The river had eaten five expeditions before you, and it did not look tired.
You stood on the mud bank with the map pressed flat against your chest, the linen wrapper gone soft as skin from forty years of hands. Doctor Imelda Cruz had drawn the last confirmed line on it before her radio went silent in 1987, and now you were the seventh name in a column of the dead and the missing, carrying paper where six teams had carried steel and rope and confidence.
"You keep touching it like it's going to run off," said Teo Bramante, hacking a fern frond out of the trail with the flat of his machete. He was your porter, your translator, and, according to the funding committee back in Manaus, your babysitter. He had also buried his brother somewhere in this basin two years ago, on Expedition Four, and never said exactly where.
"It's the only copy," you said. "Cruz didn't trust digital scans. She said the jungle eats batteries faster than it eats people."
"The jungle eats everything at the same rate," Teo said. "It just eats people last, to be polite."
Behind you, Dr. Selin Aksoy crouched over a rusted trunk half-buried in silt, its brass latches long since blackened. SEED VAULT EXPEDITION III was stenciled on the lid in paint gone the color of dried blood. She did not touch it. She photographed it three times, the shutter loud as a gunshot in the wet green quiet, and said nothing, which from Selin was its own kind of alarm. She was the botanist, the reason any of you were funded at all — the Green Archive was rumored to hold seed lines extinct everywhere else on Earth, landraces of cassava and quinoa and a strain of drought-proof rice that governments would trade small countries for. Selin had spent nine years chasing rumors of it through footnotes and missionary letters. She had not spent nine years to leave with photographs.
The fourth member of your party, a wiry ex-military contractor named Bosede Falade, was already wading into the river to test the current, boots and all, rifle slung high and dry across her shoulders. She worked for a consortium none of you had been told the name of, and she smiled too easily for someone whose job, as far as you could tell, was to make sure the seeds — if you found them — went home with the highest bidder rather than into any public registry.
"Two ways across," Bosede called back over the water's roar, pointing upstream and down. "Cable crossing forty minutes north, the one the '94 team rigged. Current's calmer there, but the anchor tree's been dead awhile and I don't love the lean on it. Or we ford here, now, while the water's low from the dry spell. Current's meaner, but it's fast and we lose no daylight."
Teo shook his head slowly. "My brother's team forded near here. Two of six came back."
"Your brother's team didn't have me roping the crossing," Bosede said, not unkindly, though something flat moved behind her eyes.
Selin closed her camera. "The vault's coordinates put us four more days out if we go around by the cable bridge. Every day we're not there is a day more silt gets into that trunk's twin, if the archive's storage is anything like what they buried here. Seeds don't wait for schedules."
You looked at the map again, at Cruz's careful hand marking a ford in pencil so faint it had nearly vanished, a note beside it in a script you had needed a magnifying glass to read the first time: *safe only below the rains — check the color of the water first.*
The water below you ran the brown of strong tea, not the ochre-red Cruz had apparently feared. It could mean the ford was clear. It could mean you were reading forty-year-old ink through hope instead of eyesight.
Somewhere in the canopy a howler troop began screaming, and kept screaming, the sound rolling down through the wet air like a warning nobody had bothered to translate for you.
"Decide," Bosede said. "Water's not getting friendlier by talking about it."
Teo would not meet your eyes, and Selin had already shouldered her pack toward the north trail out of old habit, the scientist's caution winning without a word being said. But her feet had stopped walking, waiting on you.
You are holding the only map, and both of theirs are only guesses without it.