"DAD, I CAN'T FIND my cell phone." Zane's voice was the first thing Skip heard that morning.

"Mine's missing too," said Nusiri.

Skip had noticed the same about his own phone minutes before. He thought back for a minute, then understood. "Killa," he said. "She must have taken them in the night." He held up Jack Fawcett's alternate journal, which was lying next to the bed where his phone had been. "She wants to be sure that we tell the story their way. I can understand where she's coming from. We should respect the people's wishes. We won't push the issue for now. We'll get them back later, somehow."

After a breakfast of tacacho, fried plantain slices mixed with chicharones—fried pork fat, washed down with chicha, corn beer, they followed Killa down to the river, where she had already loaded the canoe for the trip, despite having just returned herself the day before. If she was put out by having to repeat the journey, she did not let on. She did manage to find two more paddles, meaning that three out of four of them could be paddling at once. "It should take about two days up, maybe one and a half back," she told them.

Along the way, Skip noticed the unsavory looks they were getting from some of the villagers. "Not always friendly toward outsiders, I take it."

"It is not just that you are an outsider," Killa explained, "it is also that you are with me, and I am a Keeper of the Secrets. By now of course, we are generations removed from the ones who founded this village. There are few here who remember the stories of old, who know why our forefathers came here in the first place. And many move on, to life in the towns.

"But the ones who know, they are very protective. They are afraid of me trusting you with some of that knowledge. They are probably debating whether to kill you, or hold you captive, trapping yourself and your new-found knowledge within our little society here in the jungle. As I said, many do leave for life elsewhere. New blood is always welcome, if it benefits the People."

"Hmm. Good to know," Skip said wryly, remembering that Jack Fawcett himself was compelled to stay on. "Thanks for the heads-up."

Resuming their previous positions in the dugout canoe, with Killa, Skip, and Zane now manning the paddles, now traveling downstream, they made good time.

"So, how was it that your great-grandfather earned the trust of your people?" asked Nusiri.

"He married the chief's daughter," was Killa's reply. "She was the one who rescued him. By marrying her, he secured his place among the People. And because she was daughter to the chief, she was also a keeper of our history. And so that was passed down through the generations to me."

"So, who is the chief now?" asked Zane.

"Puma," said Killa. "The name, the word, is the same in Quechua as in English. He was the small one with the fiery eyes who watched you get in the boat. And like the cat he is named for, he may be smaller than the jaguar, but in his own way, he can be just as dangerous."

Moving with the current with three strong paddlers, it didn't take long to reach the river confluence where they'd left their raft. Skip retrieved their packs and debated whether to continue their voyage aboard the dinghy, with its outboard engine, but decided against it. They were soon back on their way. Killa made the turn and they started up the river they had originally come down on.

Before they got all the way back to where they'd come in however, at the landing strip by the illegal mining site, she made another turn, upstream on a narrow tributary they hadn't seen before. Now they noticed one of the ancient stone signposts, almost buried in the jungle growth, that they had missed earlier.

"So, we're going to the City of the Moon," brought up Zane, as the morning slipped past noon. "And that's the same as in that manuscript you talked about. So, what is that anyway? What's the story on that?"

"The manuscript itself was 'discovered' in 1839, in the National Library of Brazil," Skip began. "Although how it got there in the first place is anybody's guess. It dates to 1753, but the story really starts a couple of hundred years before, with the Lost Mines of Muribeca.

"Those were silver and gold mines, supposedly somewhere in eastern Brazil, passed down through a few generations of a family of Portuguese settlers, until the King of Spain, and Portugal at that time, decided to claim them for the government. Expeditions were sent out to locate these mines, all coming up empty handed. Most who searched never returned.

"Fast forward to 1743. Nobody knows who wrote that letter, the manuscript. But he was apparently a member of the Francisco Raposo expedition, one more over the years, on a quest for the lost mines, which by then had become something of a legend. For the better part of a decade they wandered and searched the Amazon basin, never finding the mines, but in 1753, stumbled upon a very old, abandoned, and certainly 'lost' city, a city, they said, whose architecture looked like something out of ancient Greece or Rome. There was a river nearby, where they at last found some mine shafts, yielding silver. Beyond the city was another compound, several small houses arranged around a large central building, and flecks of gold in the river. One more curious thing they found was a gold coin, which modern experts now claim may have been ancient Persian, possibly as old as somewhere around 500 BC. Go figure."

"So, Percy Fawcett assumed this city had to be the one he was looking for, the Lost City of Z?"

"It was certainly a major inspiration for his theory. Whether he thought it was the actual city, probably at some point. It certainly checked all his boxes. At least until Jack Fawcett learned the truth."

A colorful flash of motion drew their attention to the right-hand bank ahead. A flock of scarlet macaws took flight across the river, startling a troop of monkeys in the trees on that side. A splash below where the macaws had taken off from was followed by the ripples of a caiman angling toward them. Then, a feline snarl gave an indication of what had started the commotion. A puma or a jaguar—it was hard to tell which through the foliage—was stalking something high up in the branches, surprising the macaws. The would-be prey crashed down from the trees and scampered off to safety, too quick for them to tell what it was. The caiman, having been evicted from its rock, passed just in front of the canoe and found a quieter spot on the opposite shore. The bit of jungle drama over, a stillness once again settled over the forest, for the moment.

Then it began to rain.

Before they could fish ponchos out of their packs, Skip and the rest were soaked through.

"It is a rainforest, after all," said Nusiri with a laugh. "We can change and dry off when we get to camp."

Skip just shook his head, looked at the sky, sighed, and took it all in stride. Just part of the adventure that he'd wanted. He reminded himself to be careful of what he asked for.