I stand, and he gently shovels dirt over my brother’s face while I fight fresh tears. “Ryan nearly died once before,” I whisper. “Last year. After our dad died. He started drinking, and I used to find him passed out. Barely breathing.” My finger traces the pink line on the back of my arm. “So one night I showed him what he was doing to himself.”
“That’s how you got your scar?” Luke asks as he wipes sweat from his forehead.
I nod. “At my cousin’s Halloween party. I matched him drink for drink, until I passed out and my arm went through a glass bottle. He checked into rehab the day I got out of the hospital, and he hasn’t had a drink since. He—” My voice breaks. I clear my throat and start over. “He decided to live.”
GENESIS
“Teach us a lesson?” Penelope hisses as she pushes her way between me and Indiana on the narrow trail. “They’re going to punish us just for being American? What did our country ever do to them?”
“Poison their crops, livestock, and people with herbicides,” Domenica says over her shoulder, from a few feet ahead. “And not just in Colombia. It happened to my uncle’s farm in Peru.”
“That is not true!” Penelope insists.
Domenica actually laughs. “Your country’s ‘war on drugs’ involves crop duster planes bombing Colombian coca and poppy farms with toxic chemicals that make people sick. They cause miscarriages. And they’re devastating to poor farmers, who don’t profit from the drug trade like cartels do.”
Penelope rolls her eyes and steps over a mud puddle. “There isno way—”
“Andyour CIA sponsors backdoor deals with one drug cartel to assassinate members of a rival cartel, to cripple the drug trade.”
“She’s right,” I say. My dad followed that story prettyclosely when it broke, then he signed me up for another self-defense class. At the time, I thought he was being paranoid.
“Are you with us or them?” Holden demands through clenched teeth.
“Thereisno us or them,” I snap, annoyed when he takes up a position on Pen’s other side. “These terrorists don’t represent all of Colombia any more than we represent all of the US.”
“Well, the part they represent wants to blow up the part we represent,” Penelope insists, with a glance at Holden. “It should be pretty simple to decide which side you’re on.”
“None of it is simple.” Indiana steps up on my other side. “These guys don’t have the right to bomb the US just like the US doesn’t have the right to kill their crops and poison their people.”
“What they don’t have the right to do is make us pawns in their homicidal political statement,” Holden says, so softly I have to listen hard to hear him over the twigs crunching beneath my boots. “If Gen’s dad refuses to ship their bombs, they’ll start picking us off one by one to show him they’re serious. We have to get out of here before that happens.”
“And go where?” I whisper. “People who wander into the jungle unprepared usually don’t make it out.”
“We’ll take everything we can carry and head back to the base camp.” Holden’s pack gets caught as he climbs over a log on the trail, and Penelope reaches up to unhook him. “There’ll be another helicopter tomorrow, and we can report these psychos as soon as we’re out of here.”
“That’s the only way we’re going to get out alive, Gen,” my former best friend says.
Maybe so. But ... I glance around to make sure none of our captors are close enough to hear. “Silvana gave my dad a twenty-four-hour deadline. If he gives in, she’ll get her plane, or ship, or whatever she’s asking for by tomorrow. A cargo plane is the worst-case scenario. Assuming we even make it to the base camp in time to catch the helicopter, if she asked for a plane, she couldalreadyhave gotten her bombs into the US—or flown them into a building. It’s only a two-hour flight to Miami.”
“What are you saying?” my boyfriend demands.
“No one else knows about this, Holden.” I give them a moment to let that sink in. “There’s no one else to stop this terrorist attack. There’s only us.”
36.25 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
“Let’s round up everything we can carry.” I jog toward the abandoned tent city, fired up in spite of my exhaustion by the driving need tobe on the move. “They have a six-hour head start.”
“Who?”
“Do you still have your cell phone?”
“Yeah.” Luke pulls it from his pocket. “The signal isn’t strong enough for a call, so I texted my mom but I can’t tell if it went through.”
My gaze falls on the small bunkhouse. “Surely there’s a radio.”
“They smashed it. This is all we have.” He pats the two-way radio now clipped to his belt.
