The man—Tarzan, though he has never heard the name—tilts his head. “Porter taught words. Promised… return. Broke promise.” His eyes harden. “You break promise too?”

Tarzan fights like storm-water, but rifles bring him down. As they bind him, Kutu quietly switches sides: he cuts Jane free, then falls to a bullet. Jane, weeping, drags Tarwan into the river gorge; the glowing orchids ignite in the blaze, drifting like embers.

Jane smiles. “He exists as long as we remember the shame of taking what isn’t ours—and the courage to return it.”

II. The White Ape On the second night, the forest itself seems to exhale. A storm of arrows—poison-tipped—splits the dusk. The askari fire back, but something moves too fast, too fluid. Jane catches only a glimpse: a man-shape, sun-bleached hair whipping like a lion’s mane, eyes reflecting firelight the way a leopard’s do.

Jane realizes the shame he feels is abandonment. The white ape was once a boy marooned after a zeppelin crash—an earl’s son, maybe, though the memory is fractured. Dr. Porter befriended him, promised to bring help, then disappeared (drowned, Jane knows, but Tarzan does not). The jungle raised the boy; the shame of being “left behind” became the scar he guards.

I. The Arrival Dr. Jane Porter—twenty-nine, Oxford ethnobotanist—leans over the rail of the tramp steamer Equinox as it noses up the Mangoko River. The Belgian Congo, 1914. She is chasing rumors of a miracle orchid that glows at dusk and might revolutionize medicine. She is also chasing the ghost of her father, the elder Dr. Porter, who vanished on this same river five years earlier.

Outside, a tall figure waits in the fog, wearing a tweed coat too short at the sleeves. His eyes catch hers; a slight nod, then he melts into the crowd. Jane tucks the last orchid seed—saved in her locket—into her palm, and closes her fingers gently around tomorrow.

He sniffs the air, growls, “You… Porter?” The voice is hoarse, as if rarely used.