“Two.” This is the freakiest thing I’ve ever done.
“Three!”
I release my handhold and hang suspended for a fraction of a second as I watch the rope zing upward toward the cliff’s edge. Then the loop around the tree above releases its tension and I drop like a wrecking ball straight down into the water.
For what seems like eons, all I see is the blur of tea-colored water. All I hear is a roar. My ankle gets snarled in my climbing rope, and I reach to unclip it from my harness, but then my foot somehow comes free on its own and I claw my way to the surface. I’m moving way too fast. Sweeping is too gentle a term for what the river does to me. I’m shooting through space on an uncharted trajectory.
I bang up against a rock and ricochet off, traveling backward now. I struggle to turn onto my stomach. This isn’t swimming; it’s more like trying to crawl across a giant trampoline with six football players jumping up and down on it. Arms wheeling over my head, I stroke like crazy for the far shore, blinded half the time, fighting the vest while being grateful it’s keeping me afloat, wondering if I’m making any progress, trying to keep one eye out for Sebastian and one for the rocks ahead and one for the shore beyond. (I know that doesn’t add up and it’s probably why things are not going so well.) The climbing rope that’s still attached to my harness gives me a yank now and then to remind me that this is a deadly situation.
I hear shouting in the midst of the roaring and then I catch glimpses of Sebastian’s blue shirt between waves of muddy water. My partner is plastered to a boulder in the middle of the stream. His life vest is limp and flat. What the heck happened?
Then I shoot past and all I can think is No! We can’t get separated! He can’t stop there; he’s only halfway across. But there’s no way to backpaddle and these thoughts are a complete waste of what little brainpower I have left. Up ahead, there’s a bend in the river like a crooked elbow. If I can just make it to the inside of that elbow, I will land on shore.
Then, just before the bend, I slam up against the end of my rope. It yanks me underwater. I flail wildly. The life vest buoys me up, holding me about a foot beneath the surface, which is, of course, as good as being six feet down. Or in other words, drowning. I hold my breath as I reach for the clip to my harness, but then I realize that I’m moving slowly toward the shoreline. The rope, snagged somewhere behind me, is changing my course. I can see the shore, or at least I think I can—it’s an unmoving brown shadow, darker than the swirling brown water. But the pain in my head and the dancing black spots in my vision tell me I’m going to run out of air before I get there. I try a few froggie type swim movements, but with the pack and my running shoes and the inflated vest, I don’t travel in the least like an amphibian.
Just when I think I have to unclip before I pass out, the water shoves me to the right and my toes strike the ground. I crawl up the underwater slope on all fours until my head is above water. Then I allow myself a little break to gasp and gag and cling to a friendly rock for a second. After my head stops pounding and my heart rate returns to only double its normal speed, I stagger up the beach, putting some slack in the rope. Collapsing butt-first onto the sand, I tug off my streaming pack and my inflatable vest.
Then I look back for the other half of Team Seven.
And there Sebastian is, only halfway across this homicidal river, still perched on that damn rock. He waves at me like we’re on vacation. I curse and squint to bring him into focus. He’s still wearing his sagging life vest and his pack and climbing harness, but there’s no rope clipped to his D ring. The end of the rope he holds up is attached to the ring at my waist; he grabbed my rope as I floated past. My first thought is: he nearly drowned me. My second: he may have saved my life.
Now, if only I can repeat the favor.
I know it’s crass, but I can’t help it: I check the time on my wrist unit. We’re losing the advantage I hoped we’d gain on the other teams by doing this suicidal river float. We’re burning daylight. I sigh and look back at Sebastian, holding up my hand, signing Wait. He signs it back.
With water squishing out of my running shoes, I stagger up the rocky shore a few yards and then I walk the rope around the base of the tallest rock I can find there, leaving the end clipped to my harness. Then I face the river and Sebastian again and motion tying the end of the rope to his harness. He gives me a hands-on-head sign then a two-arm motion that says Are you out of your mind?
I skip the crazy head sign and send the two-arm signal back—What else can you do? Then I check my watch again. Dramatically.
Finally, he shrugs, ties the rope to his D-ring and gives me a little salute reminiscent of movies about Roman gladiators. We who are about to die salute you. Then Sebastian launches himself in an impressive cannonball into the current. The instant the rope goes slack, I run down the beach to snug it up and—I hope—pull my teammate toward the shore. When the rope tugs on my harness, I lean against it and peer out into the churning river. I see Sebastian’s head, his long brown hair sleeked back like a river otter. He’s still riding the waves, moving way too fast as he approaches the bend in the river. He’s already past the point where I got out. Abruptly, his head disappears, and the rope yanks my harness to the side. I lean harder against the rope’s pull.
Sebastian is now underwater at the end of the rope, just like I was. I pray the rope is swinging him in toward this shore like it did me. But he’s already further downstream than I was, and the rope configuration is different, and his life vest is well, dead.
I hold my breath as I wait for him to emerge, scanning the water between the point where he disappeared and further downstream. If he unclips, surely I will feel the rope slacken, won’t I? But it could take a few seconds. Could the rope be caught around the base of the boulder where I wound it? I glance back at it. The rope, stretched around the rock a few inches above the ground, looks as if it could slide easily enough.
Then I remember that Sebastian can’t unclip; he has to untie a knot to get free. I frantically search the water. Silvery splashes of water in the sunlight, waves rolling up and down, thousands of gallons surging past at an alarming rate. I feel lightheaded. I can’t get my breath. Oh God, oh God, If There’s Anyone Up There, is Sebastian drowning? Is he unconscious at the end of this rope?
A shape emerges from the water. I think I see his face for just a second, but it vanishes so quickly that I wonder if I only imagined him surfacing. Did he get a breath?
My heart pounds so hard that I think the suspense might literally kill me. But then I realize the whop-whop-whop noise is not only my heartbeats. Thunder is reverberating from overhead. A helicopter drops out of the sky, hovering over the river, its rotors kicking up sand in my face. A guy dressed in a wetsuit and an orange vest stands spread-eagled in the open doorway.
No! While I don’t want Sebastian to die, the minute that frogman rescues my teammate will be the minute Team Seven is disqualified. The frogman tightens his facemask. He pushes a snorkel mouthpiece between his lips. I make a frantic crossed-hands motion to tell him to stop.
Then a brown head bobs up only a couple of yards from the river bank, and Sebastian crawls out of the water. I wait until he’s firmly on shore. I unclip and, doing my best to shield my face from the flying grit with an upraised arm, jog toward my teammate, who is hunched on all fours, choking and gasping and spitting on the sand.
The helicopter lifts a few feet but hovers overhead, its rotors adding to the deafening din in the river canyon. When I’m only a few feet away from him, Sebastian sinks back into a sitting position and turns. Still coughing, he raises his right hand toward the chopper, middle finger extended. Then he raises his left and echoes the sign. Only after witnessing Sebastian’s double bird does the frogman move back from the door. The chopper pulls up and peels away like some sort of malevolent dragonfly. It quickly vanishes over the cliff above us.
In the absence of the mechanical noise and flying sand, the canyon seems almost serene. I glance at Sebastian.
“You okay?”
It seems like a lame thing to ask after all that drama.
He coughs in response but rises to his knees, pauses to slick back his hair, and then pushes himself to his feet.
“You’re bleeding.” He points to my leg.
Sure enough, there’s a gash above my knee about four inches long. Blood is pouring down my calf. It’s amazing what you can do to yourself in the water and never feel it. We walk back to my pack and I dig until I find the GluSkin and hand it to Sebastian. I mop off the blood with a kerchief and then twist the water out and dry off the gash the best I can with the wrung-out rag. Then Sebastian takes the GluSkin, twists off the cap with his teeth, kneels, and squeezes a line of GluSkin into my cut.
With a jolt, my nerve endings come back to life. My leg hurts like someone just thwacked it with an axe. Sebastian uses his fingers to hold the skin of my thigh, pressing the edges of the wound together, the tube of GluSkin caught between his teeth. I can’t help hissing at the flare of pain, and I put my hand on his shoulder to keep from falling down. His flesh feels solid and warm beneath his wet shirt. The pressure of his strong hands on my leg burn almost as much as the GluSkin on my raw flesh.
At least The President’s Son is proving to be gutsy and helpful. And he’s not hard to look at, either, even with his hair all wild and a crimson bruise quickly turning purple on his right cheekbone. But that damn helicopter…
When the white-hot pain recedes enough that I can talk instead of screech, I say, “That chopper almost got us disqualified.”
“I didn’t ask for it,” he says through clenched teeth.
The steam wafting around his head looks like smoke rising up off his temper, but I know it’s the tropical sun baking our wet hair and clothes. I’m steaming, too.
“I’m kind of glad you didn’t drown,” I say to soften my criticism.
“Likewise.”
I can’t resist needling him a little. “Isn’t a good thing that one of us kept her climbing rope clipped on?”
“Isn’t a good thing the other of us grabbed the end of that climbing rope?” he shoots right back. Then he checks his wrist unit. Dramatically.
We’re behind schedule. The first checkpoint is still ten miles away.
By silent agreement, we rise, peel off our running shoes, wring out our socks and then put them back on, tie up our running shoes again. We pack the harnesses, the rope, and our one functional life vest, squeeze more gel and water into our mouths, check our watches again, and then dash into the forest that rises up over the hills in front of us.
Two hours, three spiders, and four and a half flocks of pissed-off parrots later, Sebastian and I stagger up to the first checkpoint just as the sun sinks beneath the western horizon. The actual check-in station is simply a flag planted next to a folding table, manned by two attendants lounging on lawn chairs. These two are a married couple, aging marathoners I’ve seen at other events. When Sebastian and I burst out of the woods, their weathered, creased faces are startled into alertness. They push themselves up from the chairs.
A short distance away there’s a cluster of tents dotted with a few battery-powered lights that do a poor job of illuminating the area. Mr. Wrinkle blows the whistle hanging around his neck, which brings a couple of camera operators scrambling from one of the tents. They snap what will be incredibly unflattering pics and capture vids of us as Sebastian and I stagger around like zombies, trying to work the kinks out of our overstressed muscles.
“Together.” The photographers knock forefingers together as if we don’t understand English.
So we stand next to each other. I gasp like a beached fish, trying to get my breathing under control. Sebastian wipes sweat out of his eyes. Yeesh, he stinks, but I’m reasonably certain I reek just as bad. I’ve got a blister the size of Washington State on each foot from running in wet socks, and I’d guess Sebastian does, too.
“Well?” I finally huff, unable to stand the suspense any longer.
“Team Seven,” Mr. Wrinkle intones dramatically, “enjoy your ten hours of mandated rest.”
“You are in first place!” Mrs. Wrinkle chortles.
Sebastian and I straighten, turn toward each other and high-five. The cameras click. In the illumination of the flash, I see the Secret Service goons waiting on the sidelines, whispering to each other.
I’m starting to worry about what they might be saying. In theory, they should protect me if it would benefit The President’s Son, but they also have good reason to thoroughly check me out. Although my fictional background fools the average Joe, I’m not at all sure it can stand up to real inspection by a professional intelligence agency.
Marisela promised my back-alley Social Security number would pass. So far it has. She knows how to slide by the authorities without being noticed. Maybe her contact works at the Social Security Administration. My adopted mother and I don’t ask each other a lot of questions.
Please, Almighty Power That May or May Not Exist, don’t let them blow my cover.
Sebastian and I hit the showers, where a couple of pounds of dirt and sweat wash off down the drain. Then I go through the required medical check where I have to pee in a cup, donate a few drops of blood, have my blisters drained, and get my glued thigh wound inspected. Apparently Sebastian did a decent job on that, because the docs give me a shot of antibiotics but don’t even apply a bandage.
Then we sit down to eat heavenly quantities of chicken cacciatore and spinach salad and spiced carrots and luscious banana cream pie. That’s another thing I love about endurance racing—I eat better on every night of a race than I do the rest of the year.
The buffet, dining tables, and video screen are all in one big tent, along with all the media waiting for the racers to come in. It feels like a slightly subdued small town circus in here. Absolutely no privacy and a lot of loud chatter.
The cameras hover around us as we watch the endless loop of race vids shown to the folks back home today. I have to say that Team Seven appears brazenly gutsy in comparison to the other teams, who all look like they bolted from the same herd of sheep as they lope along the jungle paths. There is one dramatic scene of Team Three surprising a humongous python, but both humans and serpent slither off in different directions, no harm done. On Team Six, the woman is limping, and although it’s not very sportspersonlike to wish that your competitors get injured, I wouldn’t be sad if a few teams dropped out tonight.
Sebastian and I look like superheroes as we slide down our ropes and drop into the rapids. I’m grateful when the next scene reveals Sebastian crawling out while I’m on the bank doing an imitation of a nearly drowned but strong and stoic river rat, with blood running down my leg. The Secret Service cut out the helicopter drama. I’m sorry that the audience doesn’t get to see The President’s Son flip the double digit to the sky, though.
The vid switches to the other competitors, dwelling mainly on Catie Cole and Ricco Rossi running stylishly along a path. They both have big wet rings darkening their armpits—it’s nice to know that even celebrities sweat now and then. Madelyn Hatt and Jason Jones—Team Nine—barely look winded, which is a little disheartening, and Marco Senai and Suzana Mistri—Team Five—cover the terrain like graceful gazelles from Senai’s home country of Kenya.
Then the story moves back to Team Seven. The camera lingers on us as Sebastian glues my thigh wound, and if that wasn’t mortifying enough, it zooms in to show the expression on my face as I gaze down at him. I was feeling both pain and gratitude at that moment, but on screen it looks more like some sort of erotic trance, as if I plan to rip off his shorts as soon as we’re hidden in the jungle again.
My face flames in embarrassment. I sure hope that Emilio can’t see this coverage wherever his unit is stationed. I comfort myself with the knowledge that endurance racing is so far behind all the big corporate team sports like football and basketball that many Americans haven’t even heard of it. Marco and Maddie and Catie and I might be endurance racing stars, but t
o the world we are relative unknowns, in the same category as ping-pong champions or archery masters. Some of the sports channels might be following us, but this race is not likely to be featured in the regular feeds for more than a few seconds on a slow news day. Only two aspects of this competition make it newsworthy at all: the gorgeous Catie Cole, and the new national celebrity sitting beside me now.
I pretend to be fascinated with the rest of the vid, and then with dissecting a big piece of chicken on my plate. I feel Sebastian studying me, probably wondering about that close-up shot of my face in the film. The cameras in the room are aimed at me now, and the eyes of the robots are on me, too. I wish I was back home in my private little room.
Sebastian may not have asked for all this attention, but neither did I.
“Miss Grey,” one of the suits says.
I twist around at the voice. “Yeah?”
This suit has a sharp nose that matches his razor sharp haircut. He speaks with a slight accent, like he wasn’t born in the United States. He is sitting on a chair against the wall to the side of our table, frowning at a handheld computer. Without looking at me, he asks, “Where did you live before you became an emancipated minor?”
The cameras are always rolling in here, so I put on the sorrowful face that everyone expects. Actually, I don’t have to pretend to be sad, because this guy has just reminded me of that horrific Halloween Eve.
“After my parents died,” I say, “I lived several different places, pretty much with anyone who would take me in.”
I wave a hand vaguely in the air to demonstrate the nebulosity of my living situation.
“I was living with Marisela Santos and her family when I petitioned the court.” I always toss Marisela into the mix because law enforcement types can easily find records of phone calls between me and my adopted mom. Marisela has always kept up her side of the story, which is not hard for her, because she knows only the mythical diving accident version.
The suit is watching me carefully now. He’s still frowning. “How is it that you did not end up in a foster home?”
Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) Page 4