He shook his head, a slow, deliberate motion, and pointed at her again. He gestured to her unkempt hair, her mud-streaked arms, the way she’d instinctively moved to cover her chest with the machete. He said it again, this time with something like awe. Tarzeena. The word, she would later learn, meant “She Who Shakes the Earth.”
She leaned her head back against the vibrating fuselage. Her body jiggled with every rotor thump. She smiled. It wasn’t the jiggle of embarrassment or apology. It was the jiggle of a woman who had learned that sometimes, the most unexpected weapon is the one you were born with. Tarzeena- Jiggle in the Jungle
By the time she was twenty yards from the camp, every single poacher—eight men, including a flabbergasted Augustus Finch emerging from his tent with a toothbrush in his mouth—was utterly, helplessly transfixed. They had seen bullets. They had seen death. They had never seen Tarzeena. He shook his head, a slow, deliberate motion,
“What in the bloody…?” Finch began. Tarzeena
Back in Cambridge, she would write a monograph: “Kinetic Distraction as a Non-Lethal Tactical Strategy in Primate-Related Human Conflict.” It would be laughed out of every peer-reviewed journal. But in the jungles of the Congo, they would tell the story for generations.
She pointed to herself. “Tarzeena.”
The morning sun, a molten gold coin, clawed its way through the dense, layered canopy of the Verduran Depths. It painted the world below in fractured light and shadow, illuminating a scene of primordial stillness. A single, massive orchid, the colour of bruised velvet, trembled as a drop of dew as big as a child’s fist fell from its petal. The drop arced in slow motion, a tiny, perfect sphere holding a refracted world, and landed with a soft plink directly on the forehead of a woman lying unconscious in a tangle of liana vines.