The Cost of Wild Places

Chapter 1: The Last Coordinates

The photograph that changed everything arrived at 3:47 in the morning.

Neil Cordera was asleep in his Portland apartment when the satellite messenger alert chimed on his phone, that particular three-tone sequence he had programmed years ago to cut through any depth of sleep. He had given the device to Simona before she left for Papua New Guinea, pressing it into her hands at the airport with the casual insistence of a man who knew better than to seem worried. She had rolled her eyes—she always rolled her eyes—but she had taken it.

He sat up in bed and reached for his reading glasses on the nightstand, knocking over a half-finished glass of water. The screen glowed in the dark bedroom.

Two lines. GPS coordinates: 5.8612° S, 144.2731° E. Then a single word: TROUBLE.

No follow-up. No context. No second message.

He stared at the screen for thirty seconds, then swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. His left knee popped—it always popped now, a souvenir from a fall in Patagonia fifteen years ago—and he padded barefoot to the desk in his study where three monitors sat dark above a landscape of hard drives, memory cards, and coffee rings.

He pulled up the coordinates on a topographic map. The pin dropped in the Highlands Region of Papua New Guinea, deep in the interior, along a river system that fed into the Wahgi Valley. Dense rainforest. No roads. No settlements marked on the map, though he knew from experience that maps of this region were suggestions at best.

Simona had told him about this leg of her trip. She was trekking solo through the highland interior, following river systems, documenting her route for a travel publication that had commissioned a series on remote waterways. She was good at this—better than good, if he was honest. She had been walking through wild country since she could walk at all, first strapped to his back in a carrier, then toddling along trails in the Cascades, then, by fourteen, keeping pace with him on three-week expeditions in Borneo and the Karakoram.

He tried calling the satellite messenger's emergency line. Nothing. He sent a reply message through the app. The status indicator spun and spun and never resolved to "delivered."

Neil sat in his desk chair in the dark and made himself breathe. He was sixty years old. He had been in enough emergencies—real ones, the kind where the helicopter doesn't come and you splint your own arm with a tent pole—to know that panic was a luxury. Panic burned time, and time was the one currency that mattered when someone was in trouble in the bush.

He opened his laptop and began working the problem.

By 4:15 he had contacted the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby. A duty officer took his information with the polished sympathy of someone who fielded these calls regularly. She told him she would relay the information to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary and the National Search and Rescue Coordination Centre. She told him these things took time. She told him not to lose hope.

By 5:00 he had called Simona's emergency contact at the travel publication, a features editor named Dani Kilburn who answered her phone on the second ring despite the hour. She had last heard from Simona four days ago. Everything had been fine. Simona had been excited about a river crossing she was planning, one that would take her through a gorge system few outsiders had navigated.

"She's resourceful, Neil," Dani said. "She's the most resourceful person I've ever worked with."

"I know what she is," Neil said. "I made her."

The words came out harder than he intended, and in the silence that followed he heard the thing he hadn't said: I made her this way, and if something has happened to her, I made that too.

By 6:00 the Portland sky was lightening to gray and Neil had booked a flight. Portland to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Brisbane, Brisbane to Port Moresby, Port Moresby to Mount Hagen. Thirty-one hours of travel if everything connected. He packed in twenty minutes—he could always pack in twenty minutes; it was one of the few domestic skills his career had given him—filling a weathered expedition duffel with the essentials: lightweight rain gear, first aid kit, water purification tablets, his old Leica M10 and three lenses, a headlamp, a knife, and the kind of high-calorie ration bars that tasted like compressed sawdust and had kept him alive in a dozen countries.

He paused at the door and looked back at his apartment. It was a clean, spare space, the walls hung with his own photographs—a glacier calving in South Georgia, a jaguar drinking from a black river in the Pantanal, a Maasai herder silhouetted against a Kenyan dusk. Forty years of work. Forty years of leaving.

Simona's mother, Renata, had left him when Simona was six. Not because he was cruel or unfaithful, but because he was absent. "You love the world more than you love your life," Renata had told him, standing in the kitchen of their old house in Bend, Oregon, with her suitcase already by the door. She had been wrong about that—he loved Simona more than anything, more than any photograph he had ever taken—but he had never figured out how to prove it in the daily language of presence and routine. Instead, he had taken Simona with him. Into the field. Into the wild. He had taught her to read a river, to navigate by stars, to treat a snakebite, to trust her own body in difficult terrain. He had given her the world and called it parenting.

Now the world had her, and he wanted her back.

He locked the door and drove to the airport.

---

The flights blurred together in the way long-haul travel always did—a purgatory of recycled air, turbulence, and the particular anxiety of being in motion without being in control. Neil slept in fragments, waking each time to check his phone for messages that never came. In the Brisbane airport, during a four-hour layover, he bought a detailed topographic map of the PNG Highlands and spread it across a table in the food court, drawing circles with a pen, marking river confluences, calculating distances.

A woman at the next table watched him for a while, then asked if he was planning a hiking trip.

"Something like that," he said.

In Port Moresby, he met with a liaison from the constabulary, a tired-looking sergeant named Amos who told him, with genuine regret, that search resources in the highland interior were extremely limited. "We have three officers in the district," Amos said. "The terrain is very difficult. Many areas, the clans control access. We cannot simply go in."

"My daughter is in there," Neil said.

"Yes. And we are making inquiries. But I must be honest with you, Mr. Cordera. Every year we have tourists who go into the interior without proper preparation. Most of them come out. Some do not. The jungle is not forgiving."

Neil wanted to say that Simona was not a tourist, that she had more wilderness experience than most of the officers in this building, that she could survive in conditions that would break trained soldiers. But he knew that none of that mattered to a bureaucracy processing a missing-persons report. To them, she was a name on a form, a foreign national who had gone somewhere she shouldn't have.

"I'm going in myself," Neil said.

Amos looked at him—really looked at him, taking in the gray hair, the weathered face, the lean frame that was still strong but undeniably sixty years old—and nodded slowly. "Then you will need a guide. A good one. Someone who knows the highland clans."

"Can you recommend someone?"

Amos wrote a name on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk. "Tomas Bautista. He is in Mount Hagen. He has worked with researchers, film crews, mining surveyors. He knows the interior as well as anyone who is not from there. He is expensive, but he is alive, which tells you something."

Neil took the paper. "Thank you."

"Mr. Cordera." Amos leaned forward. "The highlands are not like other places. The clans have their own laws, their own disputes. Some of them have had very little contact with outsiders. If your daughter has wandered into the middle of a territorial conflict—" He stopped himself. "Just be careful. And listen to Tomas."

Neil flew to Mount Hagen that afternoon on a prop plane that shuddered through cloud banks thick as wool. Below, the landscape shifted from coastal lowland to something primal—ridge after ridge of jungle-covered mountains, river valleys cut so deep they looked like wounds in the earth, and everywhere the green, the impossible saturated green of rainforest that had never been logged, never been cleared, never been tamed.

He pressed his forehead against the window and watched the world his daughter had walked into.

---

Mount Hagen was a town that existed at the edge of two realities. On one side, the modern world: paved roads, a market selling mobile phones and instant noodles, a few modest hotels catering to the occasional tourist or NGO worker. On the other side, the highlands: vast, roadless, governed by clan structures that predated any national border by thousands of years.

Neil found Tomas Bautista at a guesthouse near the airstrip, sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and a machete laid across his knees. He was a compact man in his mid-forties, with the broad shoulders and short stature common to the highland peoples, though his accent and manner suggested mixed heritage—later, Neil would learn his father was Filipino, his mother from a village near Kundiawa. He had the steady, assessing gaze of someone who had learned to read both jungle and people with equal fluency.

"Amos called ahead," Tomas said by way of greeting. "Your daughter. The solo trekker."

"You know about her?"

"I heard she was in the area. People talk. A young woman alone in the interior—that gets noticed." He gestured to the chair beside him. "Sit. Tell me what you know."

Neil sat and laid out everything: the coordinates, the single-word message, the silence since. He showed Tomas the map with his markings. Tomas studied it for a long time, tracing the river system with a calloused finger.

"This area," Tomas said, tapping the coordinates. "It's contested. Two clans—the Konda and the Aluwa—have been disputing the boundary for years. Maybe decades. Maybe centuries. It depends on who you ask." He looked up. "Your daughter knew about this?"

"I don't know. She does her research, but some of this isn't on any map."

"No. It wouldn't be." Tomas folded the map carefully. "I'll take you in. But I need you to understand something, Mr. Cordera. In the interior, I make the decisions about safety and protocol. If I say we stop, we stop. If I say we turn back, we turn back. I've lost clients who didn't listen to me, and I don't mean lost as in they fired me."

"I understand."

"Do you? Because Amos told me you're a photographer. An expedition photographer. Which means you're used to being the one who decides how far to push. Out there, that's my job."

Neil met his eyes. "I'll defer to your judgment on everything except one thing. I'm not leaving without my daughter."

Tomas held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. "We leave at dawn. Bring everything you need and nothing you don't. We'll be carrying our own weight."

That night, Neil lay on a thin mattress in the guesthouse and listened to rain hammer the corrugated roof. He thought about Simona at six, riding on his shoulders through a cloud forest in Costa Rica, her small hands gripping his hair, laughing as a toucan exploded from a branch in front of them. He thought about Simona at sixteen, navigating a Class III rapid on the Futaleufú River in Chile with a calm precision that had made the other rafters applaud. He thought about Simona at twenty-two, telling him over a satellite phone from a base camp in Nepal that she had decided to do this—whatever "this" was, this life of movement and risk and solitude—on her own terms, without his name opening doors for her.

"I need to know I can do it without you," she had said.

He had told her he understood. He had told her he was proud. And then he had hung up and sat alone in his apartment and felt something crack inside him that he had never been able to name.

The rain intensified. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the town, the jungle waited.

Neil closed his eyes and did not sleep.