Chapter Twenty
Mandy was just getting the hang of taking a photo without falling out of the raft when Big Pete whistled and waved an imaginary
lasso in the air.
“What’s that mean?” Fiona asked.
“We’re pulling over and circling up,” Thor said.
“For lunch?” Imogen sounded desperate. Perhaps her breakfast of powdered moss water hadn’t been as nourishing as she’d hoped.
“This next rapid requires scouting,” Thor said.
“I thought there weren’t any big ones today,” Fiona said.
“No nines or tens,” Thor responded. “Bedrock’s only a seven. But it’s what we call a consequential rapid. Look.”
Mandy peered downriver. A mountain of rock rose from the middle of the water, the waves wrapping around it and shooting down
either side.
“We have to pick our way around that island,” Thor said. “Otherwise, we’ll get slammed against it.”
“And then what?” Imogen asked.
Thor shrugged. “We could flip if we don’t high-side in time. The raft could get pinned against the rock by the moving water.”
“What do you do in that case?” Liv asked.
“Crawl onto the island and make like Gilligan. Pray you’ve got enough food and crosswords until someone comes along who can help yank the boat free.
One time, I came upon two guys who got stuck for eight hours up there.
They’d come up with pirate names and composed an ode to canyon wrens that was surprisingly decent. ”
Mandy shot a glance at Liv. How long could they last marooned on an island together? Then again, this trip was not much different—they
were stuck on this river, with these people and their hats and threats and snakes and whatever else the trip threw at them,
whether they liked it or not.
Thor directed the group to back-paddle until they beached on a pebbled spit above and to the right of Bedrock Rapid. The guides
hopped out of the boats and started picking their way over the slippery rocks to study the rapid and carve out a plan. Most
of the guests followed them, but Liv put a hand on Mandy’s shoulder, pulling her behind a cluster of boulders by the rafts.
“I have an assignment for you.”
Mandy grinned. They were on this island together. She had a quick, ridiculous urge to find some river grass and make them
matching friendship bracelets. Or capes. And a theme song. They needed a theme song.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to get us switched into the other raft with Devon, Charlie, and Stefan.”
“That’s it?” Maybe Mandy should have waited to hear the assignment before mentally designing their superhero costumes.
“We have to get closer to the power players who know Babette best. If she’s behind the messages in the hats, those three are
the most likely to be involved. The most likely to be targeted, too.”
“Got it.” Mandy cupped her hands around her mouth, turned to face the river, and launched into a stage whisper: “ATTENTION!
IF YOU, OR ANYONE YOU KNOW, HAS BEEN THREATENED BY A MISSING LADYBOSS . . .”
Liv punched her in the arm, but Mandy was expecting it. She lifted Liv’s hand off her shoulder and spun her around like a
ballroom dancer.
“Don’t worry, sis. Easy peasy. We’re moving on up.”
“You’ll do it subtly.”
“Of course.”
“Without lying.”
Time to move on. “Once we’re in their raft, what do we do? Drop hints about Babette’s murderous embroidery hobby? Tip the
boat so Devon and Stefan fall in and we grab their hats and see what they say? High-side it against the island so they’re
stuck there answering our questions until dark?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“We listen.”
It was just boring enough to be what Liv probably did at work all day.
Mandy sighed. “Fine.”
Mandy turned and hopped from rock to rock, passing Devon and Fiona, who were still arguing about Babette; Charlie and Stefan,
who were talking quietly; and Imogen, surreptitiously downing a chocolate bar. Lucinda was standing with the guides, soaking
up their technical talk about paddle lines and eddies, while PK scowled at the river, as if its essence had proved poorly
matched for this quest. Mandy sidled up to him and slid her arm through his. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”
PK stiffened. “Tell me it doesn’t involve another reptile.”
“I’m hoping for some quality time with the wonder siblings to chat about CareFree.”
He looked puzzled. “Is there something that hasn’t been covered in the quarterly reports you want to know?”
“The truth is,” Mandy said, tugging him closer, “I want to get my sister to invest. She and I have the same amount in trust,
but she’s always been more conservative with her portfolio than I have.” She prayed her words made sense, or that PK knew
as little as she did about high finance. “I think she’d be more receptive to a pitch from your team than hearing about CareFree
from me.”
PK frowned. “Babette’s our best saleswoman. No one can tell the story like her.”
“I know that. You know that. But for someone like my sister, someone more”—she hunted for a better term than stick-in-the-mud—“prudent, I think Charlie and Devon might be a fit. Maybe Stefan too. Get us into your boat. They can shower her with cold,
hard data.”
“Someone will have to switch into the other raft.”
“I was hoping that might be you,” Mandy said sweetly. “Imogen has been shooting footage of herself singing songs she wrote.
Skin shanties, she calls them. She might need a little more direction.”
He didn’t look thrilled. Or convinced. But while Mandy’s dad had never taken her fishing, he’d taught her how to bait a line.
“If you’re the one to bring in a new investor at this level . . .”
PK’s eyes widened just a fraction. He nodded. “I’ll tell them we need to rebalance the rafts.”
When the guides returned from their meeting, PK made a beeline for Big Pete, approaching him with a cockiness that suggested
he both feared and relished the opportunity to lord something over the trip leader. Mandy felt a twinge of guilt, stringing
him along with the promise of money she knew Liv didn’t have and, if she did, would never invest in a skin care company. But
PK had received a threat too. This floating confab was for his own good. Even if he didn’t yet see it that way.
If Katy was at all surprised to find that her faux-hawked passenger had been swapped out for Mandy and her sister, she didn’t
show it. She checked everyone’s PFDs, and they resettled in her raft: Devon and Charlie in front, Mandy and Liv in the relative
safety of the middle, and Stefan in the third row. Katy perched on the back, the hood of her long-sleeved rash guard pulled
all the way up. She guided them down the right channel of Bedrock Rapid with precise, confident commands that shot them past
the island with ease. The whitewater subsided, and the canyon sharpened around them, slick black rock rising to replace the
crumbly sandstone with a tighter, meaner package.
“We’re heading into the narrowest part of the canyon next,” Katy said. “The granite gorge. That volcanic rock, the Vishnu
Schist, is 1.75 billion years old.”
Devon nodded. “Dad loved to talk about the ancient mountains that formed this canyon. How the world turned itself inside out here.”
“Your father brought you here?” Liv asked.
Mandy could hear skepticism in her sister’s voice. Maybe it was just the impossibility of imagining their own dad willingly
tromping into the great outdoors.
“He was actually the inspiration for CareFree,” Devon said. “Dad got me excited about plants as a kid. He’d always be bending
down to snap a picture of a wildflower popping out of the sidewalk or an unusual weed in his tomatoes. Mom joked he was great
at taking family photos of our feet.”
Mandy looked at Charlie to see his reaction to the family memory. But the man was gazing out at the slick volcanic rock.
“When I was getting my PhD,” Devon continued, “my father joined me on some of my scouting trips. Twelve years ago, we came
here, not to raft the canyon, but to walk it, rim to rim.”
“Not a lot of plants in a desert,” Mandy said.
“More than you’d imagine. This canyon crosses five out of the seven biomes you’d see if you walked the US from top to tail.
And what grows here, it’s magic. The Native people know it. Botanists know it. There’s a plant here that showed me what could
be possible for CareFree.”
“What plant?” Liv asked.
“Datura,” Devon said. “Native people call it sacred thorn-apple.”
“Why is it sacred?”
“Datura is central to a lot of traditional healing ceremonies in the Southwest. Medicine people brew a version of it as a
hallucinogenic. It’s a powerful vision expander.”
“Datura’s all over here,” Katy piped up from the back of the raft. “The side canyons are full of it. It’s toxic if you don’t
know how to handle it, but Indigenous people in the Grand Canyon use it for rituals. Kinda spooky, though.”
“Spooky?”
Katy nodded. “Datura’s a moonflower. It blooms at night, gets pollinated by bats. Witchy. I have an herbalist friend who got deep into communing with it. Smoking the flowers, sucking on the seeds, making tinctures from the root. She said Lady Datura entered her like a murderous goddess of hell.”
Charlie coughed. “That’s not the way we see it.”
“My brother’s right,” Devon clarified. “We aren’t focused on the spiritual side of datura. But its unique properties inspired
our product development.”
“Datura isn’t a product,” Katy said. “It’s a supernatural being. I drank it once, brewed into a tea. I swear I flew that night.”
“Just once? You didn’t want to fly again?” Mandy asked.
“I did it one more time,” Katy said. “The second trip freaked me out. The plant spoke to me in this deep voice, trapped me
in a tunnel of darkness. I think I took a single breath in twelve hours.”
Devon nodded. “There are accounts tracing back to the 1600s of people in North America ingesting datura—the seeds, in particular—and
experiencing a range of hallucinatory effects. All the records suggest the experience is transcendent, but highly variable.
At Oxford, I started correlating different effects that could be traced to dosage, preparation, and the precise strain of
the plant. One of the more reliable effects across different strains is a kind of temporary amnesia. A letting go of worry.
When you get the right dose, it feels—”
“Carefree,” Mandy said.
Devon’s mouth twitched. “I didn’t love that name at first. But yes. We developed a distillation process to safely isolate
that feeling. The sense I had in those earliest tests, it was more than carefree. It was like someone opened new space in
my heart.”
Her words vibrated through the air, mirroring the easy ripples of the water. Conversation was both quieter and amplified in
the canyon, echoing off the high walls and then falling away, slipping under the purr of the river.
“Anyway.” Devon shrugged. “I knew there was something in it that could help people.”
“So now you’re in the drug business?” Liv asked.
“Not at all,” Charlie interjected. “We’re in the wellness business. Traditional medicine is important, but it’s also unpleasant.
People see it as being about sickness. You take the drug, you get better, but the road to recovery is studded with chalky
pills and scary injections. What we offer is an alternative. An experience of self-care. Of pleasure. It’s about building
the relationship with your body you want. And this new product? The potential for CareFree is nothing less than personal freedom.”
Mandy thought of the little jar PK had offered her that morning, its creamy promise. She couldn’t wait to try it later that
night.
Liv seemed unconvinced. “You think there are millions of people who want to forget their lives?”
“Not forget. Just take a break. Tap into that openness Devon was talking about. Do you know how rare that feeling is? A few
people are lucky enough to do this”—Charlie scooped a handful of river water and let it pour down his arm—“but most don’t
have the time or money to step outside their lives. They’re under constant pressure. Prescriptions for anxiety medications
are through the roof. People feel broken, like they need to be fixed. But we believe it’s the world that’s broken, and you
deserve to give yourself a break every once in a while.”
“But if datura makes people feel like witches from hell, that hardly sounds like—”
“That’s where the science comes in.” Devon’s voice broke in, strong and sure. “The active drugs in datura, atropine and scopolamine,
are neuroblockers, and yes, they can be dangerous. But they can also be used in perfectly safe medical applications, like
the patches some people wear to prevent motion sickness. We honed an extraction process that targets a very specific subset
of datura’s natural properties to tap into that ephemeral carefree feeling. I did years of experimentation, first at Oxford,
then at the company, trying different sources of the plant, different strains, different ways to deliver it topically. It’s
one of the reasons CareFree has been so expensive to develop.”
“And worth it,” Charlie said. “Now that our formula is safe and stable, this is going to be huge. Like what CBD did for sleep, or retinol for aging skin. CareFree erases worry from your face, smoothing out the hard edges. You can feel it, and you can see it. CareFree’s datura formulation has multibillion-dollar potential. And we’ll be first to market.”
There was real pride in his voice. Or maybe it was greed. Mandy turned to Liv and gave her an encouraging smile. “CareFree
sounds pretty great, right?”
“It sounds like you took a cosmic being and neutered her,” Katy muttered.
“Neutered is safe,” Charlie said. “Neutered is what sells.”
“But surely using CareFree comes with some risks,” Liv said.
“No risks,” Charlie said quickly. “Devon and her team have been meticulous on the science. We’ve scrubbed the plant of all
its delirium-inducing effects. You wouldn’t believe how much active psychotropic material we have to discard from every batch
of datura to ensure we only deliver the highest quality product to our customers.”
Katy frowned. “She won’t like this.”
“Who?” Charlie said. “Our customers?”
“The plant. The goddess.”
The raft fell silent.
“Sorry. What do I know?” Katy said, taking up her paddle again.
“We know CareFree will be a mammoth hit,” Charlie said. “Our team believes in this product, and Babette’s reputation with
our customers is unparalleled. She’s a master of selling something new to the world and making people feel like it’s exactly
what they’ve been missing all along.”
“So where is she?” Stefan’s voice was curt and measured. “What is she doing that is more important than this?”
No response. All that salesmanship and bluster, and now nothing.
Mandy couldn’t let this opening pass her by.
“Maybe she’s plotting to murder the competition.”