Page 19 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Forget the hole. Look at the boat. What do you see?”

The water started speeding up, cresting into waves that rose and fell in place, hungry mouths slurping at the edges of the raft.

“FORWARD!”

One stroke. Another. Mandy strained to pull her paddle through the surging water. To her right, nothing but foam and fury. To her left, Liv was paddling mechanically, barely looking at the waves, her eyes locked on the raft in front of them.

“What do you see?” Mandy asked.

“I see Charlie and Devon.”

“FORWARD HARD!”

Mandy dug her paddle in. It felt like the river was tearing her arms from their sockets. She was slipping, and the waves kept building, the raft diving into holes and flying up into nothingness. Sometimes her paddle slammed into a wall of water. Other strokes grabbed nothing but air.

Liv didn’t seem to notice the hellscape around them. She was paddling like a possessed robot, unceasing even as a wall of water slammed the side of the raft and drenched her in an icy cascade. “I see her reaching toward him. Is she—”

The front of the boat crashed under the pounding water again, taking whatever Liv said next with it. They popped back up, and Mandy wanted to look over, but a huge wave leapt in from the right and Thor yelled “STOP” and she was holding her breath and clutching her paddle and the small raft flew into the air like a roller coaster without a track. Waves rose on both sides of them, two wild devil horns of water, and Thor was steering them into the biggest ones, driving them up surging walls of whitewater, paddle and stop, paddle and stop. Mandy was trying to keep her feet from sliding out, freezing water was pouring over the sides of the raft, and Liv was babbling about something, but they were marooned on the very brink of life and death and—

“NO!” Liv yelled.

Mandy looked left, worried she’d see empty air where her sister had been. But Liv was leaning forward, her eyes shining. The raft spun and slowed, and the water calmed abruptly, as if someone had switched off its fury.

“We did it,” she said to Liv.

Her sister nodded uncertainly, as if she couldn’t decide yet if she agreed. Her eyes were still trained on the water. Mandy turned to the others in their boat.

“WE DID IT!”

Lucinda and Imogen looked just as exhilarated as she felt, soaked and smiling. In the back, Fiona adjusted the brim of her visor and gave a crisp nod. At Thor’s insistence, all six of them tapped their paddles together in the air in a dripping high five. They’d made it through. They’d all made it through.

And then Mandy heard it. A scream, rising from the bucking waves of Horn Creek.

Chapter Eleven

“SWIMMER!” Katy stood at the back of her raft, hands cupped around her mouth. The entire right side of her boat was empty.

“TWO SWIMMERS!”

Liv saw them first. Two bodies, floundering and yelling and swirling uncontrollably through the wild heart of the river.

“We’ll pick it up,” Thor called out. He whipped their raft around so they were perpendicular to the flow.

“Steady, now.” He held a rope in one hand, a life preserver in the other. “Left side, reach out your paddles so they can grab on if I don’t catch them.”

Liv counted the seconds as the bodies moved toward them. One of them, lying face up on the surface in their neon orange jacket, mostly kept their head above water. The other was little more than a muddy Babette hat that bucked and bounced through the waves.

“And . . . NOW!”

Thor knelt down and grabbed the first floater by the PFD with his bare hands. Liv’s extended paddle snagged the other. Thor hauled up the first person—Devon—then Charlie, who was clutching Liv’s paddle, launching each of them into the raft in a sprawling, soaking cascade.

Devon rose up blinking and gave a shout—was it angry? joyful?—into the wide open sky.

“You okay?” Mandy asked.

“Right as rain.” Devon’s voice was hoarse, but energy pulsed through it. “I forgot about this.”

“What?”