“Right oar! Push hard!” Donovan curses as the river pulls us right, toward a wave that I swear is bigger than the boat.
A wave I was supposed to avoid.
“Push through it!” Donovan shouts.
Instinct tells me to duck down and hold on, but I force my tired arms to keep moving as we drop into the massive wave. My fingers slide on the oar handles, making me grip harder, and for a second the oars catch nothing but air. We hit the bottom of the wave at the same time the top curls over and slams into the boat from above.
Water crashes into me. Into my mouth, my eyes. Momentarily blind and gasping for air, I push as hard as I can on the oars as our momentum stalls. I keep pushing, digging into the water and hoping I have the strength to get us up and over the wave before the river decides to pull us back down and swallow us.
I push until the boat crests over the wave and flattens out.
We made it through.
But I’m not done yet.
“Nice! Keep it straight!” Donovan tells me as we hit the next wave and the next. Water’s coming at the boat from all sides, but I do my best to maneuver the boat to hit each wave with the nose so we aren’t knockedover from the side. “That’s it! You’re doing—” Her voice cuts out, like she turns to look behind us.
Then she swears.
“What?” I gasp as I’m hit with a rush of panic the same size as that first wave. I search the river ahead, but for the most part it looks like we’re through the worst of it. What am I not seeing?
“Mason flipped,” Donovan says.
Fear grips my heart, and I twist my head to look back. I only catch a glimpse of the upside-down boat before the rapid ahead catches my attention, forcing me to keep rowing through it without Donovan’s instructions. “What do we do?” I shout back.
She doesn’t answer.
“Is everyone okay?” I try to remember who was on Mason’s boat, but I was a little preoccupied this morning. If the boat flipped, they’re all in the water, and I can’t stop imagining Zahra or Maverick getting stuck on a rock under the water.
The river is finally calming, so I make sure nothing in front of us will get me into trouble, then stand to search the river behind us. There’s a spot of orange off to the right, but I can’t tell who’s in the lifejacket. With Mason’s boat unattended and drifting left, I grab the oars and start pulling in that direction.
“No,” Donovan says, grabbing my arm. “People first. Stuff later. Pull hard to river left.”
Considering she just coached me through a Class V rapid, I’m going to trust her. Sitting back down, I pull with all my strength, rowing upstream as much as I row toward shore so I can try to limit the space between us and the people in the water.
“More left,” Donovan instructs. “That’s great.”
We reach Brody first, and since Donovan can’t pull him into the boat with one hand, I have to drop the oars to help. I grab the shoulder straps of his life jacket but pause when I meet his wide-eyed gaze, anger flashingthrough me as I remember what he did to Donovan this morning and all the problems his actions caused. But then I see the fear in his eyes, and I think about how he just swam most of Big Drop 3. That rapid was traumatic from inside my boat, so I can’t imagine what he just went through.
And he did apologize…
Gritting my teeth, I shove him deeper into the water to give him some extra buoyancy and haul him into the boat as he comes back up, leaving him flopped on the bags as I jump on the oars again and row to the next person.
It takes a lot longer to rescue everyone than I expected, even with Thiago grabbing Mason and Hunter, so by the time we’ve grabbed the flipped boat and pulled into an eddy, I’m exhausted. That could also be because the adrenaline is wearing off now that everyone is out of danger.
Now that I’ve made it through the Big Drops.
As my wasted arms hang heavy at my sides, I watch as Donovan directs Mason and Thiago. They loop a rope under the flipped boat, and the boys climb over the top with the rope in hand, using it and their body weight to pull the side up and flip the boat upright again. Mason is smiling the whole time, laughing with his fellow guides as he recounts how thoroughly he messed up and went too far right—farther than I did—and landed his boat in a hole that showed no mercy.
His mistake was big—huge—and he’sgrinning.
“Derek?”
I blink, and my head feels like lead as I turn to look at Brody. He’s sitting hunched in the middle of the bags, his eyes on my knees instead of my face. Drenched and bedraggled, he doesn’t look full of himself for once.
He glances up only long enough to see that I’m looking at him. “Thanks,” he mumbles.
The perfectionist in me would politely respond to his apology because Derek Riley is nothing if not polite. But I’m tired. “You were an idiot this morning,” I tell him. “You’re lucky she wasn’t hurt worse.”
