We set off with more urgency than before as another roar of thunder claps through the clouds. We sit huddled together on the benches, trying to laugh about our rotten luck, but all inwardly wishing we were safe on dry land. The boat stayed relatively flat this morning, but now it lurches from side to side. I can hardly hear the engine over the plummeting rain smacking the surface of the river.
Crack. Flash.
My earlier calm has dissipated. I’m an extreme person. I’m either superrelaxed or super-on-edge; there’s no in between. And I’ve just swooshed to the other end of the spectrum so fast I have whiplash. Every nerve is on high alert.
That’s how I feel mentally. Hyperaware. Of every blinding flash, of every centimeter of damp clothing, of every single raindrop of every single surface.
After a minute or two, the driver swerves over to the eastern riverbank and angles the boat toward a crumbling wooden platform standing below a little wooden hut, which is raised above the water with thick stilts. Before we’ve even come to a standstill, he’s already looping a thick rope around the foot of the platform and leaping out, losing his footing slightly on the wet wood.
I clamber out with not a single ounce of grace, watching as Erin manages the feat with elegance. Her denim hot pants are so drenched they’re almost black, and her baggy white tee is almost see-through. Meanwhile, my sodden locks of black and violet hair are dripping water between my cleavage. Shaking like a wet dog, I squeeze some of the moisture out of my dip-dyed mane, but it’s no use.
I’m surprised to see there’s light coming from inside the hut, and the murmur of male voices can be heard over the roar of the storm. Working our way up the slippery bank, clinging onto overgrown weeds and using jagged rocks as footholds, I start to wonder whether this trip could possibly get any weirder.
The hut has a tiny raised veranda overlooking the river, and there’s a little table set up with a burlap runner, thermos flasks and chipped brown mugs. Rivulets of rainwater stream down the slanted roof, but the tiny dining area is largely sheltered. It looks like it’s waiting for us. Tim leads the way up the steps wrapping around the side of the hut, me right behind him, and as we reach the top, a man steps out onto the porch.
My mouth hangs open. He’s hands down the most attractive man I’ve ever seen in the flesh. His muscled torso ripples through his wet red T-shirt, and his short, dark brown hair is ruffled and damp, like he’s just got out of the shower. His arms are thick, with indigo veins laced over his biceps. Inky black eyes stand out starkly against a tanned, stubbly face, and as he grins, he reveals a row of perfect white teeth.
“Tim! You’re here!” he exclaims, embracing Tim with a squelch. He pronounces it “Teem.” He turns to me, though I can tell he’s already looking over my shoulder at Erin. Nothing new there. He reaches out and shakes my hand.
“Hi. I’m . . . I’m Carina,” I manage.
“Hi.” Another flash of teeth. “I’m Andrijo.”
AN HOUR LATER we’re sitting around the tiny table, and the torrential rain is starting to slow. Mosquitoes buzz around our ears, rabbit stew bubbles in a nearby pot and we’re on to our fifth or sixth cans of beer. Tim and Borko chat about this year’s JUMP compared to the last few, while my fellow journalists are in an intense debate about the political situation in the Middle East. Normally Erin would be straight in there—she’s feisty and opinionated and never backs down—but today she is not. Because she’s utterly engrossed in Andrijo.
They stand away from the rest of the group, elbows resting on the fence around the veranda, staring out to the river. I hear fragments of their conversation over the raucous debates around me.
She leans into him. “So what do you do in Novi Sad?”
“You’re so beautiful. Like the sunset over the Danube in late summer,” he replies. She flushes and giggles, sipping from her can while gazing at him. He stares right back.
She has a boyfriend.
Then she asks, “Will you be at JUMP tonight?”
“You are so radiant. Anything for you.”
I shiver involuntarily. That’s a little intense. He’s making my skin crawl, so I force myself to rejoin the conversation around the table.
But not before I hear her say, “So, do you have a girlfriend?”
He holds her gaze. “I have eyes for no one but you.”
“I’M GLAD YOU’RE here with me,” Erin yells.
I can barely hear her over the pounding speakers in front of us. We’re standing right at the front of the main stage—next to twenty security guards, the lead singer’s girlfriend and eight eardrum-bursting amplifiers. It’s so loud I can barely make out the guitar from the drums, but the view is unrivaled. I can practically reach out and touch the bass guitarist.
She shakes her head and takes my hand, pulling me off to the side of the stage while trying to dodge the endless cables and speakers littered around the backstage area. We lean against one of the portacabins the bands use as dressing rooms. It’s still so loud my ears feel crucified, but I can sort of make out what she’s saying.
“I mean it, Carina.” She still hasn’t let go of my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here—that we get to share this experience with each other. Imagine if that snooty cow Clara was my only female company out here?” She grins, but her expression has that faux-urgent quality of someone who’s drank a little too much and now believes declaring their undying love for people is a matter of life and death. “I’m glad we became lunch buddies. Hell, I’m glad we became friends. And I’m glad we’re following our dreams together.”
Maybe it’s because of the fourth cider I just finished, but I feel a little teary-eyed. The crowd behind us is swaying in time to the slow rock song, filling in the words as the singer holds his microphone in the air.
A strobe light bounces off her silver bangle—the one that matches mine. It’s thin and delicate, engraved with an Arabic expression it took us forever to translate: “If you are saved from the lion, do not be greedy and hunt it.” When a PR company sent them to Northern Heart for a shoot we were producing, we fell in love and bought one each. We always joke that Lowe is the lion.
“You make me feel like I can do it,” I tell her, swallowing my usual hesitancy to put myself out there. Again, probably thanks to the cider. “Life. You make me feel reckless, but in the best way possible. I wouldn’t be here, in Serbia, writing such an ambitious feature, if I didn’t have you by my side.”
“Yeah, you would,” she says. “But maybe in a decade’s time, once you’d finally grown some ovaries and spoken to the lion for the first time.”
I shove her playfully into the side of the portacabin and she cackles.
“I’m gonna go pee. Wait here for me?” she asks.
I smile. “Of course.”
AN HOUR LATER, the rock set has finished and the crowd is excitedly cheering for the next act—a drum and bass duo who’ll surely put the final nail in my eardrums’ coffin. But Erin hasn’t come back yet, and I’m starting to feel worried.
Has she gotten lost?
She hasn’t got the best sense of direction, but the toilets are just around the corner from the backstage entrance. Surely she isn’t that hopeless.
I check my phone to see if she’s tried to call me, but she hasn’t.
I swing around to face Tim. “Erin left to nip to the toilet over an hour ago, but she hasn’t come back since. Should we go and look for her?”
He scrunches his face up. “Nah. She’s a big girl. Can look after herself. Don’t wanna miss this set.”
I try to ring her a couple of times, but it keeps ringing out: “Welcome to the O2 messaging service. I’m sorry, but the person you are calling—”
“Anyone want anything from the bar?” I ask Clara, Duncan and Jin Ra, but all of them have recently topped up. I flash my press badge at the guard and slip through
the gap in the gate that leads to the VIP drinking terrace.
Jostling through clusters of journalists and minor celebrities, I scan the terrace for Erin. She’s tall, blond and heavily tattooed, so in theory she should be easy to spot, but I don’t see her anywhere. I frown. This isn’t like her. And I don’t like the idea of her wandering around lost and alone.
Heavy footsteps pounding against the wooden decking echo through my mind as I try to think of an explanation. Could she have started talking to new people and lost track of time? Or did she decide to go back to the hotel early? Or was she hungry and went to grab a slice of pizza?
All totally plausible explanations, but I know her. She’s thoughtful. She would have texted me first, especially after asking me to wait by the stage.
I buy a bottle of water to try and clear my head before heading back to the speakers, where the others are now raving to some obnoxiously intense drum and bass.
She still isn’t there.
Uneasiness spreads through me like a fever.
NOW IT’S TWO in the morning. The walls of the open-air fortress tower over me, but my fear dwarfs them all.
Where the hell are you, Erin?
Bass and blood pound in my ears. A roar erupts from a nearby stage. The crowd goes wild for the last headliner of the night, but the screams and chants are dulled against my mounting terror.
Something isn’t right.
I’m running past the same liquor garden I’ve passed three times now. Why have I never noticed how creepy silent discos are? Limp necks and tense limbs jerk erratically to the sound of nothing. Their eerie shadows ricochet off the crumbling stone walls and white canvas tents. A throng of intoxicated bodies swarms around me like I’m a boulder in a stream.
I wring my sweaty hands together and hit redial for the millionth time.
Dead.
Her phone is dead. Her phone is never dead. It’s glued to her hand like she needs it to breathe.
Speaking of breathing . . . how do you do that again?
I jolt to a halt and clutch at my sides, trying, failing, to massage away the sharp stitch. A tux-clad security guard gives me a strange look. My panic-stricken face must stand out like a sore thumb against the hundred thousand other drug-slackened expressions at the festival. I flash my press pass at him, and he steps aside, allowing me access to the backstage tent. The indie band who played the rock stage earlier are propped up at the bar, chasing a row of tequila shots with wedges of lemon.
She’s not here either.
She’s not raving at the dance stage, she’s not necking beer in the Corona tent, she’s not on the VIP platform watching the dubstep act on the main stage. She’s not back at the hotel—I called and checked. She’s not answering my calls, she’s not reading my texts. She’s not been seen for three hours.
My mum’s words of warning dance gloatingly through my mind.
“Serbia isn’t safe. You know what happens to beautiful girls in that country.”
“You watch too much TV,” I’d insisted. “This isn’t a Liam Neeson movie.”
The men. The men we’d met earlier. There was something too intense about them. Something off.
One more lap. One more lap of the fortress and I’ll call the police.
BY FOUR A.M., I’m screaming her name into the night.
I call the police. The woman I speak to on the emergency line tells me a person has to have been missing for at least twenty-four hours before they can launch a search, and that I’m not the first person to have lost a friend at JUMP and thought the worst. She’s sure Erin will turn up.
That makes one of us.
THE SUN RISES just after five. Its rays are weak and I’m shivering as I walk across Liberty Bridge, which is still illuminated in blue and pink and green, back into Novi Sad. In the distance, I can almost hear the festival campsite still going like a fairground, but the sounds are drowned out by the gushing Danube below me. It’s roaring powerfully with the force of yesterday’s summer storm behind it.
Daylight feels alien. Fear is still pulsing through me, but it’s somehow not as intense when the sky isn’t black and I’m not being thrust around a muddy green by an unruly crowd. The terror is quieter, but it’s still there. It’s still making my stomach twist painfully and my hands tremble as I walk. My eyes blink rapidly against the sunlight.
I stop in my tracks. The campsite. Of course.
Maybe she’s there. Maybe she snuck off with a boy.
I’m about to sprint back where I came from, to run down the rows and rows of tents yelling her name, but my gut tells me that’s wrong. She wouldn’t do that. She has a boyfriend, and she loves him. They’ve been together for nine years.
It’s wrong.
This is all wrong.
SEVEN A.M. NOVI Sad is waking up.
I wander aimlessly through the streets. The air smells of warm, wet pavement and sweet pastry and Serbian spruce trees. All the buildings are different pastel colors, some sky blue with white gables, some pale yellow with chipped green woodwork and some candyfloss pink with cream-colored cornicing. Shutters are opening and a young waitress is setting up plastic tables and chairs outside a pavement café. She stops and checks her phone. A message makes her smile.
The sight is so normal it seems borderline perverse. My best friend is missing and a waitress is smiling.
I replay the smile over and over in my head to try and keep touch with reality but it’s no use.
I’m spiraling.
I’M DELIRIOUS WITH exhaustion and fear and yes, okay, maybe a bit too much cider. But my last drink was nine hours ago, and the whooshing and swirling and plunging in my head feels more sinister than inebriation.
Nine a.m. I’ve phoned everyone. The other journalists in our group, the hotel, the festival organizers. They closed the fortress two hours ago. There was no one left inside.
I even try the police again, in case I manage to get through to a different operator who’s more willing to help. It’s the same woman. She tells me to call back once it’s been twenty-four hours, but her earlier compassion has evaporated.
I no longer know what I’m looking for in Novi Sad. A flash of blond hair whipping around a corner? A black leather jacket zooming away on the back of a stranger’s motorbike? A slender tattooed arm slung around a man’s waist? A big billboard that says, This way! She’s this way?
Jabbing her name on my call log for the thousandth time, I start to feel dizzy, like I haven’t eaten in a week, and the pain in my stomach and the lightness in my head are a result of simple hunger. The call takes a moment longer to connect than usual, and for an agonizing split second of hope, I think I might hear a dial tone.
Dead.
Chapter Three
July 13, Serbia
I WAKE UP starfished in the king-sized bed in my hotel room. There’s a crack in the curtains, and I can see sunlight blazing through. It’s eerily silent, bar the hum of the air-conditioning.
I blink against the confusion. Was it all a dream? I roll over, grasping for my phone on the bedside table. It reads 1:36 p.m. My call log shows me it wasn’t just a sordid nightmare. Recent outgoing calls: Erin Baxter (51). I have a message from Tim, the press trip organizer, and a couple from other members of the group, but nothing from Erin. No responses. No voice mail. I hit redial, praying to a God I don’t believe in that she’ll pick up, and everything will be fine, and we’ll laugh about this tonight as we sing along to Rudimental. I’ll make her buy me a beer to make up for scaring the living shit out of me.
Dead.
I throw my thumping head back onto the pillow. How did I get to my bed? Why does my head hurt so much? I’m still fully clothed, minus my muddy sneakers. Vague images of a deserted Liberty Square, glimmering puddles and a cloud-pocked sky come back to me. I peel one eye open again to read Tim’s text.
>
We’ve canceled today’s excursion. I don’t want you to worry about Erin—we’re doing everything we can to find her. Tim
His text was sent two hours ago, and I’ve had nothing from him since. They obviously haven’t found her yet. I take three deep breaths. I refuse to let myself get worked up again until I have good reason.
Focus on what you know. Like the time is 1:37 p.m. and you’re in Novi Sad and it’s sunny outside and you’re too hot and you’re thirsty and the duvet is blue.
Reality isn’t all that comforting right now.
Duncan messaged me at six a.m.
All right, wee one. Where are you and Baxter? Been looking for you everywhere. Give us a bell so we know you’re not in a ditch anywhere, eh?
Clara Fox. Tabloid journalist and gossip columnist extraordinaire. See also: gigantic douche.
Fuck’s sake. We’ve been looking for you and Erin everywhere. They’ve canceled the winery trip because of you! Where are you?? Cx
My limbs feel like they’re moving through molasses as I stumble out of bed to the shower. I feel marginally less panicky after sleeping, but my throat feels dry and scratchy, and my headache is on the blinding end of the migraine spectrum.
This morning flits back to me like beams of sunlight through half-open blinds. Calling the police a third time, talking myself down from a panic attack, staggering back to the hotel and finding an incredibly stressed out Tim in the hotel lobby waiting for me. His crestfallen face when he realized Erin wasn’t with me. His assurance that he’d wait in the lobby in case she returned, and that I should go and get some sleep.
Twenty-four hours has never seemed like such a long time. I think of all the terrible things that can happen in that time, and yet the police wait until some bullshit criteria has been met before they’ll take action. I know something is spectacularly wrong. I know it deep in my gut. But I have to wait another ten hours before they’ll take me seriously.
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