Mr. and Mrs. Hatt flew out at dawn on another helicopter. They took Maddie’s remains with them. Just like my family, all reminders of Maddie and Jason have been erased from this place.
Three years ago, when I called my brother’s school to see if they knew what had happened, I was told the Robinsons had moved.
“Somewhere out of the country, I believe,” the secretary said.
Next I called my own school, pretending to be a relative. “Amelia Robinson has been reported as a runaway,” said the man who answered the phone. “If you have any information about her, please call this hotline.” He rattled off an 800 number. “Do you have any information about where she is?” he asked.
I hung up.
It took me another day to screw up enough courage to find another pay phone and call the 800 number.
A male voice answered. “Runaway Reports.”
“Is this the police?”
“No, Runaway Reports is a national agency. Do you have information about a runaway child?”
“About Amelia Robinson,” I said. “She’s not a runaway.”
“How do you know that?”
It took me a minute, because I wasn’t sure what to say. He sounded kind enough, but who was he? Never trust what anyone says.
Then that kind-sounding voice said, “Amelia, honey, I know you’re scared. But it’s going to be okay.”
I ripped the old-fashioned receiver away from my ear and stared at the black plastic like it could suddenly become a caller ID screen.
“Stay where you are. We’ll come get you, Amelia.”
I dropped the phone and ran to the Bolt Bus station, where I spent the last of my cash to take me as far away as it could.
Now I’m farther away from home and my old life than I’ve ever been. Over breakfast, Sebastian and I learn that yesterday’s accident has had a ripple effect. After the shock of realizing that unexploded munitions could be hidden anywhere in this tropical paradise, Teams Two and Ten packed their bags and left, citing unacceptable risks to their valuable athletic careers. I suspect that excuse was mostly for saving face, though, since they were the last two teams, hours behind the leaders. There’s no prize for anything lower than third place. They didn’t have a chance unless the rest of us got blown up in the next couple of days.
So on Day Four of the Verde Island Endurance Race, the number of contenders is half what it was on Day One. Five teams, ten racers still vying for the prize. I’m thrilled about the dwindling numbers, although the major competition, Team One—Cole and Rossi—and Team Five—Senai and Mistri—are still with us and we have two days to go. I don’t know the runners on Teams Four and Eight, but I’m not counting them out, either. It’s clear that on this island, winning might come down more to survival than to cross-country running prowess.
As we eat, our minders make another feeble attempt to interest Sebastian in The Threat. As usual, he ignores their pleas, and as usual, nobody shares any intel with me about anything.
Since these warnings seem to be emanating from the White House, I’m guessing The Threat is a political issue. I wrack my brain to dredge up what I know about the politics of Verde Island, but I can’t even remember which country this place belongs to. Or if any nation has claimed it at all.
What political organization would care about what happens here? After seeing two people separated from their appendages yesterday, it’s hard to believe that any nebulous political risk could be as dangerous as stepping on a mine.
Catie Cole and Ricco Rossi start nearly an hour before Sebastian and I do. We see nothing of them except their footprints in the damp ground at the starting line. As soon as we enter the forest, we lose even those; the thick rotting vegetation underfoot is too uneven and springy to retain prints. Marco Senai and Suzana Mistri are scheduled to set off twenty minutes after we leave camp, and I find myself listening for them as we jog through the jungle. After the land mine episode, Sebastian and I are staying off wider paths and roads. We’ll take our chances bushwhacking or running along narrow animal trails.
Over the last three days, The President’s Son and I have become a team. Without talking, I lead for a while, and then he does. My bruises ache, the gash in my thigh alternately burns and itches, and my feet are growing blisters on top of blisters, but overall, I’m doing well, and so is my partner. Every endurance racer left in this competition has bruises and scrapes and sore muscles.
The media always asks why anyone would volunteer to run an endurance race. The contests are exhausting and dangerous, they point out, like we need to be reminded. I have no idea why the others do it, but personally, I think who wouldn’t want to have the hope of winning a mondo prize and the adventure of jogging through an exotic location? How else would I ever get to see the Yukon Territory or the Amazon or even Rocky Mountain National Park? My life has to be about more than cleaning cages.
When I run, I feel free. When I race, it doesn’t matter what my name is. It doesn’t matter that I’m poor. The only thing that matters is how fast I can find my way through unfamiliar terrain.
After some races, I get to spend a couple of extra days exploring an area, but none of us is allowed to stay here after the end of this contest. I hope they don’t have more bomb practice scheduled. Verde Island could be a pretty spectacular place if they’d stop with all the destruction. I try to enjoy what I can see of the island, although running through the landscape at high speed is not an optimum form of tourism. I spy two remarkable orange and black butterflies dancing in the air, and I surprise a large ground dwelling bird of some kind, which squawks loudly as it dashes for cover. A tropical turkey?
Sebastian, running ahead, nearly plows into a buffalo calf galloping across the trail. It bawls in fright and crashes off into the jungle after its massive mother. I pause with my partner to watch them go. We’re both panting loudly and glad to take a break.
A twig snaps behind me, and I glance over my shoulder. At first I see only the sprawling leaves of the jungle foliage, and then, between thick vertical stems, my brain zeroes in on a pair of golden eyes studying me through the bamboo and philodendrons.
The buffaloes were fleeing the tiger.
I slowly put my hand on Sebastian’s sweat-slimed arm. “Bash,” I murmur.
He turns.
“Tiger.” I add, “Don’t run.”
Two tigers live in the zoo where I work. We never clean their cage until they’re locked in their den. We’re not allowed to come closer than the length of a broom handle to the barred gate separating Habitat Maintenance Technician from big cat.
I’ve been told that tigers don’t like to attack creatures that are looking at them, so my partner and I face this silent cat. The tiger is so still that she almost looks like a painted backdrop behind the vegetation. I’m afraid to blink.
Those yellow eyes burn with such predatory intensity, assessing whether we are worthy opponents for muscle, fangs, and claws. Sebastian takes my hand and we step slowly backwards down the trail. If the cat so much as twitches, I might wet my shorts. The tiger doesn’t move, at least while we can still see her. After a few yards, her outline becomes completely invisible among the leaves. We turn and run.
“You saw her, right?” I take a quick glance over my shoulder just to be sure the tiger isn’t behind us.
“Hell, yeah,” he says, shooting a look over his shoulder, too.
The big cat doesn’t seem to be following us. Or she’s not close enough that we can see her. Still, as we plow noisily through the brush for the next two miles, my skin prickles with the anticipation of claws on my shoulders and teeth on my neck.
Intermingled with my fear of her is a pang of sympathy for that tiger. She’s the only one of her species in her world. That must be such a lonely feeling.
Today is the longest segment of the race. Sebastian and I got a late start because of our late finish yesterday, and so by the time we emerge from the jungle, the sun is already going down behind Mount Everett. The forest abrupt
ly gives way to a mountainous landscape, barren black and gray rock carved by trickling snowmelt. The change in scenery is startling after the dense greenery we’ve been traveling through.
Sebastian slows to a walk in front of me, staring at the mountain. “Whoa!”
He shrugs off his pack, and pulls out a tube of orange energy gel.
“Yeah,” I agree with his assessment of the landscape. There’s no transition zone between the jungle and the charcoal waves of bare rock. “Must have been a hell of a lava flow.”
I pull out my own gel and squeeze a gooey caterpillar of lime paste into my mouth as I regard the scenery.
Mount Everett’s snow looks like a stocking cap, with a little tassel of clouds resting on the summit. The clouds swirl in a slow circle; the wind is blowing up there.
I think of my race around Mauna Kea on the Big Island in Hawaii, which has the same geography. This is the reason that this race is staged on Verde Island. This place has everything—heat, cold, raging rivers, snow, a volcano, jungles, snakes, tigers, buffaloes, crocodiles—what more could you want for a reality show?
Oh yeah, let’s toss in a land mine or two to spice things up a bit.
The volcano looms in front of us, an imposing natural pyramid we have to conquer before we can sleep tonight. The sunset tinges the snow at the crest a beautiful rose-gold color.
“Check it out.” I point up the mountain.
Small dots like mosquitoes zigzag across the slope above us. Cole and Rossi are not so far ahead. If Sebastian and I can keep up our current speed, we might catch them in the next couple of hours. Of course, that’s a big “if” when you’re running up the side of a mountain.
I check my wrist unit. “Four miles to go.”
“Let’s catch ‘em.” He pulls the straps of his pack over his shoulders.
We take off running again. I wish I had a camera to capture this spectacular view, but the best I can do is to look up from my feet now and then to watch the shadows lengthen and the alpenglow intensify.
At first the ground is bare rock, fractured into small shingles that slide under every step. There’s nothing approximating a trail, so we employ the strategy that every experienced mountaineer uses—we zigzag horizontally up the side of the volcano, creating our own switchbacks, which creates a longer but easier path than clawing our way straight up.
In places the slippery fractured rock transitions to sandy mud sliced by dozens of small streams. Some are narrow enough we can leap over them, but the wider ones slow us down, forcing us to cross by hopping from rock to rock. A rock turns sideways under my right foot, dunking me into an icy creek up to my knee. I yank my leg out and keep running. I feel cold wetness against my ankle, but my toes seem fine, so maybe the glacial melt didn’t penetrate beyond the cuff of my running shoe. With so few miles to go and the thought of hot food waiting for us, I’m not about to stop. My salivary glands are already working overtime as my brain conjures up visions of cheeseburgers and pork chops and mashed potatoes and spinach soufflé and cherry pie with ice cream.
We pass into the first traces of snow, streaks of white gleaming against the back side of the ridges, and then as we ascend, the snow pack becomes more dense until there’s nothing but white underfoot. The surface is icy, which makes the landscape sparkle in the setting sun, but that glittering crust is also uber-slick, and neither of us thought to pack crampons. I hope none of the others did, either. Surely Catie and Ricco are slipping and sliding ahead, too. I wonder how close Team Five and the others are behind us.
And then I remember that Madelyn Hatt is out of the competition forever. Jason, too. There are no one-legged endurance racers. Even those springy artificial feet don’t work well enough to jump ditches and climb up volcanic slopes.
The air gets thinner the higher we ascend, and soon I’m gasping, trying to suck in more oxygen with each breath. I spend most of my life at sea level; I should have trained more in the mountains. Sebastian, the native of Georgia, is affected, too. Team Seven is slowed to a trot. My mouth is dry and my head aches.
The breeze is cold and getting stronger the higher we climb. I’d be shivering if I wasn’t running. The clouds are slithering down the mountain, too. One minute they shroud us in dense fog; the next they blow away to reveal dark skies above. It’s eerie. I don’t want to get lost in fog on a snowy mountaintop.
The terrain changes from crunchy snow to a jagged ice field. I’ve seen this spiky morphology on Mount Baker, a volcano close to where I grew up—the serrated ice is caused by the dramatic freeze and thaw cycles each day at high elevations. The hotter the sun and the colder the nights, the more the ice fractures. Sometimes Sebastian and I can simply jump over the cracks, but other times we are forced to slip carefully into shallow troughs and climb over ridges. My hands and legs are scoured by sharp-edged ice. Sebastian has a bloody scrape on the back of his right thigh. I try to keep my mind on the hot food ahead.
We come to a big crack in the snow that is too wide to leap across. A crevasse, I know from Mount Baker—my middle school class took a course in mountain rescue there my last year in Bellingham. A lot of people climb Baker every year, and there even used to be a race up it a hundred years ago, before the politicos decided that contest was too dangerous to continue. And yet, here we are, running up another volcano halfway around the world.
Sebastian and I study the problem. Thankfully, this crevasse doesn’t extend all the way up the mountain. We climb a little higher to where the wind has piled snow into a furry surface, a soft white carpet waiting to welcome us.
We’re halfway across the white velvet strip when it collapses beneath our feet.
Chapter 10
I’m sure the fall takes only a second, but it feels more like a week. Snow plops into my eyes, blinding me, which is probably a small blessing. My shoulder glances against something hard, then there’s a scrape to my knee, a jolt to my jaw, and finally, my whole body slams into the ground. Which is not a flat solid floor, but little hillocks of snow. Which is probably another small blessing. My left foot is twisted awkwardly beneath me. My butt and back and head are suspended in icy mush. My cheek rests against the side of Sebastian’s running shoe. A small avalanche of snow slops down from above onto my hips and thighs. Overhead, in a narrow ribbon of dark sky between streamers of clouds, I see stars. I’m reasonably certain they’re real.
It takes a minute before I can breathe again. “Sebastian?”
“Alive.” It sounds like he’s spitting. “I think.”
I pull myself out of my private snowbank, rolling over onto my hands and knees. And then I sit back on my haunches to survey our new surroundings. Sebastian pushes himself to a sitting position, groaning.
We both stare up toward the narrow zigzag of sky above. A shower of ice pellets rains down, striking me in the forehead and dotting Sebastian’s dark hair and shoulders. I notice a thin trickle of red oozing from his hair onto his cheek in front of his left ear. He must feel it at the same time, because he swipes his fingers through it, looks at the blood on his hand as if surprised to see it there, then gingerly feels his scalp for the source.
He groans again. “Tell me I don’t need more GluSkin.”
“Pretty small,” I tell him. “Looks like falling ice took out a little divot. Press your hand on it to stop the bleeding.”
He flattens his palm against his temple and looks at me. “You should do the same to your chin.”
I brush my fingers over my lower jaw. Sure enough, they come away wet and red and the gash I feel there begins to sting.
“I’m surprised the rescue squad isn’t already here,” I say. Seems like the Secret Service would be pretty freaked, watching us vanish like that.
“Me too. Although I did tell them not to interfere.” He looks at the device on his wrist. “And these things show them we’re moving, so they know we’re alive. They may show up before too long, though.”
I slip my straps off my shoulders and rummage around in my pack, noti
cing for the first time the scrapes on my elbow and forearms. I pull out a bandanna and my spare shirt, press my shirt to my jaw and extend the bandanna to Sebastian.
He wraps the blue fabric around his hand and holds it to his head, shivering as he studies the vertical ice walls. “How in the hell are we going to get out of here?”
I inspect the crevice we’ve fallen into. We have our climbing rope and harness, but none of those clever metal doodads that real climbers pound into rock to thread ropes through. And even if we did possess those, how can we pound one in way up above our heads? The walls glisten with thick ice; they rise straight up. I can’t see a single handhold or even a place for a toe to stick. We have no ice axes.
I claw through the snow beneath my knees and locate a fist-sized rock. It’s heavy, wedge-shaped. I push myself up, giving a little yelp when I put weight on my left foot.
Sebastian stands, too, his eyes wide with concern. “Did you break something?”
I take another step. My foot hurts. But it also feels kind of tingly. “I don’t think so.” I take another step. “I just fell on it funny. It works.” Well, sort of. I limp the few steps to the ice wall. Holding the rock just above waist level, I hammer it against the thick ice.
“You’re crazy if you think you can break through that.”
Ignoring him, I pound the rock against the ice until I’ve knocked a little white pocket into the crystal coating. “We don’t need to break through, just hammer in finger and toe-holds.”
I chip in another one further up. Slipping the toe of my good foot into the lowest one, I curl my fingers into the higher one and hoist myself up a few feet from the ground. The ice is really slick. I have to dig in my fingernails to stay in place. The cold burns my bare flesh, and I shiver as I pound the rock against a spot above my head. Ice chips fly, hitting me in the face. In my handhold, my fingers are slipping backward. I clench my fingers more tightly.
Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) Page 10
