The news vids are in the mess tent tonight, but the media has been shepherded to a different tent. The day’s coverage includes a scene of Cole and Rossi galloping prettily across the snow, well in the lead. Viewers can tell the Golden Couple is working hard only because their breath is actually visible in the cold mountain air. Wisps of clouds stream in and out of the frames. Far down the mountain flank in the distance there are two black dots—Sebastian and me. A red circle appears around the black dots as the announcer identifies us. Then we simply disappear.
The film cuts to Team Five, Marco and Suzana, as they confront one of the island’s feral buffaloes. The bull paws the ground and lowers its head threateningly. Marco and Suzana separate, each moving in a different direction, and for a second, the beast can’t decide which one to attack. Then it gallops after Suzana, who screams when she glances over her shoulder and sees it closing on her. Marco runs up beside the buffalo, coming at it from an angle, and then he chucks the big rock in his hand. It bounces off the buffalo’s flank. The beast turns to find the attacker. But Marco is already dashing away and Suzana never stopped running, and so the buffalo stops, shaking his head and blowing out angry snorts.
Apparently Marco knows buffaloes, as well as crocodiles.
Then the vid cuts back to Team Seven as Sebastian crawls out of the crevasse over my back and then hauls me backward to safety. Neither of us appear the least bit glamorous; we’re soaked and bloody and our clothes are pulled every which way. We look like dweebs with our packs on backwards. Then there’s our laughter and our kiss and our fist-bump.
Our eyes meet across the table in real time. Then we both quickly look away. I don’t have a clue what Sebastian is thinking. Does he have a girlfriend back home?
I, of course, am wondering what Emilio will make of that kiss. With luck, that segment won’t be shown wherever he is today.
Something bleeps. The secret squirrel standing to my right presses a button on his wrist and pulls a tiny microphone from behind his jaw closer to his mouth. “Silverman,” he says quietly into the mike.
I hear the buzz of someone talking on the other end, but I can’t make out the words. The voice sounds angry, and although Silverman’s expression remains stoic, the color of his face morphs from olive to plum. “I’ve been told it was interference with drone signal, Sir. Contact was temporarily lost.”
More angry buzzing from the other end.
His gaze bounces across the room to connect with Hasanov at Sebastian’s side. Hasanov lifts his shoulders slightly in a shrug, or maybe a question.
“Yessir. I’ll check on it right away, Mr. President.” He casts a last glance at Hasanov and then darts his eyes toward Sebastian and me. Even I can read that—watch these two.
When Hasanov nods, Silverman ducks out of the tent flap, still repeating, “Yessir, yessir, I understand.”
The blond female agent and Hasanov exchange guilty glances. That phone call had to be about why our drone didn’t do anything to rescue us or even check on us, after Sebastian and I fell into the crevasse. I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I wonder if the drone staff includes any of the keepers who camp with us each evening, or if there’s a separate drone crew off in a tent somewhere more hospitable, manipulating controls and watching the video feed. Maybe the drone operator took a bathroom break at a bad time and simply lost us. I probably wouldn’t admit to that, either.
The tension in the room feels like static electricity. Whoever’s in charge of our drone will probably be fired tonight.
Mr. Wrinkle interrupts the awkward moment to deliver a box of packages and letters to Sebastian, and a laptop to me. Which indicates that maybe I have at least a couple of messages. Marisela has sent me a long email about her fears as she watched me on television and her gratitude that I have survived so far. Winning is not important, she writes, you have the rest of your life to win other races.
I bite my lip. Little does she know. I was trying not to think about losing this race. Now she’s reminded me.
Kai says it’s rad that I’m now a mountain climber, and Kiki asks if I’m in love with Sebastian. He’s so SO, whatever that means to an eight-year-old, but what about cousin Emilio? Aren’t you getting married?
I moan and hold my head in my hands. Married? I am seventeen, I want to scream. I have zero intentions of becoming anyone’s wife for at least the next ten years.
Across the table from me, Sebastian rips open an official-looking letter and scans it.
“Yeah, right,” he says, and then tosses it onto the floor.
The blond agent retrieves the page. She seems to be in charge of picking up things that The President’s Son throws away. I think Sebastian told me her name is Macey. Her eyes widen as she reads it. Sebastian angrily snatches the page back and stuffs it into his box.
“Bad news?” I ask.
“Full ride to Harvard to study law,” Sebastian growls.
“In whose world is that bad?”
He shrugs. “They’re offering only because The Prez went there. I am, as they say, a ‘legacy’.” He makes finger quotes around the words in the air.
I don’t respond. How can he be so ungrateful?
“I already have a full scholarship to Enciron U,” he explains. “And I earned that one. I don’t want to study law. Haven’t lawyers already ruined this country?”
Enciron U, located in Northern California, is the most innovative university in the United States, maybe in the world. They offer practical programs to study real-world problems, and ingenuity is prized far more than memorization among their students. Every science nerd I know wants to go to Enciron. Their grads walk into big salaries the instant they get their degrees.
I swallow down my bitterness to ask, “What do you want to study?”
“I am studying Environmental Chemistry,” he says, reminding me that he’s two years older than I am, not to mention a lot further down the road to a meaningful life than the one I have, shoveling giraffe doodoo in Seattle.
Environmental Chemistry could mean practically anything. I raise a questioning eyebrow.
“I’m working on a strategy to mine landfills.” Having delivered those picturesque words, he inspects the dessert plate in the middle of our table, selects an artistic little fruit tart from the array, and bites into it.
I picture garbage blasting heavenwards and then raining back down. Disgusting. Why in the world would anyone─
He spots the confusion on my face, licks a piece of kiwi from his upper lip, and grins. “Not to blow them up, silly. Mining, as in recovering the valuable minerals and chemicals buried all over the earth. Converting plastic back to petroleum.”
His explanation comes too late, because I’ve already flashed back to that dumpster I hid out in three years ago. I can smell the sour odor, see that ugly damp patch of God-Knows-What on the rusty metal wall across from where I’m crouched.
He continues. “It’s the ultimate recycling, plus the only way to clean up all the waste dumps.”
“How noble.” It sounds sarcastic, but I really mean those words. It’s just that I’m fighting down a surge of nausea. The fish on the plate in front of me is not helping. I suck down a big gulp of air.
He sighs heavily. “My first semester at Enciron, I had a solid B average. After the big reveal, suddenly I became smarter. Now I get all A’s.”
He has no idea how petty and privileged all this sounds to me. I stare at the table and rub the back of my aching neck, trying to smooth down the knots there.
“What do you want to study in college?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No money; no college. At least not for now.”
I’d give anything to go to college. But half my school records say Robinson and half say Grey. That could be a big problem. Not to mention the money angle. Even the best scholarships don’t pay for all expenses. I lost everything that night three years ago—my family, my name, my future.
“Sir, the threat level is still high,” says one o
f our guards.
I’ve had it with all this secrecy. I jump to my feet. My chair falls backward behind me with a clatter.
“WHAT is this freaking, world-shattering threat?” I yell at the suit. I feel the fireflies on my back light up with my anger.
The Secret Service agent acts as if he doesn’t hear me. He focuses his gaze on the far wall of the tent.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sebastian tells me.
I angrily squint my eyes at him.
He dips his chin, which needs a shave, and calmly explains, “There’s always a threat to the president and his family and pretty much everyone who works with the president. There will always be a threat. This is Garrison’s way of trying to keep me in captivity.”
I glance at Hasanov, the suit by Sebastian’s side. If ever a man could do an eye roll without moving a muscle, this pointy-nosed Secret Service guy is doing it.
I turn back to the laptop and do a Net search through the latest news for threat to United States. Whoa! So many hits. A few are economic articles, pretty much nonsensical to me. But then there are more links that mention all the civil wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Big surprise. Always plenty of threats there.
Hasanov twitches, looks at his wrist gizmo, frowns, glances quickly at me and then back at the gizmo again. I have a sneaking suspicion. I search for Secret Service Verde Island, which gets no hits, but his gaze darts in my direction again. Damn. He’s monitoring my keystrokes.
I guess I should have expected that.
A new email message pings onto the screen: HOW COULD YOU?
Emilio has apparently seen the vid of today’s events. No Are you okay? or I can’t believe you fell down a crevasse!
Shadow would focus on that two-second kiss. I decide to let him cool off before I answer.
I toy with the food on my plate, suddenly feeling completely exhausted. Defeated. My foot hurts. My whole body is sore. I feel like I’m seventy instead of seventeen.
“Fourth place,” I murmur despondently.
Sebastian’s hand lands on top of mine. “We could still win. Team Four just dropped out. He got an ACL injury.”
“So our fourth place is last place now.” I groan.
When I’ve witnessed this self-pity in others during races, I always want to give them a slap and tell them to get over themselves. Yet here I am, wallowing.
“We are contenders,” he insists.
“If you say so.”
“I do.” He turns his attention back to finishing his food.
Because it’s the evening before the big finish, we are shepherded through falling snow to the media tent, where the newsquackers group us all for a joint interview, positioning us along one side of a table in order of our current rank in the race. As each racer takes a chair, I notice he or she is also moving stiffly. We all sport bruises and scrapes on our faces and hands. Some of our competitors probably wear elastic bandages like mine beneath their clothing, too. I am reminded of salmon swimming upstream, how they all keep going despite getting so beaten up along the way.
“And last but not least,” Mrs. Wrinkle, playing the chirpy organizer tonight, points to the final two chairs. “Team Seven!”
Maybe not least, but certainly the most depressing. Sebastian and I glumly take our seats.
The first question is why we want to win. Duh. I struggle to come up with something that sounds noble, and by the time the cameras turn my way, I’ve got it. “I want to win for my Mom and Dad.”
There’s a catch in my voice as I say the last word, and I press my lips together and blink to keep tears at bay. I’m not acting. I’d like to think I make Mom and Dad proud, wherever they are now.
The cameras and microphones move back up the row. The next question: If you win, what would you do with the prize money?
Catie says she’d donate it to the Special Olympics. Marco says he’d use it to buy a spectacular vacation for his whole extended family—all forty-two of them. Yeesh.
I wonder what Maddie would have said.
When they get to Sebastian, he rubs a thumb across the whiskers on his chin for a second. “Maybe buy a nicer house for my mom and dad.” He tosses his head and clarifies. “My real dad, not The President. And I’d put some money into my landfill mining project.”
They focus on me. “How about you, Zany?”
I would save Bailey. My eyes tear up again, and I quickly look away. “I have a plan for it.”
A reporter presses me. “Your plan sounds important.”
“It is.” I swallow to tamp down the rasp in my voice before saying, “I have a friend whose life is in danger. I would use that money to save him.”
Naturally the reporters want to know whose life. If I told Bailey’s story, it would ignite a Net firestorm. There’s a sizeable percentage of the population who would argue that Bailey is not worth saving. While a few might consider me a hero, I don’t want to be at the forefront of any debate.
So I shake my head. “I don’t want to give false hope.”
Some of my competitors look perplexed by my statement. A few squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Most viewers will assume that I’m talking about some medical procedure that an insurance company has refused to pay for. That’s another of Garrison’s economic control policies that polite people don’t discuss. Corporate profits always trump individual lives; it’s a basic principle of life in the Twenty-First Century.
Catie Cole stares at me with glistening eyes that make me wonder if she’s lost someone important lately. Then my brain gloms onto the fact that Catie’s father is always with her, but I’ve never heard anything about Mrs. Cole. What happened to Catie’s mother?
The press conference finally ends and we all move off to our sleeping tents.
“There’s money attached to second and third place,” Sebastian reminds me.
I shake my head. Five hundred thousand to split for second, two hundred fifty thousand for third. Not nearly enough for what I need. No bank would give a seventeen-year-old minimum-wage employee a loan for the rest. “I don’t want second or third.”
“There are only four teams left. And there is still a whole day to complete the course, Tarzan.” He grins and gives my shoulder a little pat.
I want to believe he has a point. We are still both in relatively good shape. Maybe a miracle will happen and the three teams ahead of us will encounter major problems tomorrow. Although I hope nobody else dies, I am evil enough to wish sprained ankles or getting lost in the jungle on my competitors.
I try to envision winning. And I try to imagine how to ask Sebastian for the whole million.
Chapter 13
Outside, the wind moans around our encampment. Snow crystals scour the sides of our tent. When I go out for my nightly ritual, I find a totally different world than last night. The full moon is only a blur in the swirling snow above. The stars are completely obliterated. There’s little point in looking up, so I stand with my eyes closed, inhaling the cold clear air, feeling the snow brushing my cheeks, hoping the weather clears up by tomorrow morning, and trying to think of something to be thankful for in addition to surviving one more day.
My thoughts land first on the tiger. She was so fearsome and proud, and yet so sad and alone. Seeing a tiger in the wild—that was miraculous, even if it was terrifying at the moment. Next, I remember the myriad shades of blue in the icy crevasse, and I decide I am grateful for getting to see the inside of a place like that. Then my brain replays the sheer terror and agonizing tension of our climb out, and finally my partner’s kiss.
“I am grateful to have Sebastian Callendro for my partner,” I whisper to the snowflakes stinging my face.
A hand lands on my forearm, startling me out of my private mental screening of the day’s events. The leather glove on my sleeve belongs to the suit shadowing me. He impatiently tilts his head back toward the tent.
I step inside the flap and shake off the snow that has accumulated on my jacket and hair. Sebastian, perhaps smar
ter than I, didn’t come outside with me this time to say goodnight to the world. He’s lying on his bed with the covers up to his neck, staring at the canvas stretched overhead.
“Sounds cold out there,” he remarks.
“Got that right.” I turn my back and unzip my jacket and begin the process of stripping down to my thermal underwear for sleeping.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says.
“Don’t hurt yourself.”
He ignores my snarkiness. “A crocodile, a land mine, a tiger, a crevasse.”
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” I sing as I slide into my bed. The sheets are cold against my bare feet, and I slide out again to put my socks back on.
“Haven’t run across that partridge yet,” he says, yawning. “Maybe tomorrow. But no worries, because I think Team Seven might be immortal, Tarzan.”
My entire body aches as I bend down to pull on my socks. “If I were immortal, I wouldn’t hurt this much.”
“Maybe that’s part of the deal.”
Now there’s a horrible thought, that you could be doomed to suffer throughout life but never die. Naturally my masochistic memory works to disprove this possibility, rewinding to Maddie’s death scene and then back to my parents’ bodies on our living room floor. Here one minute, and gone the next.
“Nobody is immortal,” I tell him.
Why would anyone want to be? You’d have to watch everyone you love die over and over again.
I have a hard time getting to sleep. Apparently Sebastian does, too, because after a half hour or so, he whispers, “You awake, Tarzan?”
“I am now. It’s freezing in here.”
“I’m too cold to sleep.” He’s beside me, lifting up the edge of my down comforter. “Shared bodily warmth?”
I choose my words carefully. “Get in. You can sleep beside me.”
He yawns and slips into my bed, pressing his back against me. I slide my arm under my pillow and roll over onto my side away from him.
“Is Aaron your boyfriend?”
My pulse skips a couple of beats. “What?”
His voice was soft. Maybe I didn’t hear that right.
Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) Page 12