The Reckoning by Jeff Long Page B

of water on the floor. She laughed.
    â€œYou’re happy,” said Duncan.
    She didn’t turn. “Yes,” she said.
    It pleased him. That pleased her.
    She didn’t try to explain her joy. After all these weeks, she felt released. The tension of searching for the pilot, the pushing and pulling of tool against earth, of man against man, civilian against soldier, of Kleat against Duncan, all of it seemed left behind. Her trespass upon the pilot, with her camera, was a thing of the past. The highway and its dark menace were forgotten.
    The sun would find them somewhere. That was the heart of it. The farther they got from the main road, the more it felt like she was finally reaching a center. When the time came, one way or another they could always retrace their journey, and eventually she could return to writing her words, publishing her photos, and promoting her name, the maiden name—the only name she knew—of a woman who had forsaken her. For now, she just wanted to keep going.
    The river—or her happiness—changed Duncan, too. His anxieties fell away. He put aside his map, and she thought that now they could cast themselves into the journey. They had made their crossing. Their hell-bent midnight ride could slow. She could start to know Duncan without the background noise and her urgency to catch the recovery team’s story. They were on their own now, threading up a path across a river that was just a stream upon a mountain that was just a hill, wandering off the maps. Two searchers, that’s who they were.
    The bones were an excuse. That divorced her and him from Kleat, who was so bound to his dead and his duty. She hadn’t come to resurrect soldiers any more than Duncan had. The missing pilot had drawn them as a novelty, an opportunity, nothing more. Now they could enter a territory of the heart.
    They had never talked about what preceded Cambodia for him. For a month, they had worked and lived within inches of each other, but she still didn’t have a real handle on him. For all his tales of high school football and a dog named Bandit and his summer-long Harley solo to Anchorage and special barbecue recipes and favorite old movies, she had no idea why he’d landed here, or even when. The one time she’d asked, he’d dodged. Sometimes it feels like I was born here, he’d said. Like I’m like some dusty thing out of a Kipling novel, just one more relic of the empire.
    Not Kipling, she thought. Conrad. And not Kurtz, not Heart of Darkness, but Lord Jim. Duncan had secrets, maybe dark secrets or sad secrets or old guilt. One does not go to the jungle out of innocence. He never talked about a wife or children or another woman, never crouched over snapshots of a lost family or a lover who had chosen a different man or died a tragic death. He never mentioned where that part of his life had gone. Survivor guilt, she guessed. Maybe that was what attracted her to him. He seemed to carry her same sense of a past best unrepeated, of a voyage without anchors. Like an orphan, he acted never quite worthy of love. They were perfect fodder for a grail quest, the two of them.
    They passed worn blocks of stone in the river wall, evidence of ancient channels. That perked him up.
    â€œIncredible,” he said. “We’re looking at water control that predates the Angkor kingdom by centuries, and on the opposite side of the country. A massive hydraulics system in the mountains, for Pete’s sake. You need to understand, water is everything here. There’s not another country like this on earth. For the Khmers, the world is water. When the monsoon comes, almost half the country vanishes under water. The Tonle Sap River reverses course. Great battles were fought on inland boats. Their civilization was founded on wet rice cultivation. The Angkor empire rose and fell based on their ability to control water. The Angkor kings captured the rain in huge pools and would