Chapter Eighteen
Mandy strode to the dishwashing station, timing her arrival to sync up with her target. It felt good to start with Babette’s
assistant instead of Charlie or Devon. Those two were at least a decade older than her, top brass, more likely to be on guard.
The best sources were always at the bottom—people who collected information like magpies to help them get ahead. People like
PK Raghuram.
“Love love LOVE your shorts,” she said. It was true. PK’s shorts were bright blue with koalas all over them, chomping away
at tiny eucalyptus leaves. He’d paired them with a faded pink tank top and a silvery-white Babette headband that sent his
faux-hawk shooting up like a feathery firework.
PK couldn’t help it; he smiled back at Mandy. His hands were in the suds, conveniently trapping him at the table at least
through rinsing and drying.
“Thank you so much for making this happen,” she gushed. “You must have put in a lot of work to get all of us here.”
“It’s my job.” PK looked tired, maybe hungover. Babette was based in Las Vegas, and Mandy suspected he was a creature of bright
lights and concrete. She wondered whether his colorful outfit was an expression of joy or a performance, a way to mask the
stress of an extended work trip with no indoor plumbing.
She flicked her turtle sarong at him and smiled. “Apparently you and I were the only ones to get the memo about wearing animal print.”
He wiped his hands on his koalas. “Honestly? I didn’t expect investors to be up for this at all.”
“Have you put together this kind of trip for the company before?” she asked.
“Yes and no. This is my first Essence Quest. I joined the team three years ago, after the Fierce line had launched. But we
do a board retreat every year in a foreign location, and that’s a lot of moving parts—booking reservations, making sure everyone’s
needs are met. This is different. I don’t have to worry about what wine we’re pairing with dinner or who wants their board
packet printed in eighteen-point font. But there are a lot of things out here I can’t control, and in some ways . . .”
“It’s worse?”
“Just harder to get a handle on.” His cheek twitched.
“It can’t be easy without Babette here.”
“It isn’t.” PK’s lips clamped into a firm line, and Mandy worried for a moment that she had lost him. PK had been the only
one to express real distress about Babette’s well-being the day before. Whether he had useful information about his boss’s
whereabouts or not, he was invested. Maybe even scared. It was up to Mandy to keep him talking before he shut down.
“Do you know everyone here?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” PK said. “The family, of course. And Dr. Fiona was around a lot when I first started at the company. Imogen
and Lucinda I’ve never met before. But I knew from the contract negotiations that Imogen would be . . . special.”
It was clear the teenager was a flavor of special he never intended to order again.
“And Stefan?”
“Eriksen? This is the first time I’ve seen him. He became a trustee last year, and he’s never even switched on his video for
a board call. I was starting to wonder if he was real.”
They looked over to where the bearded man was standing with Lucinda, both of them listening earnestly as Big Pete pointed out various sections of the supply boat.
“He seems into it,” Mandy said.
“Hopefully that translates to a favorable report.” PK twitched again, a reflexive twist of his left cheek. “He works for our
biggest investor.”
“But they didn’t want to come themselves?”
Twitch.
“Well, I’m here to make it better.” Mandy raised one hand and touched her pinky to her thumb in her best impression of a Girl
Scout. “I solemnly swear to be the lowest-maintenance, highest-fun investor you’ve ever had to deal with.”
“I’m not sure what kind of fun we’re going to find here.”
“Late-night skinny-dipping? Hot gossip about the guides? I’m here for all of it. Lord knows my sister isn’t.” She shot a pointed
glance over to where Liv was deep in conversation with Charlie, who looked like he’d barely slept.
“She seems kind of intense,” PK said.
“So does he,” Mandy said. “Hopefully it’s not contagious.”
“Charlie? He’s always wound tight. And especially right now, with Babette not here, it means he’s in charge. Not his favorite
place to be.”
“A behind-the-scenes guy?”
“More like in the shadows,” PK said. “Not like a vampire or a mole rat. Just, Babette is the engine. He’s the caboose. It
works well that way.”
“Is she a benevolent engine?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve heard she drives the company with a lot of intensity. Charlie seems to think she can be threatening.”
“Threatening? That powder puff. Babette is exactly who she says she is. Raw. Fierce. Her love language is intensity.”
“What do you mean?”
PK cocked his head to the side. “Do you know the story of how she got Skinnmilk to stop testing products on baby animals?”
“She keynoted a conference with their CEO, right? She brought a basket of puppies onstage and kept handing them to him as
she spoke.” Mandy had watched a clip of Babette, smiling ear to ear as the fur balls wriggled all over the horrified double-breasted
suit beside her. “Her talk went viral, and the board of Skinnmilk had a change of heart.”
“That’s the public story. But that CEO?” PK flashed her a sidelong grin. “He’s allergic to dogs. Those puppies sent him to
the ER in anaphylactic shock. Their stock tanked, he got put on notice, and he changed their testing policy to save his job.”
“Babette put him in the hospital? Intentionally?”
PK waved her off. “She motivated a change he never would have made otherwise. It was brilliant. And the guy was fine. Checked
himself out three days later. I delivered Babette’s get-well dragon-fruit-and-sea-moss bouquet myself.”
“Has she ever done something like that to someone who works in the company?”
“Something intense? To inspire them to do what needs to be done?” He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Every
day. Look at this.”
Mandy accepted the phone and started scrolling through screenshots of text messages he’d received from Babette.
SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK. GET BACK TO WORK.
WE’RE HERE TO CHANGE THE WORLD, NOT TO TAKE WEEKENDS OFF.
A STONED MONKEY COULD DO YOUR JOB BETTER.
“Whoa,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Why don’t you quit?”
PK shrugged. “I don’t work for Babette because she’s my friend. She’s a genius. She’s my hero.”
“But she talks to you like you’re disposable.”
“She talks to me like I can do better,” he said. “And I have the receipts if I need them.”
“So your plan is to sue her if it gets too bad?”
“You don’t get it,” PK said. “Think of a goddess. A beautiful, terrifying, thunderbolt-wielding goddess. You don’t want a
deity to chitchat with you. You want them to challenge you. Open new worlds to you.”
“And Babette does that? Even though she treats you like . . .” Mandy waved at his phone.
“She does that, and more.” PK’s eyes were shining. “Much more.”
He shot a glance up the hillside. “You were the first investor in CareFree. You deserve a first look.”
PK motioned for Mandy to follow him up to an alcove in the cliff wall where he had made camp the night before. He had staked
a sheet into a makeshift canopy, shielding his campsite from the sun, or prying eyes, or both. He reached into a crack between
vertical flakes of shale and pulled out a soft-pack cooler, the word “Babette” sprayed across it in silver.
He unzipped the cooler and pulled out a small cylindrical container. It was like the others: matte-white, unlabeled. Mandy
felt a little zing of excitement as he handed it over.
“Here,” he said. “A taste of CareFree. A new world of liberation.”
She unscrewed the cap, revealing an airy cream with a subtle scent of eucalyptus. It was bright white with a purple halo around
the edges, as if it had been beamed down from another planet.
“I recommend waiting until evening to try it out,” PK said. “The first time, the effects can be . . . dazzling. Especially
in this heat.”
“Am I going to forget my own name?”
“Not your name. Just your worries. Temporarily. Which might be more pleasant after we’ve spent all day barreling down that
river.”
Mandy took one more whiff. Then she reluctantly handed the container back to him. “Can you keep this safe in your cooler until
later?”
“Of course.”
He turned to put away the cooler, then froze.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
His back was still to her.
“Shhh.” His voice was abrupt, urgent. “There’s a—in my—don’t—”
His body blocked her view. She couldn’t see it. But she could hear it. It sounded less like a rattle than a shushing, like
the ill-fated rain stick project she never repeated after the boys turned their instruments into exploding lightsabers.
PK was inching backward, one hand on his cooler, his torso flexing away from his sleeping area as if conjuring a magical force
field between himself and a giant, writhing snake.
The snake was creeping out of the seam in the rock behind PK’s sleeping area. Its head was patterned in rose-colored diamonds,
its body a dark line splitting the synthetic yellow sleeping bag in half. It seemed big. Was it big? What was the standard?
She tried to remember if there was any correlation between the size of the rattle and the venomous threat posed, if you were
supposed to move or not move, scream or not scream. The snake danced in a hypnotic spiral, coiling and uncoiling, its tiny
black eyes boring into her, tongue flickering.
“Should we yell?” she whispered.
PK reached back and grabbed for her hand. “Maybe we should pray.”
They took one coordinated half step back, then another. Their bodies fused into a single unit of shuffling fear. His hamstrings,
tight muscled ropes, shook the koalas on his shorts out of their tiny trees.
The snake’s coils slid and folded over each other, its glinting scales swirling so fast the patterns started to blur. It was
much bigger than she’d initially thought.
“Is it just me, or is it pink?” she whispered.
“Matches your sunburn.”
Mandy risked a quick glance at his tanned face. “We can’t all have little elves who slather us with Babette FeatherLite SPF
Perfection every morning.”
PK gave Mandy’s hand a tiny squeeze. “If we survive this, we’re going to be friends.”
It was at that very moment he tripped backward, pulling Mandy with him to the ground. She had just enough time to see the rattler match their sudden movements with its own, accelerating from a slither to a dizzying, terrifying blur.
“SNAAAAAAAAAKE!” she screamed.
She dropped PK’s hand and started scrabbling backward. Her foot slid on something and shot out from under her, knocking her
onto her back.
This was it. Game over. She lay supine, knees throbbing, waiting for the rattlesnake to strike. She could already picture
herself being lifted on a stretcher, a handsome paramedic sliding her onto the floor of a helicopter and sucking the venom
from her thigh as they flew to safety.
Instead, a flash of blond hair and muscle launched in front of her and crash-landed her reverie.
“Got it!”
Thor thrust a pair of barbecue tongs toward the snake’s head and clamped down, pinning it to the ground. He held the tongs
steady as the snake bucked and writhed, its furious jaws snapping at the dust. His other hand snatched up its tail close to
the rattle, stretching at least four feet in the air.
“Y’all okay?” His drawl held an appealing dash of concern.
Mandy sat up carefully. PK looked dazed, like her. But there was no blood. No bites. They both nodded.
“You got lucky,” Thor said. “This here’s a Grand Canyon rattlesnake.”
Mandy waited for him to explain what lucky meant. Maybe it wasn’t poisonous. Or perhaps it was especially deadly and her dreamy paramedic would have had to give her
mouth-to-mouth in addition to sucking on her thigh.
“These cuties only live here, between the rims,” Thor said.
“That rose-pink coloring on its scales? You won’t see it on any other rattlesnakes in the world.
Rarer than pigs in heels.” Despite her throbbing fear and pain, Mandy was charmed by the gap between his front teeth, the oddity of this mountain man who didn’t get the memo that rattlesnakes are not to be messed with nor described as cuties.
“Anyone want to see a snake?” he called out.
Big Pete, Stefan, and Lucinda hiked up, and Thor started educating them on the features of the rare rattler. PK, whose face
was rapidly transitioning from shock to disgust, yanked the sheet off his makeshift lean-to and draped it over his backpack
and the soft cooler, hiding them from view.
Mandy rubbed her left knee, which had banged into a rock when she fell to the ground. It didn’t seem bad. Maybe a bruise.
She reached under her sandal, groping for whatever had made her slip earlier.
It was PK’s hat, covered in sand and dust.
Mandy gathered her sarong around her, concealing the hat in the folds of the fabric. “Do you have anything to help with bruising?”
she asked PK.
He looked at her, then turned back to the soft cooler, rummaging around. “I think I’ve got a rosehip calendula tincture in
here somewhere . . .”
While he clicked through bottles and vials, Mandy poked her head under her sarong and flipped PK’s hat over. There was a message
outlined in thread, bright white against the red dust.
EVERYONE IS REPLACEABLE
Maybe they’d gotten mixed up with the wrong goddess.