Don't Look Back by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

ticking clock. You don’t.”
    “We all do.”
    “A little easier to say when you’re you. ” Claire released the catches on her brace, snapping them with aggressive twists. “You have everything going for you. Attractive, smart—”
    Eve laughed. “Come on. You’re tough. Fearless. You speak your mind.”
    “And every day that matters a little less.” Claire tugged off her orthotic and threw it onto the mattress beside her. “You can do anything you want. And you don’t even have a fucking clue you can.” She shook her head. “If I had what you had—”
    “You’d what ? Be cheery?”
    Claire leaned back, turned down her lantern. “Thanks for the help, Florence.”

SATURDAY

 
    Chapter 10
    Eve came awake with a dull throb between the temples, a stress-and-jet-lag hangover. After pulling on clothes, she stepped out of her hut to see the camp already bustling with movement, indígenos scrambling around shifting crates of supplies, leading burros by their noses, hauling linens, sprinkling pesticide around the cantina’s perimeter. No sign of Neto, Lulu, or the group, but voices and the hum of machinery carried from several roomy canvas tents erected by the outskirts—“activity centers” if she remembered correctly from the Días Felices Ecolodge™ Web site.
    Eager to hear Nicolas’s voice, Eve ducked into the admin shack to check the Internet connection. Still not working. She closed the screen and headed back out.
    Grabbing a cup of coffee at the cantina, she wandered toward the tents, passing through shafts of intense sunlight breaking through the canopy. Given her precaffeinated state, the play of brightness and shadow had a dreamy, strobe-light effect, and she slipped into the first activity center slightly disoriented.
    The confusion of scents inside didn’t help. Rose, mandarin, and mint, freshly chopped into bowls, perfumed the air. Claire, Sue, and Harry stood over various pots, boiling glycerin, stirring dye, pouring waxy liquid into molds. The cooling products, laid out on a table beneath Lulu’s imperious eye, were colorful hand soaps in the shapes of turtles and crocodiles.
    Lulu paused from tying bamboo ribbons around cutesy bottles of massage oil. “Morning, sleepy.”
    “What time is it?” Eve asked.
    “Isn’t it nice not to know?”
    Claire glanced up from her witch’s cauldron behind Lulu and rolled her eyes—the first gesture of public bonding she’d offered up.
    Eve manufactured a smile for Lulu. “Where’s everyone else?”
    “At the artisanal mezcal station next door.”
    “The other men opted for alcohol over soap,” Harry said. “I know— shocking. But me? I’m in touch with my feminine side.”
    A clanking carried to them through the canvas walls, followed by animal braying.
    Eve lifted her eyebrows. “This I must see.”
    The second activity center was a study in focused chaos. Neto leapt back and forth, stoking burning stones, juggling agave piñas, pouring juices into vats. Airplane-miniature spirit bottles, arrayed on the shelves in rows like missiles, bore rugged Días Felices Ecolodge™ labels. Gay Jay chopped fermented agave with a cartoonishly large knife. Beyond the vented canvas rear wall, a burro yoked to a millstone had halted stubbornly, and Will pushed at it from behind, trying to get it to continue along its prescribed circle. He set his back against the burro’s flanks and shoved, shoes slipping in the crushed pulp. He spotted Eve and paused. The burro brayed again, displeased.
    “I swear,” Will said, “this isn’t what it looks like.”
    Eve laughed.
    But Neto kept on, a commander pacing the deck, throwing out orders and bits of knowledge. “Come on, amigo. Move that burro. You see these beautiful piñas? We have to wait eight years to harvest them. There, no there. We burn them in the buried fire, see? For three days we’ll wait. No—use the hardwood. We want good charcoal, sí? ” He leaned over a copper still, adjusting a