The Edge

Copyright © 2015 by Roland Smith

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Jacket art © 2015 JIMMY CHIN/National Geographic Creative

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Smith, Roland, 1951–, author.

The edge / by Roland Smith.

p. cm.

Sequel to: Peak.

Summary: Fifteen-year-old Peak Marcello is invited to participate in an “International Peace Ascent” in the Hindu Kush, with a team made up of under-eighteen-year-old climbers from around the world—but from the first something seems wrong, so when the group is attacked, and most of the climbers are either killed or kidnapped, Peak finds himself caught up in a struggle to survive, shadowed by the Shen, a mysterious snow leopard.

ISBN 978-0-544-34122-7

1. Mountaineering—Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Juvenile fiction. 2. Survival—Juvenile fiction. 3. Snow leopard—Juvenile fiction. 4. Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Mountaineering—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Snow leopard—Fiction. 4. Leopard—Fiction. 5. Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S65766Sh 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2014044086

eISBN 978-0-544-63653-8
v1.1015

For Alessia

The snow leopard makes an impossible leap.

Twelve feet.

Maybe fifteen.

Up the sheer rockface.

Landing on a narrow shelf as if she is lighter than air.

Her two cubs stand below, yowling for her to come back down. She stretches out, her dusky white paws hanging over the ledge. Her long, thick tail flicking back and forth like a metronome.

She looks down at the cubs, yawns, wraps her tail around her body, then closes her pale green eyes.

“
THAT'S RUDE!
”

“They need their mommy!”

Paula and Patrice. My twin sisters—well, half sisters—the two Peas. Like two peas in a pod. Seven years old. Just. I'm the third Pea. My name is Peak. Not Pete. Peak Marcello.

The two Peas and I share the same birthday. They were born, on the day I turned eight, to my mom and my stepdad, Rolf—a good guy, but very different from me.

Paula was holding my right hand. Patrice my left. We were at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, not far from our loft on the Upper East Side.

“Maybe the snow leopard needs a little break from the kids,” I told them.

“Are you saying
you
need a break?” Patrice asked.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Paula said.

They look alike, they sound alike, they think alike.

“Lucky for you I wasn't thinking that at all,” I told them.

They smiled. Same smile. Same missing teeth.

Different clothes, though. They don't believe in dressing the same. “Twins dressing the same is goofy!” Every morning they have a little meeting and decide who will wear what. No arguments. Fashion is not their thing. Music is their thing.

Piano.

Prodigies.

Both of them.

Me? Not so much. Unless you count the ability to climb sheer rockfaces and buildings a talent. Although buildings are out now or I'll be locked up until I'm eighteen.

“If you can't do the time, don't do the climb.”

“What?” Paula asked.

“Nothing.” I hate it when my private thoughts come out of my mouth without me knowing it, and it had been happening a lot lately. What was that about?

“You could climb up there,” Patrice said, pointing at the mother snow leopard.

She was right. I had already figured out three routes up to the ledge. I couldn't help myself. It's what I do.

“Not as gracefully as the snow leopard,” I said.

“There's no snow,” Paula pointed out.

“Not in July.” It was a sweltering ninety-two degrees in the city and was supposed to get hotter.

“It's still a snow leopard, even without the snow,” Patrice said.

“Did you see snow leopards on the mountain?” Paula asked.

She's asking about Everest. I was up there a couple months earlier, but standing at sea level in the sticky heat with the twins, it seemed like a century ago.

“The only animals on Everest are yaks and birds.”

“Why?”

“Because there's no food except for camp garbage.”

“Snow leopards don't eat garbage,” Paula said.

“Birds do,” Patrice insisted.

Patrice was right. The birds also picked at the frozen corpses at the higher altitudes, but I didn't tell them this.

“What do they call snow leopards in Tibet?” Paula asks.

I tried to remember. I hadn't picked up much Tibetan or Nepalese on Everest, but it seemed like one of the other climbers called it . . .

The twins' smartphones started playing Chopin's polonaise Op. 53 in A-flat major. The only reason I knew the piece was that they had been practicing it for at least a year. I'd heard the music so many times, I thought I might be able to play it on the piano myself.

“Texts!” they shouted in unison, reaching into their pockets.

That would be
one
text from either my mom or stepdad. They always text all of us so no one feels left out. Somewhere my smartphone was buzzing too, or maybe not, because I hadn't charged it in a week. In fact, I wasn't exactly sure where I had left the phone. Probably in my bedroom, or maybe in the kitchen. Drove my parents nuts. They couldn't threaten to take it away from me, because I didn't want it in the first place. I understand the idea of smartphones, but I think smartphones look dumb.

Almost everyone in front of the snow leopard cage was holding a smartphone—talking, listening to music, snapping photos, thumbing texts, tweeting, whatever. I'd rather hold the twins' hands than a smartphone.

“Mom,” Patrice said.

“She wants us to go to the bookstore,” Paula chimed in.

“Right away.”

Mom co-owns a small bookstore with a friend.

“Shen!”
I shouted.

The twins' eyes went wide. The crowd stared at me.

“Shen,”
I repeated, more quietly. “That's what they call the snow leopard in Tibet.”

MOM'S BOOKSTORE IS
called the Summit Bookshop—not surprising, as she was a world-class climber before I was born. But the shop carries very few titles about climbing or mountaineering, and those it does carry are written by climbers she knows personally, including my bio dad, Joshua Wood, whom I rarely see and, to be truthful, don't miss much.

The store was doing okay, considering most people are reading their books on electronic gizmos now. It stays in business because of Mom's taste in books.

When Mom stopped climbing, she started reading—everything. No TV or video games for me, the twins, or Rolf. We spend our spare time with words and music. Oh, and climbing—at least in my case, but not so much since I came down from Everest. Instead, I'd been hanging with the twins, which saved them from hanging out in the bookstore all day. We'd been going to museums, plays, concerts, and movies almost every day.

So far I hadn't gotten the itch to climb, but I knew it was coming. It was just a matter of time.

We left the zoo, walked up Fifth, took a right on East Sixty-Sixth, then walked into the air-conditioned Summit Bookshop. It was jammed with people getting out of the heat. Mostly nannies. On weekday afternoons, the place looks like a daycare center. Mom has a little coffee shop in the corner of the store and makes more money selling coffee and pastries than she makes selling books.

The nannies sipped iced lattes, chattering in several languages over their cooing babies and crying tots, talking about their real children, who lived long subway rides from where we lived. The twins ran over to the strollers and started making baby noises in perfect harmony.

Mom came out of the back room carrying an armload of books with a padded envelope balanced on top. “How was the zoo?”

“Hot, but we were having a good time. What did you need the twins for?”

“I didn't need the twins. I needed you. And knowing you wouldn't have your phone, I used them as intermediaries. I wish you'd carry your phone.”

“Sorry.”

“Right.” She set the books down and handed me the envelope.

“What's this?”

“Vincent dropped it by.”

Vincent is my literary mentor, a.k.a. English teacher, at the Greene Street School. The school is filled with little geniuses like the twins. Then there's me. Everyone there has to have some kind of special talent. It was decided, without asking me, that I was the school's writer. To pass to the next grade, I had to write about my experiences on Everest in a couple of Moleskine journals.

I knew what was in the envelope without opening it. I'd carried Moleskine journals to the summit of the highest mountain on earth—well, almost to the summit.

“Are you going to open it?” Mom asked.

I tore the envelope open. Two Moleskine journals. Blank. Big surprise. There was a yellow sticky note on the cover of one of the journals in Vincent's careful printing.

Write something in First Person Present Tense. V.

“Looks like Vincent has an assignment for you.”

“I already completed his assignment on Everest,” I pointed out. “And school doesn't start for more than a month.”

(Note to Vincent: First person present tense is a ridiculous viewpoint. To start with, it's unbelievable. You're writing as if what is happening to you at that very moment is actually happening right then, but the reader knows that's not true. How can something be happening to you while you're writing about it in a journal? And don't tell me that the writer is merely transcribing what happened in real time. FPPT is a literary trick, but I've used some of it in this journal, so you'll know that I can do it. And I can't believe that you dropped off an assignment a month before school starts. What's the matter with you?)

“It won't hurt you to keep your writing brain working until school begins,” Mom said. “You're a good writer.”

I wasn't a good writer. Yet.

“Writing is no different from piano,” Mom continued. “You have to practice to be good at it.”

“Except when you're practicing piano, you're not writing the music—you're playing other people's scores. When you write, you need to have something to write about.”

“I'm sure you'll figure something out. But Vincent's assignment is not why I pulled you from the zoo. You have some old friends waiting for you in my office.”

“Who?”

“Go see for yourself.”

JR, WILL, AND JACK.
We'd been on Everest together.

With them was another guy I didn't know. They were gathered in front of Mom's climbing wall. The wall is covered with beautiful photos of her in her former climbing days, clinging and dangling at impossible inverted angles on sheer rock walls along with my real father, Joshua Wood.

“She was called the Fly,” I said as I walked into the room.

They all turned around.

“She's incredible,” JR said. “It's great to see you, Peak.”

It was great to see them, too. We shook hands.

“This is Ethan Todd,” Jack said. “The newest member of our team.”