Chapter Thirty
Mandy stumbled down and away from the mouth of the slot, then caught herself. She was standing on a narrow ledge no more than
three feet deep, a fifty-foot drop-off down sheer rock separating her from the rest of the world. She looked left. Ten yards
over, the ledge crumbled to nothingness. To her right, the ledge continued, a wavering line of dusty orange sugar ending abruptly
at a dark stain in the rock where a trickle of water slicked over the edge and plunged into the sparse valley of brush and
gravel below.
She took an anxious look back at the dark slot. Thor hadn’t just vanished into thin air, and she seriously doubted he had
a wingsuit stuffed in the back pocket of his weathered shorts. If he hadn’t turned back and he hadn’t flown, he must have
continued along the ledge to the right.
It looked like one adventure too far. The ledge was exposed, without enough room for her to turn and walk normally, and she
didn’t trust herself not to lose her balance. It would be so easy for her shoulder to knock against the cliff, for the edge
of her boot to peel down over the lip. She kept her back to the cliff instead, inching along in a shuffling half squat. The
sun-warmed rock singed her shoulder blades above the thin sarong, but she didn’t care. She wanted contact with the earth.
She wanted to touch anything but air.
Had she been an idiot to follow Thor? Why had he left her at the most dangerous part of the slot?
She kept her eyes on her hiking boots, obsessively scanning for pebbles, holes, anything that could cause her to trip.
Every few steps, she snuck a look out to the valley below, praying for a hint of a trail that might help her descend safely.
But her prayers continued unanswered. The shadows in the desolate valley stretched like dark ghosts away from her, and the adrenaline she’d felt earlier leaked out of her like an old balloon, replaced by fatigue and fear.
Her muscles ached, her water bottle was empty, and while the rock against her back was still warm, the fading sun made her shiver each time the breeze tickled her sarong.
She was twenty yards from the dark stain when the ledge narrowed even more. Two feet, maybe. Eighteen inches. Her shuffle
slowed to a shambling creep. She tried not to think about the spring she was approaching, how the water would make the ledge
slick, how what had looked like a docile trickle from further away now growled menacingly. She took a deep breath and kept
moving sideways.
Then a rush of cold air from behind her. Two strong arms grabbed her and yanked her backward.
“Got you!”
She screamed. The sound of it ricocheted around the darkened cavity of rock Thor had pulled her into. Mandy spun to face him,
ripping his hands from her sides. She wanted to move away. But there was no away. They were in a shadowed seam in the cliff
behind the ledge, protected by a boulder half sunk into the rock. He must have been hiding there as she slinked along the
ledge. Or maybe not. Hiding was weird. Hiding was creepy. Maybe he’d been scouting the trail down to the valley and he’d come
back to guide her.
He went to clamp a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him away. “Where were you, Thor?”
“I figured you might want to experience the most exciting stretch of the slot on your own. Magical, right?”
“And this ledge? You wanted me to experience that on my own too?”
He cocked his head at her. “I thought you were one of us.”
“Us?”
“Explorers. Adventurers. The tribe of the wild.”
She gaped at him, annoyed that he’d dropped her into a dangerous initiation ritual for a secret society she’d never asked
to join. She loved exploring new things. But she did it on her own terms. And the curses that had run through her mind as
she’d stepped out onto the ledge weren’t about adventure. They were about recklessness. Abandonment. Danger.
Was that how Liv saw her? When Mandy handed her sister an ice ax and waved at a glacier, when she put a paddle in her hand
and whooped at the whitewater, did Liv think she was putting her in jeopardy? Did Liv get that same choked frog in her throat
Mandy had felt just a few minutes before?
“Is there a way to get down from here?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” Thor said. “We’ll be down in Surprise Valley fast as a jackrabbit.”
He pointed to a pencil-thin trail she hadn’t spotted before, winding down below the dark stain in the cliff. It looked real.
It looked better than the ledge. But she felt unsettled.
Still, she followed him. What other choice did she have?
Thor marched downward, leading her into a huge amphitheater of rock a quarter mile across at its base. It looked like a man
cave for giants, with boulders big as cars, some of the smaller ones stacked into crude couches and chairs.
“That trickle of water we passed under,” Thor said, pointing back up, “it’s one of the springs that feeds Deer Creek. But
most people call this spot the Throne Room.”
From this vantage point, halfway down the amphitheater, Mandy could see how the stain on the rock rippled down to a line of
lush plants crowding the creek. In the winter, it might be a pounding falls, but now, in high summer, its flow barely punctuated
the dryness of the area. The Throne Room was a red, shining bowl of rock. The empress of the Grand Canyon belonged at its
center. Mandy could almost picture a goddess here, perched on a massive slab of sandstone, her scepter the gnarled spine of
an ancient ocotillo.
But the best thing she saw had nothing to do with mythic desert queens. It was a cluster of people, real, living people, down in the basement of the amphitheater, heading up into its bowl.
She could hear a man’s laugh—was that Big Pete?—and a young woman’s screech. Imogen. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted
the security of the group until she heard them. She turned her head, straining for the sure tones of her sister’s voice. But
if Liv was there, she was silent. Listening. Observing.
Mandy felt the ridiculous impulse to wave or hoot, to reach out to her sister across the expanse of the Throne Room and let
her relief rain down to the rocks below.
But before she could say a word, a foreign sound echoed through the basin.
It was a soft keening, rising from a pile of stones by a thick, yellowed patch of rabbitbrush in the bowl. She squinted down,
trying to resolve what was making it.
The sound broke out louder now, a ragged, undulating cry rattling the amphitheater walls, splitting the gem of the canyon
into something heartbreaking and terrifying all at once.
She started moving toward it, leapfrogging down the rocks, ignoring Thor’s calls to slow down and wait for him to check it
out first. Some of the people below were racing up toward the sound as well. The cries didn’t stop. Whatever was in that rabbitbrush,
it was too focused on its own pain to notice her approach. Which might make it less dangerous. Or more.
“Mandy!”
Thor caught her by the upper arm and wrenched her out of her trance. They were both breathing hard, just feet from the dense
cluster of brush. He pulled a holstered knife from his belt and unfolded it, clutching the blade in his hand.
“Follow my lead.”