We continued to follow the creek, hoping to find a shallow spot to cross, or at least a slower-moving section to cast a line. My thighs burned in protest, but I did my best to ignore them.
I’d taken to muttering curses under my breath with every step. It seemed to help. But it also made me almost miss it when Luka whispered, “Look!”
Shoeprints in the wet mud ahead of us. Had to be fresh, or the rain would have washed them away.
“Should we follow?” he asked.
“I think it depends on if we’re supposed to be enemies,” I said. “Or are we supposed to be working with the other teams? You’d think they’d have told us.” But then I had a thought. “If they found a way across, maybe we can, too.”
And then I saw it. Whoever had come before us must’ve had the same idea, or better luck.
A giant log had been felled across the creek. Thin trickles of water streamed over the top, but the log held firm. A rope—very similar to the one in our own pack—had been tied to a living tree on our side of the creek, suspended over the log, and staked on the other side. A crude bridge.
“This must be how the others got across.” I turned to him, tried to read his face. “Is this safe enough for you?”
He put a hesitant foot on the log, testing its strength, and tugged experimentally on the rope. “It seems sturdy enough.” He didn’t sound thrilled. “I’ll go first. If it can hold my weight, it can hold yours.”
“No,” I said quickly. “If you slip, I might not be able to pull you back. Let me go first. Your weight might dislodge the thing and then I’d be stuck on this side.”
A corner of his mouth smirked. “You worried I’d leave you behind?”
I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Should I be?”
He grinned, clasping the back of my neck in his strong hand in a friendly, and very Russian, gesture. “If I left you here, you would pay me back only tenfold when we got back, no?” He released me. “Go careful and slow. I will cover you.”
I sucked in a breath, steadying myself. My hands still shook, but I gritted my teeth and took a first, balancing step onto the log. It sank an inch or two into the water, and a thin layer of creek streamed around my shoes. I held on to the taut rope with both hands and planned each footstep carefully.
I shot one last look at Luka. Far from joking now, his eyes were steely and focused on me, hands outstretched and ready to grab me if I fell.
“Wish me luck.”
He nodded once, solemnly.
I took a breath. And then I took a tiny sideways step. And then another.
As I inched my way farther toward the center of the creek, the water grew more turbulent at my feet, the rope swaying dangerously. I dared not look anywhere but at my feet. Just a little farther, I thought. Just far enough where I could swim the rest, if I had to.
I was now so far away from either bank that neither side was within reach. No chickening out now. My only option was forward.
It seemed to take forever. The log dipped farther and farther beneath my weight, but it held firm and did not roll or budge. The rope was strong enough to catch me once or twice when I nearly lost my footing. After what felt like an hour, I hopped gratefully onto solid ground on the other side.
“Okay?” Luka called.
“Yes!” I smiled and waved, flooded with relief and adrenaline. “It’s sturdier than it looks. I’ll spot you.”
Luka ventured out on the rope-and-log bridge, following my technique of moving very, very slowly. He was taller than me by a few inches, and definitely heavier, but even though the log dipped low in the center, it didn’t break.
He crossed the center of the river and was coming nearer and nearer to me. Almost home free, and we didn’t even have to build the bridge ourselves.
Then I saw what was about to happen, and I still couldn’t stop it.
Some debris in the creek passed over the log, right as Luka’s foot came down on it. His foot slipped, he jerked off balance, and the rope, which had been tied securely to a sapling on the far side, couldn’t hold his weight—the sapling tore loose, roots pulling easily from the wet earth. The rope that Luka was relying on for balance went slack, sending him flying forward into the creek.
And just like that, he was gone.
I dove for him, my torso hitting the edge of the bank hard, arms sinking into the water as far as I dared, trying to keep most of my body on land for leverage. The mud and debris in the water obscured almost everything, and for endless seconds he was lost to me.
Then his face broke the surface, just for an instant. He’d managed to fall forward, toward me and the bank, and had fought his way close enough for me to touch him. But the furious current pounded at him and he couldn’t right himself. The water took him under again and again.
I grabbed for him blindly, one hand catching a handful of his shirt, the other hand wrapped around a sapling, anchoring me to the bank.
It wasn’t enough to hold him. The water pulled his body from me, tearing the fabric out of my hand.
Not thinking, I let go of the sapling and used both hands this time. I plunged my arms into the creek until water soaked my chest, feeling blindly, scrabbling until I had enough purchase to pull him toward me.
I was flat on my stomach, holding him to the bank with force of will alone. With one hand keeping a death grip on the collar of his shirt, I grabbed for the sapling to use as leverage, twisted my body sideways, and wrenched him like a caught fish up out of the water and onto the bank beside me.
I lay on my side catching my breath as he turned and spat out rivulets of muddy river water. His head and arms were drenched with mud, his once-white shirt now brown and transparent, but he was coughing, which meant he was breathing, which meant he would live.
His coughing subsided and he rose to his knees. Only then, when I realized he was going to be okay, did I realize how fast my heart was ricocheting around my rib cage. My fingers were vibrating like someone had struck the bones with a tuning fork. The entire musculature of my back, shoulders, and arms still screamed with the strain I hadn’t even felt till now.
I put my hand on his back. I didn’t know if he realized I was there, but I wanted to offer comfort—and also to reassure myself his chest was still moving. “I’m sorry,” I said. He sat up and I let my hand fall to the ground. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t strong enough to—”
He stopped me by placing his hand over mine, both of them cold and slick and filthy. “It wasn’t,” he said, sucking air between words, “your fault.”
“Are you gonna be okay?”
He nodded, held up a finger. When he’d caught his breath, he sat up and wiped water out of his eyes with the edge of his soaking-wet T-shirt. Then he took a long, unlabored breath, like a sigh of relief.
He was going to be okay.
We both went in for a hug at the same time, wrapped our arms around each other in a tight, quick embrace. “I’m so sorry,” I said again, relishing the feel of his arms around me, strong and secure. His heartbeat was thundering, and I could feel it everywhere we touched. “Are you really okay?” I let go first, studying his face.
“I’ll live.” He ran a hand through his hair, shaking off drops of water and finger-combing it away from his eyes. “Do you realize what you did?”
“What?” There was a leaf plastered to my cheek; I swiped it off with my shoulder.
“You just. Saved. My life.”
I shrugged. “Well . . . yeah.”
“You could’ve died.”
My eyes traveled back over to that dirty rushing water. Me dying hadn’t been a consideration at the time. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. To either of us.”
He stared at me like I was an undiscovered species. “I . . .”
And then, a thwack-thwack-thwacking of helicopter blades cracked the sky. We turned as one to see our salvation zoom over our heads.
The camo-green metal bird grew larger and lower in the sky, heading for the rendezvous point that we still
hadn’t reached.
We climbed to our feet and ran the last quarter mile, Luka seemingly reenergized, and me with nothing fueling my body except the relief that soon this would be over. We hustled across the open expanse of mud and reeds to an open field filled with red indicator smoke. Emilio and Hanna were boarding the helicopter.
We were the last on the chopper. Everyone else was already strapped in. All of them took in our soaking-wet selves with bewildered expressions, but we were too tired to explain.
Then we were in the air.
I couldn’t even enjoy the views. As I caught my breath, I had the sinking feeling that Luka and I had come in dead last.
ELEVEN
THEY DIDN’T EVEN let us shower before hustling us down the halls to our evaluations. But in the waiting room, a young woman in cheery pink scrubs made sure we drank lots of bottled water while she took our vitals, and put salve on our burns and bites.
No one really talked. We all kind of eyed one another warily, trying to gauge how each person spent the night in the swamp. No one seemed unscathed. Kendra had welts on her face and arms. Emilio’s messy dark curls were matted with dirt, and he looked more unlike his cheery self than I’d ever seen him. Hanna’s cheeks and shoulders were an angry red, and she and Emilio weren’t even looking at each other.
Mitsuko, a scabbed-over scratch on one cheek and usually immaculate hair filthy around her shoulders, caught my gaze and rolled her eyes—silently summing up her experience being partnered with Giorgia in the wilderness.
Luka and I were called last into Pierce’s office, a plain, narrow cinder-block room with no windows and no personal effects.
There were no chairs. We stood side by side in front of his desk, which was piled with orderly stacks of papers and a laptop with the screen turned off.
“And group five,” Colonel Pierce said, not looking up from his notes. I tried to peer over and see what was written on them. Probably the exact transcript of every word Luka and I had spoken since we got in that van, with readouts for our body temperature, heart rate, and other biometrics. But he was holding everything close to the vest, so instead I studied his expression, waiting for some hint as to what he was about to say.
His hard-lined face didn’t soften. “You were our most promising pair. I have to say, Luka, I’m very disappointed.”
I swallowed hard.
“We scored you as a team on a rubric consisting of a variety of criteria, including teamwork, creative problem solving, and wilderness survival skills, among others. Of the five teams, you two came in fourth. A distant fourth,” he added disdainfully.
But we’d been the last to the rendezvous point. Luka had almost drowned. The question wasn’t who did better than us, but who could have done worse?
“You’re dismissed,” Colonel Pierce said, already looking at another file.
I caught Luka’s eye, questioning. He shook his head slightly. He didn’t understand, either.
We split up—the first time we’d been apart in almost twenty-four hours. Hanna and Mitsuko had gone ahead of me to the cafeteria. Being alone in my room was almost as wonderful as the forty-five-minute-long shower I immediately took to wash every trace of the outdoors off me.
When I finally joined the others, it was almost sad to see how few of us were left. We were a motley bunch. So many empty chairs, empty tables; the remaining bodies filling them were hunched over their trays.
I searched the cafeteria for Luka but he wasn’t here. Feeling strangely bereft, I took a seat between Mitsuko and Emilio. Everyone’s plates, including mine, towered with food. Emilio had apparently taken an electric razor to his head, shaving the sides of his hair and leaving a lone strip in the center.
“I never want to do that again,” I said. “I’d rather die in a fiery crash. So much simpler.”
“Dear God, yes. Let me burn up on reentry rather than endure that BS again.” Mitsuko looked a little better after a shower, her face scrubbed to poreless perfection—the wound on her face somehow making her look edgy but no less beautiful.
Emilio shrugged. “I didn’t mind it so much, actually.” He was more withdrawn than usual, but I chalked it up to exhaustion.
Anton joined our table. “So, are we talking about our rankings yet?” Anton asked.
“They didn’t tell us we couldn’t,” I said.
We all waited for someone else to go first.
“Kendra and I came in first,” Anton blurted with a grin.
“We were third. I think stupid Boris and Pratima came in second,” Mitsuko said.
“Yeah, well, we were last.” We all turned to Emilio, glumly stuffing forkfuls of spaghetti into his mouth.
“What happened, man?” Anton asked.
We waited until he swallowed. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
Anton, however, was more than willing to tell us all about his experience. He called Kendra over, too, so they could lord their victory over us. Neither one of them had gotten a major win so far, so I didn’t mind—I also didn’t mind knowing how they did it.
Apparently Anton had basically grown up trekking through the rain forest, and Kendra was into mountain hiking. They couldn’t have made a better team. I started to feel a little bit better about the whole situation. Luka and I were still the strongest overall competitors. The leaderboard hadn’t changed, but maybe it just didn’t reflect our new scores yet.
Luka finally came in just as we were leaving. I waved the others on without me and caught up with him near the door to the hall. “I looked for you,” I said and then cringed inwardly. “You okay?”
He was clean and dry, but his face was a little drawn, a little distracted. “Yes. They wanted to check my lungs, to ensure they were clear. I should not suffer any ill effects from my dip in the creek. Thanks to you.”
I waved that off. I didn’t deserve praise; it’d been a reaction, a bare-minimum response. But now the air was weird between us, the gratitude in him making our relationship off balance. So I changed the topic to the one I’d want to know, if I’d been him. “Anton and Kendra came in first. Emilio and Hanna were last.”
That piqued his interest. “Really? Even though they reached the rendezvous point ahead of us?”
“Yeah. That’s the mystery. They won’t talk about why, though.”
It still nagged at me why we’d placed fourth. And he had a point: How could Hanna and Emilio have really done so much worse when they’d made it to the helicopter before us?
Luka focused his attention on the buffet. There was almost no one left in the cafeteria; only Kendra sitting along the back wall, sipping a drink and reading her tablet.
I wavered, shifting my weight. It felt like abandonment to walk away, to rejoin my friends and leave him to a cold dinner alone. He’d somehow begun to feel like one of mine—one of my allies, or friends, or at least someone on my team. And I knew how much it sucked to eat alone. “Hey, do you want—I mean, I already ate, but I can join you if you want? It’s kind of lonely in here.” And he didn’t even have any roommates left, either, I realized.
He gave me a quizzical look. Probably wondering why I wanted to spend more time with him, when we’d just been stuck together for twenty-four hours. Probably wishing I’d leave him alone so he’d have a break from me. “I’m fine. I’m quite used to eating unaccompanied.” A smile softened the words. “But thank you.”
Needing to outrun the feeling of failure from our outdoor adventure, I headed to the track late that night, when I thought I’d get to be alone.
But Emilio was already pounding the tread when I got there, the dying sun sending our long shadows to chase each other as we ran out our stresses. He stayed behind me most of the way, until I slowed purposely and he caught up. We jogged together silently, breathing and foot strikes the only sounds we shared. I couldn’t help but remember the first day, the long run they’d put us through where I thought I was going to fail. Everyone’s sweat combining and evaporating off this track. Particles of ourselves mi
ngling together, escaping into the atmosphere.
The only way I had gotten through it at all was because of everyone else running with me.
Endorphins and exhaustion finally dulled the edges of my emotions. I sat on the outer edge of the track where the grass had started to poke through, feeling the pebbles dig into my skin and the sweat drip down my back, and the amazing feeling of fresh air going in and out of my lungs.
Emilio jogged a few more laps alone, then came to sit beside me. We drank bottled water and watched through the fence as the sun melted red hot into the prairie grass.
After a while, Emilio spoke. “Something’s been bugging me.”
I turned toward him. He was leaning back on his hands, still watching the horizon. The deep orange light turned his skin to bronze. He could be good-looking, especially in moments like right now. Even his new haircut worked for him. I wondered what had made him do that—if it had something to do with what’d happened out there with Hanna. I wondered what it said about me that I hadn’t thought to ask him until now.
And then I thought back to what Mitsuko had said. If I’d ever grow to look at people the way she did. If I’d ever grow to care about people the way Emilio did.
“What is it?” I asked when he was silent a long time.
“I feel like they’re keeping a lot of information from us about this mission. I mean, obviously they are, they’ve said as much. But it’s gotta be something major, right? This is so far beyond what I expected.”
I leaned back on my hands, mirroring him, blades of grass shooting up between my fingers.
There weren’t any walls here. We weren’t wearing any wristbands. It felt safe to talk. “I’ve been feeling weird about it, too.”
“Yeah?” He looked at me a second and trained his eyes back to the dying light. “Then I’m not nuts. I mean . . . I was even afraid to talk about this inside the building, in case they’re listening. That isn’t normal.”
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