“Throw it down!” Patterson yelled up at me.
I’d just finished climbing to the top of the temple. “Temple” was being generous. The jungle had done a damn fine job of reclaiming whatever it was I was standing on and climbing up it had not been fun.
“Standby.” I was disentangling the mesh ream designed by Matty and Patterson to camouflage the temples. The first one had gone very smoothly after we got a rhythm going. And by rhythm I meant Litz and me climbing to the top with the mesh while Patterson barked orders from below.
“Waiting…” Patterson drawled.
I was going to put laxatives in Patterson’s chocolate cake when we got back.
“Roll number one, coming down!” I unleashed the first ream. Litz took one corner while I took the other, affixing them with the special stakes and binding solution they’d developed.
The problem with the temples was that they were buried under six hundred years worth of growing trees, branches, vines, and dirt. It wasn’t like a maid had been coming in and dusting the suckers off.
So first we had to climb the slippery things, then we had to dig into the tops and find a place to clean and affix the mesh. All while a whiney little brat yelled things up at us from the bottom.
I was definitely putting laxatives in his cake.
Litz laughed. “I know that look.”
I scowled at him. “Then you’ll forget it as fast as you can. You saw nothing. You know nothing.”
He held up his hands. “As someone who has been your victim in the past, I would never ruin that joy for someone else.”
I grinned. Oh yes, I’d forgotten about the time I put honey around Litz’s tent in the Canadian Rockies. I was a sadistic jerk sometimes.
“Sorry, ‘bout that.”
Litz snorted. “No you aren’t.”
I pointed at him with the trowel in my hand. “That’s fair. I am sorry you had to experience the joys of being woken up by baby bears. I’m not sorry I figured out what you were made of.”
Litz pounded his chest once. “That’s because we’re manly men.”
“Manly men who act like five year olds when we’re left alone with tools in the forest.”
He held out his fist and I bumped it with mine. I liked Litz. We weren’t as close as, say, Sparks and me, but he was in my inner circle of trust.
And that was saying a lot.
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