side, under a canopy of camouflage netting, stood several tin construction trailers lined up like containers on a forgotten pier. The green zone. Living quarters.

Leo stepped out of the Cruiser, and his feet bogged down in dark orange, oily mud. The earth here was different—not earth, more of a clayey sludge, a mix of spilled diesel fuel, rainwater, and something else, deep and ancient, that oozed from the bowels like ichor from a poorly bandaged wound.

Two people emerged from the furthest trailer.

Dzuzu Koma—short, wiry, with quick, birdlike movements, wearing a greasy medical gown over jeans and rubber boots. She was around thirty-five, maybe a bit older—but years of working in provincial Congo hospitals add as much to your age as wars do. The dark skin of her face was pointedly smooth, without a single wrinkle, and on this smooth, immobile face, her pupils—large, amber, with a slightly yellowish sclera—seemed overly alive, overly attentive, like the pupils of a bird of prey spotting prey in tall grass. She didn’t smile.

Lukala Mbuyi stood nearby, slightly behind her—tall, stooped, in a crumpled white shirt, trousers rolled up to his knees, and sandals. Forty years old. His face—elongated, with deep nasolabial folds and sunken cheeks—belonged to a man who had long forgotten what a proper meal looked like. His eyes, dark, clouded, beneath swollen eyelids, looked at the arrivals with that expression Leo had already encountered in such places: neither hostility nor joy—the tired, quiet despair of a professional who had worked alone for too long.

“Glad you made it. Dr. Koma,” she gave Leo’s hand a brief shake. Her palm was hot, dry, rough. “Dr. Mbuyi. The situation is bad. We have two corpses in the reefer and one critical patient in the isolation ward.”

Lukala nodded. Didn’t offer his hand. His gaze slid over Leo, caught on the copper bracelet on his right wrist, and lingered a fraction of a second longer than was customary. Then he looked away.

Dzuzu Koma led them into a trailer that served as both office and warehouse. Inside: a table, two chairs, a map of the region pinned to the wall with thumbtacks, and a stack of folders tied with string. Dzuzu flipped open the sash of the tin window: murky light flooded in, illuminating the dust motes floating in the air.

Remy immediately took out his notebook, losing all his metropolitan swagger: “Let’s go in order. Patient zero?”

“Two corpses,” Dzuzu began without preamble, the way surgeons begin, used to the fact that every second of delay costs a life. “The first is an unidentified male. White, about thirty to thirty-five years old. Found four days ago by a local hunter in the forest, roughly three kilometers south of the village. No ID, clothes in tatters. The hunter dragged him into the village on his own back. A day later, the unknown man died from massive internal bleeding and organ failure.”

She opened the folder and placed printed photographs on the table. Leo leaned in. The body lay on a gray-green tarp, in the shade of a tree. The man—lean, with a broad chest and short, muscular legs like a running enthusiast, with burst water blisters on his palms—had already been dead for several hours at the time of the photo. His face had turned black. Mouth open. Arms stretched along his body, fingers curled. On his chest and stomach were dark, almost black spots, streaks, ecchymoses.

“The second,” Dzuzu continued, “is the hunter himself, Kasongo Mpala, thirty-eight years old. From the village. Found the body, informed the elder, went home. Twenty-three hours later—fever, vomiting, diarrhea. Twelve hours after that—bleeding from the gums and nose. Died this morning, forty-eight hours after contact.”

“Classic hemorrhagic fever,” Sarah nodded.

“Yes and no,” Dzuzu interjected quietly, as if weighing every word. “The symptoms match, but the speed of tissue breakdown is anomalous. And the blood… It’s not uncoagulated and scarlet. It’s atypically dark. Almost black and thick as tar. In my fifteen years of work, I haven’t seen anything like it. This certainly could be hemorrhagic fever, but we can’t confirm Ebola without a lab analysis. We have no PCR equipment. We were waiting for you.”

“And the third?” Remy asked.

Dzuzu and Lukala exchanged glances.

“A miner,” Lukala answered, speaking for the first time. His voice was low, muffled, with a quiet, guttural vibration that seemed to originate not in his throat, but somewhere deep in his chest cavity. “A guy of about twenty, from a local artisanal mining cooperative. Helped carry the hunter’s body. Three days ago—fever, chills, muscle pain. Yesterday—bleeding gums, rash. We isolated him, but we haven’t done a full analysis. He’s in the red zone, stable, conscious. But his colleagues started to panic. Several miners refused to show up for their shift. The mine security reinforced the perimeter.”

“Security?” Leo sat on a spare stool, stretching his legs out in front of him and feeling the bracelet press against his joint. “You mentioned a mine. A white man deep in the forest with no ID… Where do white people even come from around here?”

“The company is called IC Waze,” Dzuzu said, returning to the table. “Private. Israeli. Mining copper and cobalt. Twenty-year license. The site is six kilometers north of Bata Kolé. Own infrastructure: housing, electric generators, diesel depots, a helipad. They have their own security—also private. Southbridge Security, registered in Pretoria, but the owners are supposedly from Romania. South Africans. Ex-military. They don’t let anyone in, and their people don’t come down to Bata Kolé. They don’t answer our radio requests.”

“And how could an unidentified corpse end up in the forest at their mine?” Remy asked.

“Smugglers,” Lukala pronounced the word like a medical diagnosis. “Small-time diggers, ‘partisans’ as they call them here. They infiltrate the mine territory through the jungle, steal ore, resell it on the black market. Southbridge catches them, but not always. Sometimes bodies with gunshot wounds are found. But this deceased man had no signs of violence. No bullets, no knife wounds. He just died.”

“Just died,” Remy repeated. “In the forest. Without clothes. Without ID. Three kilometers from the mine where the Israelis work. And no one has any questions.”

Dzuzu Koma gave him a long, steady look.

“Questions, Dr. Gaillard,” she said quietly, “are only asked of the dead around here. And only when there are too many dead.”

Evening descended on Bata Kolé suddenly, like a falling curtain. The sun—huge, crimson, merciless—set behind the jungle line, and in a matter of minutes the world switched from scorching white to stifling, dark blue. Mosquitoes and gnats attacked instantly, plastering exposed skin in a dense, buzzing shawl.

Remy went to his trailer first, tossing over his shoulder: “Tomorrow at eight we start. The Congo waits for no one.”

Sarah lingered in the lab tent, unpacking containers and checking reagents. Leo could hear through the thin canvas walls as she muttered something under her breath—lists, numbers, test tube codes—there was a comforting, monotonous, almost maternal rhythm to this muttering that made the anxiety recede.

Leo’s trailer was the last in the row. Inside: a narrow cot, a tin nightstand, a stool, a rusty sink with a tap that leaked murky water smelling of iron. A small window with no glass, covered by a mosquito net. Leo tossed his backpack on the cot, pulled off his boots. He went to the sink, turned on the water, splashed his face. The water was warm, tasting of rust and clay.

He looked at his reflection in the murky, smudge-covered piece of mirror hanging above the sink. His back under the shirt burned unbearably—the four parallel scratches that had appeared that morning under the stained-glass windows of the Kinshasa cathedral burned like a fresh scorch.

The copper bracelet on his wrist gleamed in the gloom. Leo tapped it with his knuckles—the metal answered with a hollow, low ring that lasted a second longer than it should have.

He thought of her. Of Imani. Of how she had vanished from the church—or, more accurately, how Remy hadn’t seen her leave. Of her wooden amulet, of her words: “I will follow you there… This is my land, Leo.” Of the inscription on the hotel mirror—in burgundy lipstick, in sweeping, confident handwriting: “I will find you.” The inscription could have been a threat. Or a promise. Or—more terrifying than both—a simple statement of inescapable fact. But the memory of the scent of her body superseded everything.

Throwing a light jacket over his shoulders and grabbing his laptop to set up the portable Starlink satellite terminal, Leo stepped out of the trailer and headed for the lab tent.

The night was dark as a shroud. No moon, no stars—clouds, low, heavy, swollen with rain, covered the sky in a solid velvet canopy. The air was thick, like fabric—hot, humid, permeated with the smell of rotting leaves, diesel fuel, and something else—barely perceptible, sour, organic—that specific smell that exists only in places where death lies next to life.

Leo walked past the two FARDC soldiers standing at the entrance to the green zone. They let him pass in silence, not even turning their heads—figures poured into the darkness, faceless as stones.

The lab tent stood in the center of the camp. The white canvas glowed dimly from within—Sarah had left a headlamp on the table, switched to a dim diffused light setting, and had already gone to sleep. Inside smelled of bleach and ozone. The portable generator connected to the tent hummed quietly, evenly, maintaining the lighting and a small air conditioner blowing a weak stream of dry air.

Leo assembled and aimed the Starlink dish at the sky. The indicator on the router blinked green—there was a connection.

He sat at the folding aluminum table, turned on the laptop. The screen flared with a cold bluish light, illuminating his face from below with a cold, lifeless glare, the way faces are lit during an interrogation. Logging into the WHO network, he opened the medical database, began scrolling through the latest reports from the regions: Mbandaka—negative; Goma—suspected, unconfirmed; Kisangani—clear; Lubumbashi—three cases of hemorrhagic fever, most likely Marburg. In the sterile tables of the World Organization, the letters A, T, G, C lined up in endless macabre dances, in dry ranks of nucleotides that danced like white moths over Benga’s body, and in this strict genetic geometry there was no room for pity—only for replication.

Stop. Now the company. IC Waze. Different server, different network, different protocol.

He typed notes, scrolled through files, cross-referenced coordinates. Time dragged like thick, sticky molasses. Leo felt his eyes getting tired, his eyelids growing heavy, his body—exhausted by the flight, the heat, and two sleepless nights—beginning to treacherously shut down, sector by sector. First went his concentration. Then—his train of thought. Then—his sense of time.

He rested his forehead on his crossed arms in front of the keyboard and fell asleep.

Not gradually, not smoothly—as quickly as a person who has lost blood passes out.

And instantly the reality in the tent distorted.

He was pierced by an inhuman, penetrating frost. It became so cold in the tent that his exhaled breath turned into thick white steam. The hum of the generator outside the wall changed: the mechanics vanished, leaving only a low, visceral, pulsating rhythm—as if a giant creature was groaning heavily deep underground. The smell of bleach evaporated. Instead, the space was filled with a thick, intoxicating aroma of blooming night jasmine, damp earth, and rusty iron. The smell of tropical blood.

A flash of wild pain scorched his back—it felt as though the four scratches had burst into flame. The copper bracelet on his wrist heated up to an icy burn, biting into his skin. Leo tried to stand, to scream, but his body was paralyzed by an absolute, crushing paralysis.

In his dream—or in this ghostly waking state—he stood in an ancient, impenetrable forest. The trees grew so close together that their trunks merged into a living wall. The canopies completely blocked out the sky. Only darkness and a deathly air smelling of rot and that very blossom.

Leo was walking. His feet carried him on their own—bare, over wet earth. He heard someone’s footsteps nearby. On a parallel course, behind a wall of vines, someone else was walking too: breathing—light, even; the rustle of bare feet; and an oppressive, guttural sound—as if someone were drawing out a single note, vibrating in his chest cavity.

He stepped into a clearing. A body lay on the ground—that same white man from Dzuzu Koma’s photograph. The black, caked face, the curled fingers. The body was surrounded by a ring of large white flowers with thick petals, growing right out of the mud beneath the corpse.

The body stirred. Slowly, with agonizing reluctance, it began to rise—not like a human, more like a marionette being pulled by invisible strings: jerkily, brokenly, with a crunching of joints. Getting on all fours, it turned to him.

But there was no face. In its place was a flat, smooth, dark surface—like a screen onto which an image had not yet been projected. No eyes, no mouth. Just skin stretched over the skull, and beneath it—a faint, barely perceptible pulsation.

And then Leo heard a voice. Not with his ears—from within, from his own spine, from his ribs:

“You have come…”

The voice was her voice. Not Imani. Not female. Not male. The voice was a scent. A floral aroma transmuted into saturated sound, in which his entire being drowned.

“You have come… And you bear him. Sleep. Tomorrow. Everything is tomorrow…”

The darkness slammed shut like the jaws of a trap.

“Doctor!” rang out sharply right in his ear.

A harsh, blinding beam of a headlamp struck Leo in the eyes.

Leo convulsively jerked, knocking his chair over with a crash, and breathed heavily, raggedly, gasping for air. His heart pounded in his throat.

Standing before him was an FARDC soldier—the very one who had been on guard at the entrance. Tall, in camouflage, with a rifle on his chest. He watched him in silence.

“Doctor?” the soldier repeated. His voice was level, devoid of expression. “You fell asleep. It’s already 1 AM. Go get some rest. You have a hard day tomorrow.”

Leo wiped his face, wet with cold sweat. The tent was once again filled with the suffocating tropical heat, smelled of bleach, and the generator hummed steadily. No frost. No jasmine. His spine ached, his legs felt like cotton.

He nodded, reached for the laptop to close it. The screen was in sleep mode, but on the black surface—right above the reflection of his terrified face—a single line in a small white font blinked, one he hadn’t typed and which couldn’t be in the system:

SHE KNOWS YOU’RE HERE

Leo blinked hard and touched the touchpad—the line instantly vanished. Standard screensaver. Standard dark screen.

He closed the laptop, stood up, and walked out of the tent into the pitch-black night.

The camp slept. The only noise was the monotonous purr of the diesel and the distant chirping of cicadas beyond the perimeter. Leo took a few steps along the muddy path, pulling the collar of his jacket tight. He was shaking with a fine, nervous tremor—the residue of that dream, of that blank face, and the voice that was a smell.

And then he froze.

From the direction of Bata Kolé village, breaking through the nocturnal silence, a rhythm drifted.

A low, hollow, staccato beat. Tum… Pause. Tum-tum.

Drums.

The sound came from beyond the camp, from beyond the trees—distant but crisp, like the beating of someone else’s heart. The rhythm was strange—not the familiar African polyrhythm, not that erratic pattern Leo had heard in the Kinshasa bar. This was different. Two beats—pause. Two beats—pause. Even, heavy, identical in strength. Like the footsteps of an enormous creature walking the earth, unhurriedly, knowing it had nowhere to rush.

Mingled with the rhythm of the drums was singing—a low, choral, guttural chanting in an unfamiliar language. The melody permeated Leo through his skin, through his bones—and inside his chest cavity something responded, vibrating in unison with this nocturnal choir.

And then one tone separated itself from this singing. A female voice—high, clear, piercing, holding a single, solitary note. Long, endless, ancient. In it sounded a primal yearning, a fatal inevitability, and a tender promise.

Leo clenched his fists. The copper bracelet dug into the skin of his wrist, pressing against the bone. The song poured into him, as if this voice were singing for him alone.

Then the drums fell silent. The voices melted away. The night once again became quiet, lonely-silent—but this silence was alive. It felt as if it were listening to him.

Leo reached his trailer, unlocked the padlock, went inside, and bolted the door from the inside.

He turned to the cot to collapse onto it without taking off his clothes, and suddenly froze.

On the tin nightstand at the headboard—next to his phone and flashlight—stood a glass of water. Full, clear, with a crown of tiny bubbles on the sides.

Leo had not poured this glass. When he had left for the lab, the nightstand was empty, and the door secured with a padlock.

The water in the glass was warm.

And on its surface, gently swaying in the very center, floated a single milky-white petal.

Large. Thick. Unfamiliar. Smelling of the night and blooming jasmine.

Chapter Four. Symbiosis →
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