The Edge (15 page)

“I'm sure the kidnappers have a way of getting their demands out,” Rafe said. “Be pretty stupid to nab a bunch of people with no way to let anybody know about it.”

“Maybe,” Ethan said. “But, rather than sticking in camp, it seems like our best bet would be to head downriver to the nearest village or town. If we get lucky, we might even get a sat or cell signal.”

“I wouldn't bet on finding a signal, mate. And the nearest village, if you even want to call it that, is a three- or four-day hike.”

“Not in a kayak,” Ethan said.

“You have a kayak?”

“Two-person inflatable. Do you know how to use a two-person?”

“Of course I do,” Rafe scoffed.

I didn't say anything. Rafe had surprised me with the camel. And the camel surprised him when it saw the river. He very well may have been an expert kayaker. But none of this made any difference to me. I wasn't going with them.

“The water's not that fast here,” Ethan said. “But there might be some tricky places downriver were it narrows. If you see trouble ahead, you can always haul out and portage around it. The kayak is as light as a feather.”

Cindy's eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by ‘you'?”

“I mean you and Rafe. It's a two-person kayak. You two need to get out of here. Get help. Let people know what happened. I'm going with Peak.”

This was news to me, but I was happy to hear it.

“What about your ankle?” Cindy asked.

“It's a lot better today than it was yesterday. And it'll be even better tomorrow. I'll use the camel.”

“Do you know how to drive a camel?” Rafe asked.

“No, but I've driven a yak, elephant, horse, and car, and flown an airplane. I should be able to figure it out.”

“And a snowboard down McKinley,” Rafe said with a smirk.

“That's right, mate,” Ethan said, returning the smile, then turned to me. “That's if you want me with you.”

“Of course,” I nearly shouted.

Ethan slapped his hands together. “Great! Then we have a plan.”

“No one asked me what I thought,” Cindy said.

“Sorry,” Ethan said. “If you have a better idea, I'm all ears.”

“Two could ride the kayak, and two of us could walk downriver.”

I was about to say something, but Ethan beat me to it.

“Except Peak isn't going downriver. He wants to find his mom and the others. And I don't blame him. We can't leave them out there hoping that the kidnappers let them go.”

“What are you going to do if you find them?” Cindy asked.

“Exactly,” Rafe said. “I asked Peak the same question last night.”

“And I bet Peak said that he didn't know,” Ethan said.

“That's right,” Rafe answered.

“You know,” I said, “I'm standing right here.”

Ethan laughed. “Sorry. We'll figure it out when we catch up to them—if we catch up to them. It's no different from climbing a mountain that you haven't been up before. You figure it out as you go along. I'm not letting Peak go alone, and if he wasn't going, I might go after them myself.”

“Enough of this,” I said. “We're wasting time. I'm outta here.” I started down to the river to retrieve my gear from the camel.

“Hold on,” Ethan said.

I turned my head but kept walking. “What?”

“I'll take care of the gear, drinking water, and kayak. Why don't you tape Rafe up again? I think I saw some waterproof bandages in Phillip's first aid kit. By the time you get him rewrapped, I'll be ready to go.”

Which would probably be another forty-five minutes to an hour—and this was the problem of climbing with other people. I was grateful Ethan wanted to go with me, but I didn't want to wait a second longer. I wanted to find Mom and Zopa and, to be honest, Alessia. And thinking about this brought on a memory that made me smile, unlikely as that was under the horrible circumstances. Mom was not much of a cook. We ate out, or ordered in, almost every night of the week, and it drove me nuts. Not the food, but the
What do you want to eat? Where do you want to eat?
Five different answers every night
.
My answer was always
I don't care.
It took us longer to decide than it did to get the food and eat it. The memory made me grin.

“What are you grinning at?” Rafe asked, irritably.

“Family dinners,” I said, my grin broadening.

AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES
later, the ticked-off Cindy and wounded Rafe pushed away from shore and started downriver. They did four complete three-sixties before getting the kayak bow pointed in the right direction. Rafe shouted instructions at Cindy through each revolution, but it seemed to me that it wasn't Cindy causing the problem. It was Rafe.

Ethan shook his head as we watched them disappear around the bend. “I hope they're strong swimmers.”

We walked up to where he had tied the camel. Ethan was favoring his right ankle, but not nearly as badly as he had been the day before. The camel looked like she was carrying the entire contents of a flea market on her back.

“I know what you're thinking,” Ethan said. “Don't worry. We can get rid of this stuff along the way if we think we can do without it.”

“Where are you going to sit?”

“I'm not sure I want to sit up there at all, but I guess I should try so I don't aggravate my ankle, which should be as good as new by tomorrow. What's our next step?”

“I recalibrated my altimeter next to the river. When we get up to where they split off, we'll compare Phillip's drone photos to the topography maps and maybe figure out where they're headed.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ethan said. “But at some point, you're going to have to get some sleep. You've been up all night stumbling across the scree. You look hammered.”

He didn't have to tell me. I felt hammered, but hoped part of it had to do with worry and not exhaustion.

“Let's go,” I said.

WE ARRIVED A LITTLE AFTER NOON
at the spot where our path had diverged. The scree felt like lava. I stared down at my boots to make sure they weren't on fire. There wasn't a shadow on the entire slope.

I looked up at Ethan. Somehow he had completely changed his appearance. Or else Lawrence of Arabia was on the camel. He was decked out in baggy white cotton pants, a white kurta, and a white keffiyeh on his head, all of which he had managed to change into on camelback without me seeing him.

“You brought that with you?”

Ethan shook his turbaned head. “It's either Elham's or Ebadullah's.” He tapped the camel on a front shoulder with a trekking pole. The camel immediately lay down. He climbed off. The donkey trotted over and rubbed against the camel's side.

“Dead man's clothes,” I said.

“I don't think they'd mind.” Ethan took a long drink of water. “There's a reason they've dressed this way for centuries. My core temp has dropped by at least twenty degrees since I put these on. There's another set if you want them.”

“No, I'm good,” I said, although I wasn't. I was burning up. I looked at my watch, which my dad had given to me on Everest. It did everything but make him a good dad. It was a hundred and fourteen degrees out. Ten degrees hotter than the day before. It was going to be a long day.

Before Rafe and I headed down to the river, I'd stacked a few rocks up to mark where the trail split. I spread the topo maps and drone photos out on the ground along with the watch that did everything. Plank of course had provided another fancy watch with the gear, but I hadn't taken it out of the box because I hadn't had the time to figure how to use it, what with people getting injured, murdered, and kidnapped.

“So this is where they took off,” Ethan said.

I pointed. “To the northeast.”

He shaded his eyes and looked in that direction. “Odd, isn't it? It would have been a lot easier for them to head down to the river and follow it east.”

“Unless they know something about what lies upriver that we don't know.”

“What lies in the direction they're traveling is China.”

“I'm sure there's something before China.”

“My point is, are you sure this is the way they're headed?”

I looked northeast along the scree. It looked exactly like the scree in every other direction. Undisturbed. What looked like a freeway in the dark looked like a hillside of treacherous rocks the size of fists. If I were in Ethan's boots, I'd be raising the same doubt.

“It was clearer last night when the rocks were freshly flipped. The sun has obviously dried them out. I don't know what else to do but follow along where I think they were headed and hope we stumble across a cigarette butt.”

Ethan grinned. “Sounds like a plan. Just checking.”

I looked back down at the maps. “I just need to pinpoint where I think we are on the map and photos. I'm hoping to discover something up ahead that—”

“Whoa!”

I looked up, thinking that maybe he had twisted his ankle again. But he was standing right where he had been, staring at his wrist. “GPS,” he said.

“What?”

“I have a signal.”

I looked at my own watch, and sure enough, the GPS had connected to a satellite a couple hundred miles above us. I now knew exactly where we were, but if we couldn't tell anyone what had happened, it did us little good.

Ethan fished his cell phone out of his pack, turned it on, and shook his head. “No cell towers around here, and Cindy has the only sat phone, which she's probably drowned by now.”

“If I'd known, I would have asked her to give it to us,” I said.

“And she would have said no way. She found it in Phillip's stuff when her cell went dead. Girl's addicted to her cell. She only has one useful hand. The other hand always has a phone in it.”

“I wondered if you and her were—”

Ethan laughed. “Not my type, and I'm not her type either. She was doing that stuff with me at the river to get under Phillip's skin and because she didn't want to go for a hike. The moment you disappeared up the hill, she disappeared into her tent. The only time she came out was to hold a phone above her head to see if she could catch a signal.”

I didn't know why, but I was kind of relieved. It wasn't like I cared about who liked whom, but I'd been a little disappointed when it looked like Ethan was interested in Cindy. And I wasn't knocking Cindy. She wasn't the outdoorsy type, and there was nothing the matter with—

What am I doing? I never think like this, and even if I did think like this, now is not the time! What's the matter with me?

I looked at the GPS coordinates on my watch, then tried to find them on the map. For some reason, I was having a hard time with this simple task. The map didn't seem to make any sense to me. Then I forgot the coordinates and had to look at my watch again, and the numbers didn't make sense.

“You're not sweating,” Ethan said.

“What?” I looked up and wondered who the man in white was.

The man in white squatted down next to me. “Drink some water.”

“Not thirsty.”

“You're slurring your words.”

“I'm what?”

“Drink. You have heat stroke. I think we need to—”

THE NEXT THING I REMEMBER
was a bouncing, rocking sensation. I thought I was in the hull of a ship with my hands and feet tied. My eyes felt like they had been glued shut. I had to rub them to get them open. I was assaulted by a piercing white light. I looked down at my hands. They were tied with climbing rope. There was a climbing harness around my waist cinched down to a . . .

“What is this?” I yelled. “Who—”

The ship came to a sudden stop. I felt myself sinking. The white light disappeared and was replaced by blue sky and Ethan's worried face.

“You okay?”

“Why did you tie me up?” I shouted.

“You're sweating,” he said. “That's great.”

“So you were with them from the very beginning!” I jerked on the ropes.

Ethan's expression changed from worry to utter confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“You're with them!” I shouted.

My outraged accusation did not cause the reaction I thought it would. Ethan started laughing. Which enraged me even more. If my hands hadn't been tied, I would have strangled him.

“Chill out,” he said. “You'll hurt yourself. I'll untie you.”

This stalled my outrage. I began to think that maybe I had misjudged the situation. Ethan was being too reasonable and cheerful. I stopped struggling, but I continued to glare at him as he loosened the ropes.

“Sorry about the tie job,” he said. “But I didn't know any other way to keep you on the camel after you conked out.”

“Conked out?”

“Yeah. Eyeballs rolled up to the top of your sockets. Caught you before you did a face plant on the rocks. For a second, I thought I'd lost you to the great beyond. Managed to get you cooled off and hydrated. Had to get you out of your clothes into something cooler.”

I looked down at what I was wearing. Baggy cotton pants and a kurta. Dead man's clothes, which I have to say were more comfortable than climbing pants and a T-shirt.

“I wet you down and rigged a shelter with tent poles on the back of the camel,” he continued. “The problem was keeping you in place. Had to truss you up to keep you from falling off and cracking your head on the rocks.”

It started to come back to me. Not the kurta, the wetting, or the trussing, but the reason he had to tend to me.

“Heat stroke,” I said.

“Bigtime. More like heat fist. A knockout.”

Ethan got the last knot undone. I rubbed my numb wrists.

“So you're not a terrorist or a kidnapper.”