“What’s going on?” Nyah asked, squinting toward the centre of the circle.

Elijah took one more step forward and stopped short. “They’ve found something,” he muttered.

One of the warriors turned his head slightly as Bette approached, then nodded once in respect. He stepped aside wordlessly, opening a narrow view into the centre of the formation.

Bette moved forward, her pulse hammering now in a dull, tight rhythm.

There, sprawled in the dirt, half-covered by scorched branches and wet ash carried last night by the water, was a man.

Torn, ragged clothes.

The skin on his face was bloodied, but not beyond recognition.

Bette’s stomach dropped.

“Chang,” she breathed.

Nyah gasped softly beside her.

He was still here.  Barely alive it seemed. His chest rose and fell with shallow effort, the movement barely visible beneath the mud that clung to him like a second skin.

One arm lay crooked beneath him at an unnatural angle, the other half-submerged in a dark rivulet that still trickled from where the tanks had ruptured earlier in the night.

Bette took a slow step forward, confusion tightening in her chest. He should have been long gone. His three accomplices had scattered into the darkness hours ago.

Why was he still here? Why hadn’t he vanished with them into the bush, into the silence?

Her eyes scanned the area, half-expecting movement. But nothing.

Then, as she looked down again, something glinted beneath the watery sludge, a thin, rusted strand of wire peeking through the churned mud.

A snare.

Half-hidden beneath churned mud and uprooted grass, tangled like a grotesque spider’s web, was a mess of wire, rusted steel strands and loops of fencing, barbed coils braided into tension traps. Kamau’s work. She recognized it instantly.

It had caught Chang like it was meant to catch a lion.

One snare had cinched tight around his ankle, the barbs tearing into muscle and tendon until the flesh beneath was pulp.

Another looped around his torso, the metal biting through his jacket and into his ribs.

A final cruel coil, nearly invisible beneath the soot and blood, had looped around his upper chest and shoulder, strangling him every time he moved. His breath came shallow and wheezing, his body slack and slowly turning redder and redder beneath the pressure.