Chapter Six
They reached the river before Mandy decided how much of the real story to tell her sister. She’d always wanted to meet Babette,
and the chance to spend a whole week with her was too good to pass up. But she hadn’t thought it all the way through. Liv
wouldn’t understand what she’d done, and she’d be even angrier when she found out how long Mandy had been hiding it from her.
Mandy looked out across the Colorado, searching for an answer in the fast-flowing water. The river was more motion than object,
thick and viscous, roiling with sediment, a muddy orange fist hooking through the canyon walls. Mandy removed her shoes and
slipped her feet into a pocket of quiet water by the bank, letting its chill prick her awake after the tiring hike down. She
took a step deeper, flirting with the lip of the current, testing its fearsome shove.
“Not too far,” Liv whispered.
Mandy took another step.
The truth was, Mandy liked her sister’s protectiveness.
So different from her friends back in Austin, the ones who pushed her over the edge to justify their own free falls.
They loved concocting cocktails and costumes, making out with strangers at black-light-and-hay-speckled music festivals.
Most nights, Mandy loved that too. But sister trips were a time to reset.
To strip back the paint and partying and come back to her old self.
Even preparing for this trip, waking up early to jog along Lake Austin, she’d felt better.
And now here they were, and Liv’s love felt as claustrophobic as ever. Mandy never could tell if Liv worried because she cared
or because she didn’t trust Mandy to take care of herself. Probably some of both. And so secrets piled up, covering the rough
patches where trust ran ragged between them.
She’d tell Liv everything. But not until Babette gave her official welcome. Mandy was a decent storyteller, but Babette had
built an empire with her words. Babette could explain everything.
The rest of the guests filtered in slowly, gazing at the river, dunking their feet, tossing off their packs, and tucking into
low-lying pockets of shade offered by scraggly bushes along the shore. Every few minutes, PK took a lap around the beach,
looking from his watch to the water to the sky, like a dog who had lost his owner. But if he was hoping for a sign of Babette,
none was forthcoming.
Finally, there was a whoop from the river, and up came a flotilla: a thirty-five-foot-long barge, with two smaller rafts linked
by rope trailing behind. The parade was both rugged and majestic, and it was suddenly obvious that this had been Babette’s
plan all along: to float in on an inflatable throne, held aloft in a litter by a crew of shirtless, gleaming boatmen, the
freshly anointed empress of the river.
Mandy rushed to the bank to watch. There was only one person on the barge, a weathered man in a faded orange life jacket,
wielding a pair of oars atop a mountain of bulging tarps. He was towing two rafts, one of which was empty. The other held
a young woman with a long braid down her back, using a paddle as a rudder. Babette was nowhere to be seen.
The rafts were bright as sunflowers, blazing above the thick brown river.
“Yellow,” Imogen groused. “Kill me now.”
The braided woman leapt from her raft, flaked out a rope, and tossed one end to Thor on the bank.
Within minutes, the guides had all three boats anchored to stakes pounded into the sand.
The oarsman on the barge stood, took a running leap over the bulging tarps, and flew not toward the beach but into the heart of the river.
He hit the water with a big splash and a bigger yell.
A few sharp strokes later, he scrambled up on shore and shook himself like a satisfied mutt.
“Wild Adventures?” He unclipped his life jacket and took off his sunglasses, revealing a crinkled smile, scraggly beard, and
a blue bandana peeking out the collar of his soaked long-sleeved shirt.
“Howdy. I’m Big Pete. Your trip leader. Welcome to the Colorado.” Everyone nodded, or waved, or made the absolute minimum
effort to demonstrate that they’d survived the hike down. “We’ll do introductions tonight at camp. For now, there’s me, head
boatman. Our other guides are Katy, intrepid boatgirl”—the young woman with the braid rolled her eyes—“and you’ve already
met Thor and Marc. Marc will head back to the rim with the mules today and meet us with the van at the end of the trip. Thor
will be on the river with us.” The long-haired guide looked positively itching to get on the water, his fingers spidering
up the clasps of his life jacket to clip on a knife and a mesh bag stuffed with rope.
“Katy’ll talk your ear off about the plants and geology around here,” Big Pete continued, “and Thor’s our trip medic. If you
need anything, holler for any of us.”
“Holler?” Liv asked. “Are we piloting the rafts ourselves?”
“Not a chance.” Big Pete grinned. “There will be a guide in each raft telling you what to do. Plus one on the supply boat—the
big boy we call the chub—with all the gear. Mostly we’ll just float along. But we’re starting with a bang. These next rapids,
a couple miles downriver from here, they’re two of the biggest whippers we’ll see on the trip. Get ready to hold on.”
Liv’s hand shot into the air. “Will there be a tutorial?”
“Wear your PFD—your life jacket. Never take it off when you’re on the water, no matter how calm it seems. Follow the instructions
your guide gives you. When they say paddle forward, paddle forward. When they say stop, stop. Rafting’s easy. Until it’s not.”
Mandy grabbed her sister’s hand to keep her from raising it again.
“I know you’ve had a long hike down,” Pete continued. “And there’s more work ahead. I promise we’ll take good care of you. But more importantly, you ten will take care of each other.”
He gave them what Mandy imagined was his best football-coach-before-the-big-game face. Then he frowned.
“I count nine. We missing someone?”
PK swooped in next to him. His faux-hawk was somehow refreshed despite the brutal heat.
“We’re not missing someone,” he said grandly. He gave a thumbs-up to Imogen. Then PK dropped to one knee on the rocky beach
and aimed his phone in her direction. “We’re waiting for someone.”
Imogen looked up at the sky reverently.
“She’s coming,” she said.
The girl kept gazing up into the sunshine, not blinking, waging a staring contest with the empty sky.
Liv nudged Mandy. “This is seeming more and more like a cult.”
Big Pete frowned and turned to Thor. “I told you to stay with the slowest hiker.”
“Dude, I did.”
“Shh,” PK said. “Look.”
Mandy squinted. Way in the distance, a black speck was approaching them.
PK nodded at Imogen, and the young woman lifted her arms in the air, her fingers moving in soft gyrations, commanding the
attention of the rest of the group.
“We are waiting . . .” Imogen was practically vibrating. “For that special feeling to arrive. That feeling when your worries
just melt away. When the weight of your pack slides off your back. When you feel—” She started spinning in a slow circle in
the sand. “You feel—”
“Nope.” PK stood up. “Sorry. This isn’t working.”
“But we practiced!”
“Yeah, we did. You aren’t supposed to start talking until the helicopter is above us, and then you throw the biodegradable
glitter and—”
“No, I’m supposed to do the speech, then the glitter, and then the helicopter arrives, and then we all kneel down, and then she descends on a long silk rope . . .”
“Cult to the cult degree,” Liv whispered.
Imogen’s grandmother pulled a pair of binoculars from her pack. “That helicopter doesn’t seem to be moving toward us.”
“Maybe they’re going to swing around,” Imogen said. “So we can get better light for the video.”
Mandy stared up. It looked to her like the black speck—which sported a white nose and a yellow stripe—was shooting up the
far side of the canyon.
“That’s not a commercial flight,” Katy said. “That’s 368, the Park Service search and rescue helicopter. There was a radio
call for a hiker off the North Rim with a broken leg an hour ago.”
“But . . .” PK looked at his phone. “She should be here.”
“When?” Imogen asked.
“Two hours ago.”
“Did she text you?”
“No.” PK looked around anxiously at the others. “Did anyone hear from her?”
Around the circle, people made a show of taking out their phones, as if they hadn’t been told dozens of times that there would
be no reception once they got down into the Grand Canyon. One by one, they shook their heads.
“She ditched us?” Imogen asked.
“She wouldn’t,” PK said. “Something must be wrong. We have to hike back up.”
“I’m sure she is on her way,” Stefan said. “We have all put a lot of energy into being here.”
“She isn’t coming.” Fiona, the blond doctor from Los Angeles, spoke in a clipped, definitive voice.
“We didn’t know you were coming,” Devon muttered.
“You think I wanted to be here? With you?” Fiona shot back.
“Babette called me two weeks ago and begged me to join. I postponed a trip to Seoul, slept in that moth-ridden lodge on synthetic sheets, got up at four in the morning to hike down to meet up with her. All of us made sacrifices to be here. Now we’re a mile underground and Babette is .
. . where exactly? A conference room? A luxury spa? ”
“No,” PK said. He looked like a frustrated child about to cry. “She planned to be here.”
“This whole trip was her vision,” Charlie said.
“Precisely,” Fiona said. “You know how relentlessly she pursues her visions. Remember the Raw Essence Quest, when she hired
crews to break into our kitchens in the middle of the workday and replace all our cooked food with fresh-pressed turnip juice?
Or when she made her assistant hike Half Dome with a fractured humerus during Fierce?”
Stefan frowned. “I thought this was a corporate bonding exercise.”
“It is,” PK said. “I can’t speak for earlier Essence Quests.”
“Of course you can’t,” Fiona said. “You were hired after Fierce, because your predecessor broke his arm in Yosemite, and when
it healed improperly, she fired him for having poor alignment.”
“That can’t be real,” Mandy whispered to Liv.
“Not in the autobiography?” Liv whispered back.
“That was a long time ago,” Charlie said.
“People like Babette don’t change,” Fiona said. “She’s ruthless. And thorough. She hurts people who get in her way.”
“What’s your point?” Devon asked Fiona.
“You know your sister.” Fiona’s eyes were dark. “She isn’t late, or lost. My guess is she marooned us down here intentionally,
without internet or phones.”
“Why would she do that?” Imogen asked.
“CareFree is all about letting go of your worries,” Mandy improvised. “Maybe Babette wanted to give us a scare. A before to
make the after even sweeter.”
“Whatever game she’s playing, I’m not interested.” Fiona glared at Charlie and Devon. “Babette operates like Vegas. The house
always wins.”