26
The raft drops into the first chute, slamming down hard and sending a wall of water over the boat, obscuring my view of the scattered black boulders that look like teeth in a rabid mouth.
“Left!” I try to scream, but we’re already plunging down the next drop. A surging wave sends water shooting past my parted lips, cutting off my air.
“No, back! Back!” Deborah is screaming.
It’s too late, though.
As I blink away the water, I try to follow Deborah’s desperate command, digging my paddle into the water—and meeting the unyielding scrape of rock instead.
The raft shudders as the nose wedges into a gap on the left side of the canyon—pinching our boat between two enormous boulders that hadn’t been visible through the spray a few seconds earlier.
Churning water hammers against the rubber sides of the raft like liquid thunder, trying to fold the boat in half as it slams into us again and again. The heavy rubber flexes and squeals beneath us, sending everybody lurching forward, even as the raft stays pinned in place.
“Oh my god, we’re stuck!” Pam cries. She’s already scrambling through the spray toward the back of the boat, levering her paddle between one of the boulders and the raft’s side like a crowbar.
“Come on, everyone! Use your paddle to push off!” Allie calls through the storm of water.
The rest of us follow her lead, jamming paddles against the enormous rock in a desperate attempt to break free of the boulders’ vise grip.
The force of the water holding us in place is unbelievably, terrifyingly powerful.
There’s no way the four of us, already beaten down, are going to break free from its grip.
There are so many ways to die, a strangely calm, defeated voice in the back of my mind whispers, while the muscles in my arms scream with the effort that feels more futile by the second.
It’s not Parker’s voice. It’s my own.
I can’t see Leo anywhere, but there’s no time to look, and for the moment I’m not afraid of him.
Even he can’t maneuver near us in these rapids.
“Keep trying!” Deborah cries, her voice ragged, the front part of her nearly disappearing as she leans farther into the spray ricocheting off the massive rock, burrowing her paddle deeper. “Don’t give up!”
Her beloved hat—the one her sister Beth gave her—blows back into the angry current, but she doesn’t stop battling the force of the waves. I watch the cap get swallowed by the frantic waves, unable to stop myself from imagining how we’d disappear beneath the surface every bit as quickly.
We’re impossibly stuck.
“There’s only two ways to die, Kaia.” There’s Parker’s voice, calm and clear as day, suddenly back in my ear. “You tap out, or you get taken out. Don’t you dare tap, baby. Fight. One more time. When the wave draws back, look at the angle of the boulder’s edge.”
The sound of his voice sends a surge of welcome adrenaline pulsing through me, and I do what he says, my gaze sweeping past Imani.
She has her eyes squeezed shut, leaning into the surf pouring over the edge of the raft, her good arm wrapped around a paddle that she’s somehow managed to wedge against the boulder.
When the recirculating wave smashes against the side of the boulder, I wait for it to draw back. In the brief moment before it surges again, I study the rock’s surface.
There’s an indentation there along the edge of the boulder—barely larger than the width of my paddle’s blade.
I raise my arm and slam the yellow part of the plastic into it, before it’s completely obscured from my view again, and lean all my weight against it. The other women struggle with me, all of us grunting and gasping with the effort.
The raft trembles as the current surges forward—and with a loud groan of rubber on rock, we finally break free.
It worked. We did it.
There’s no time to cheer, though.
The raft careens forward, straight into a trough of roiling water that looks like so many other harmless stretches of whitewater we’ve crossed over the past two days—no hidden traps. Or at least that’s what I think for a second—until the water swallows us.
This is a hole.
One heartbeat, we’re upright and moving forward. The next, we’re vertical, as if unseen hands beneath the surface have reached for the stern and yanked with all their might.
Before I can even scream, we’re upside down.
I hit the water hard—or maybe the edge of a boulder. For a few seconds, I can’t breathe, even when my life jacket pops me briefly to the surface before my head is dragged back underwater.
Then there’s only blackness, and water in my eyes, and the river spinning me like a rag doll in a washing machine.
I thought I was scared when I was thrown from the raft yesterday, swallowed up by the sun-warmed greenish water. But back then, I’d known that the second I surfaced and managed to grab hold of the catch rope, there would be hands waiting to help me, to pull me back to safety.
This time, the water is black and cold. I’m completely spent. Nobody is waiting to help.
And the only person hurrying toward me has a knife.
“Do not tap out,” comes Parker’s voice again.
When my lungs unseize and my head breaks the surface, I swallow water, coughing hard and fighting to get my legs in front of me.
Just in time, I manage to push off a boulder.
The current swings me sideways and downriver past a sharp bend, still moving at a steady clip.
I can already hear the growl of the next rapid, growing louder with each passing second.
I look wildly around for our raft, for the others.
But the canyon has squeezed in so tightly, its rock walls block my view ahead.
I bite back the urge to scream out, because as terrified as I am that the next rapid will swallow me whole, I’m even more terrified of what is coming down the river behind us.
There’s no raft anywhere in sight. No sign of the others.
The river pushes me faster through the slotted canyon and down a mini waterfall, where my head goes back underwater.
When I come up again, the canyon has widened to a straightaway of choppy, dark water—maybe a hundred yards—before the next true rapid. Above me, the sky has turned a paler shade of gray. It’s nearly dawn.
I wipe the water from my eyes and catch a glimpse of something orange bobbing in the water ahead of me—someone’s life jacket?
—but in the next instant, it vanishes behind a wall of water.
The current picks me up and shoves me sideways into a patch of jagged boulders.
I try to protect my head and neck as it sweeps me across fallen tree limbs and branches, praying I escape with scrapes and don’t get snagged like Imani.
As I break free of the scattered rocks and the current sends me surging upward, I finally catch sight of our raft, flipped upside down in an eddy on the right side of the river, where yet another minefield of small boulders forms a maze along the canyon wall.
In the split second before the river slaps another face full of water at me, I try to observe everything I can.
There’s Deborah. I can see her shocks of short gray hair above the lapels of her life jacket. She’s in the water, holding onto the side of the flipped raft.
Another flash of orange draws my eye—another life jacket. It’s Pam, trying to swim across the current to reach the raft before the next rapid, strands of red hair plastered to her face.
There’s no sign of Imani or Allie.
Choppy current sends another slap of water directly into my eyes, just as I hear a sound that nearly makes me release all the precious air from my lungs in a scream.
A low, resonant whistle.
And the faint, now-familiar thud of rubber bumping against rock.