Val is a former soldier, looking for a job from her old comrade-in-arms, Miles. Miles works in drugs now, and there's a lady who was supposed to be establishing contacts for distribution, but decided to keep some of the drugs to sell for herself. If Val wants the job, she needs to eliminate this problem. And Val wants the job, since she's out of prison because an FBI agent thinks she's an "in" to the org Miles works for. For Val to stay out of prison, Leo needs to die. Instead, Val and Leo end up on the run together from Miles, the FBI, even a relative of Leo's that owns a gator ranch.
Val is prone to episodes where the world around her fades, shifts, is overlaid by a jungle. Sudzuka and Svorcina usually depict it in solid colors to start. Red vines twining around Val, tropical birds emerging from a purple chasm tearing apart the ground beneath Val's feet. Eventually it develops into a jungle, dense grass and trees, downed logs, all colored something close to natural. And somewhere in there, someone needs help. Usually it happens when Val gets violent, which is too bad, because being around Leo results in a lot of violence. Though the red tendrils appear during calmer moments a few times.
Oddly, Leo is able to see the jungle - and thinks it's neat - though Phillips never explains that quirk. Leo has her own trauma, and Phillips shows the parallels in how neither of them got any support or help. Leo was dismissed as making it up by her family and the doctors. Val was turned away by the groups that were supposed to help people who had bad experiences serving overseas. Maybe that's the "why", but in that case, shouldn't Leo have a "jungle" of her own?
But Leo's more manic. She leverages it, in that she acts goofy or flighty to make people underestimate her. Meanwhile, Val is repressing everything, trying to pretend nothing happened, nothing's wrong, all business. Until she's not. I don't think either character has addressed their problems, but Leo's more accepting of hers?
Phillips puts the work in building the peculiar relationship between these two. Leo seems so eager to have a friend, while Val starts out unsure if she wants to protect Leo, strangle her, or just get far away. It doesn't ever entirely end, because Leo seems so flighty and random to Val, but there's a gradual softening as the two save each other. Phillips slows the plot to allow for quiet scenes between them where they talk about something other than their impending doom. It's during those where we see the tendrils emerge from Val's chest, reaching towards Leo. They don't form into a full jungle, and it's not clear whether Leo can see them.
When the mini-series was coming out, I thought the pacing was off a bit. I think I was expecting more focus on a sort of cat-and-mouse chase between the Val/Leo duo and everyone after them. Spending an issue at Leo's relative's gator farm felt like an odd choice. Leo bringing Val to a spiritualist community, where two old women were waiting to tell Val she needed to stop running from her ghosts, only for Val to die like 10 pages later, felt like an odd choice.
Still does, a little bit, but I think the point is Val has been running all this time and refusing to acknowledge it. Isolating herself, throwing herself into things as distractions. All the people after them are a sideshow as far as Val's issues. Another thing she can use to avoid dealing with her past. So when she faces it, really looks at the guilt she feels, and the opportunity comes to possibly do it right this time, she seizes it. Not really sure where that leaves Leo, but Val's struggle is over, at least.
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