Downburst (7 page)

I wake to the smell of smoke. I scurry hastily out of the bivy, panic mounting my throat, but then I see Charity sitting by a small, contained blaze. She’s dressed again, and perched on the rock next to her are our newly filled water bottles and the two packets of granola. She smiles shyly up at me, and I cough and dig my shoe into the dirt.

We eat breakfast in silence, listening to the water lap gently against the shore and the cheerful singing of the birds, less aggravating now than they were last night. When we finish eating, we pack up the gear.

Charity may know how to light a fire, but camping is clearly unfamiliar territory for her. She follows my example, watching me to figure out how to fold up the bivy and packing her bag the way I do. But she’s a quick study, and it doesn’t take us long to finish.

When everything’s ready, she takes off my jacket and hands it back to me. As I put it on, my hands move automatically to my pockets, and my fingers bump against an unfamiliar object, something square. I yank my hand back out. The wallet—I had almost forgotten.

I raise a finger to let Charity know I need a moment. Grabbing the toilet paper to make it seem convincing, I walk a little way into the trees. When I’m out of sight, I reach into my pocket and, pinching the wallet between two fingers, pull it out of my windbreaker. I open it and remove the two licenses. Then I dig a hole in the ground with my foot and drop the bloodstained plastic inside, covering it with an ample pile of dirt and a large boulder. No one will ever find it—or my fingerprints—here, but I’m not in the clear yet.
I’ll have to ditch Aura’s real I.D. later, after I leave the camp.

I walk back to Charity, and we drag the kayaks to the lake and get situated. After I look at my compass and point toward the direction we need to go, she nods, and we both shove off into the water.

The next few hours are peaceful, our pace quick and easy. The lakes and rivers we follow aren’t large enough for the waves that troubled the water around the town where we got the kayaks, and, even if they were, there isn’t any wind to stir them up. The trees are more verdant in the full light of day, more welcoming. Their images glisten in the water, making it seem as if we’re actually kayaking through the treetops. Occasionally, yellow leaves drop from the sky, landing on our heads and in our satiny reflections, sparking tiny ripples, releasing the smell of autumn. At one point, I see a black bear, fishing by the bank, and when I point it out to Charity, her face warms into an enormous smile.

I have to admit it’s nice having a companion. There’s a strange confidence that comes from traveling in numbers, and my worries about finding the camp have lessened considerably, which is odd when I consider that the responsibility for locating it rests on my shoulders alone.

We continue to make steady progress, stopping occasionally to pick away at our freeze-dried meals or to carry our kayaks across a strip of land. By early afternoon, however, my arms are stiff and heavy, and I’m starting to slow down. My hands, even though they’re wrapped in a strip of cloth cut from my shirt, are bleeding.

A breeze swipes the sweat from the back of my neck. Thank goodness for that. It’s gotten hot over the last hour, and it looks like the sun’s going to keep beating down on us. The extra heat won’t help things at all. As best as I can tell from the map, we still have about twenty kilometers to go. Four hours at a good pace—twice that long if I keep slowing down.

I’m trying to figure out how to communicate my concerns to Charity when I look up and see she’s fifty feet ahead of me and moving still further away. A moment ago, she was right by my side. I splash my paddle on the water to get her attention. She slows down and looks over her shoulder at me then gestures excitedly with her arm. I paddle as quickly as I can, which doesn’t feel very fast, and when I’m fifteen feet away, she points vigorously skyward.

I look up, afraid we might be in for another storm, but the sky is clear. There’s not even a cloud. Nothing except the bright sun. I look back at her and discover she’s moved forward yet again.

“Ah, c’mon,” I mutter. “Stop doing that. I can’t go that fast.” I paddle awkwardly after her.

After a few minutes, she notices I’m not keeping up and waits for me. When I finally catch up, huffing from the effort, she looks at me, forehead wrinkled. I want to ask how’s she able to go so quickly, but I don’t want to offend her by breaking the silence. So I meet her perplexed gaze with my own.

She frowns. Then she paddles the kayak backward until her stern touches my bow and, reaching back, loops our toggled handles together. I stare at her, not even trying to hide my incredulity. Does she really think she’s going to be able to paddle for both of us?

Apparently, she does. As soon as the kayaks are linked, she dips the oar back into the water. I skeptically raise my paddle to join her, but before it even touches the water, we’re moving forward, not as quickly as she had been before, but certainly faster than I was going on my own. I gape at the back of her lifejacket, at her scrawny arms. How is this possible?

Finally, I decide to be more than a dead weight and add my paddling to hers. I can’t tell that it makes any difference, but at least I don’t feel like such a loser. We cruise through the water, covering more distance in the next fifteen minutes than we had in the previous hour.

Countless questions ricochet inside my head. How does Charity have such amazing upper body strength? Why did she wait until now to go this fast? How do
any
of the kids from the van know how to kayak so quickly and yet know nothing about camping? But soon the ache in my arms and back drown out everything else. I don’t want to stop paddling, but keeping up with Charity’s pace is beyond exhausting.

The next hour goes by in a throbbing haze, and I lose feeling in my arms long before the end of it. Just as I’m about to give up, we reach a fork in the river, and Charity stops, looking at me for direction. Gratefully, I bend down to retrieve the map from my pack. I move slowly, afraid the break will be over as soon as I give her our heading. But it turns out there’s no need for my dawdling—it legitimately takes me several minutes to figure out where we are. I can’t believe how much ground we’ve covered. It seems impossible, but we’re only a kilometer or two away from our destination.

I show Charity the location of the camp on the map and point to the stream branching to the right. She nods and, to my simultaneous relief and disappointment, unhooks the kayaks. I see the fatigue in her face. If I’m tired, she must be ready to drop.

We paddle leisurely down the river, resting our arms often since there’s enough of a current to do the work for us. As I wonder again what lies ahead, I feel that twist in my stomach. What kind of a camp abandons its campers in the wilderness? I jiggle my shoulders, trying to shake out the tension.

The river shrinks drastically, and as we come around the bend, it grows so narrow the tree branches on either side of the bank entwine above the water. We sit low in our kayaks as we travel through the tunnel of leaves and pine needles. It’s quiet. Just the lapping of our paddles and the whistle of a bird.

Suddenly, the tunnel widens, and we enter a bay the size of several football fields, fed by at least twenty other tunnels like the one from which we just emerged. I look up at the trees, astonished at the way they’ve all grown together to create a natural canopy. But something about it seems strange. The tree trunks don’t curve. It’s as if the limbs have extended outward, merging with their neighbors even though there’s nothing underneath to support them. I continue to stare, and then I figure it out—there aren’t really pine boughs and aspen leaves above us. It’s some kind of netting.

Frowning, I paddle after Charity toward a beach on our right where metal racks hold at least fifty green kayaks. Two people are arriving just ahead of us, but no one I recognize. A man in a baseball cap approaches them, says something, and then helps them carry their kayaks to the stands. By the time we reach the shore, the two initiates have disappeared over a small hill.

The man in the baseball hat greets us as we get out of our kayaks. “
Manewa.
Welcome to the testing grounds!” he says. “Your period of silence is honorably ended. I’ll take your backpacks. Please stack your kayaks on the frames and go to the
wakenu
to check in.”

The kink in my stomach tightens. Testing grounds—what does that mean? And what language is he speaking?

Taking deep breaths and hoping Charity understands what he’s talking about, I drag my kayak up the beach and follow her over the hill.
Stay calm
, I remind myself
. Act natural.

“Thanks for helping me last night.” Charity looks over at me and smiles softly, her voice cracking.

“What?” I cough. “Oh, that—don’t mention it.” I open my mouth to ask her about the kayaking, but then I see the camp and the words don’t come out.

At first it seems like we could be anywhere in the forest. Pine trees extend in all directions for as far as I can see, separated now and then by patches of deciduous gold. But after a moment I see the same camouflaged netting overhead and spot rope walkways strung between the trees. And, just ahead of us, a spiral staircase wraps around a large pine. I follow it with my eyes until it disappears halfway up the trunk.

I squint. Where did it go? I take a few steps to the right, and the branches shift. I step back to the left, and the trunks bend again. And then I see why: they’re not trees at all. They’re reflections. Hanging in the forest is an enormous mirror.

As we get closer, I discover there are actually four enormous mirrors—each one forming the side of a large rectangular building. The mirrors reflect the trees around them, making the building blend in almost perfectly with the surrounding forest. The entire structure is supported by a dozen pine trees and stands halfway between the ground and the pine boughs at the top.

Charity walks toward the staircase, and I trail after her. The stairs lead us up through the floor of the building, depositing us in a wide corridor made entirely of steel. Not just the floor—the walls too.

At the other end of the hallway is a second staircase leading to an upper level, and to the right of us are two rooms. A steel table is stationed between the doorways to the two rooms, a large flag draped across its front. Embroidered on the flag is a red eagle grasping an axe.
No, not an axe
, I think, noting the feathers on the handle and the shape of the blade
. A tomahawk.

The only person in sight is a middle-aged woman sitting behind the table. Charity and I walk toward her.

“
Tanaka
,” the woman says.

“
Tanaka,
” Charity replies. I echo her awkwardly.

“What was your base city?” the woman asks, twitching a narrow, pointed eyebrow. Her back is rigidly straight, and her black hair, slashed with gray, is pleated behind her in a long braid.

“Winnipeg,” Charity says.

The woman picks up a sleek walkie-talkie. “Jeremy!” she barks into the device. A few moments later, our counselor comes bounding down the staircase from the floor above.

“Yo, Naira,” he answers. Then he sees us, and a smile fans out across his lips. “Hey, hey! You made it! Come with me.”

As I follow Charity toward the other staircase, the woman at the table stands up and walks over to the door that’s closest to me. I glance to my right in time to see her enter the room. The door swings back, and as I get a brief glimpse inside, I stumble forward, bumping into Charity.

“Sorry,” I mumble, my mind spinning.

The room was filled with machine guns.

I curl one sweaty hand around my switchblade as I ascend the stairs, my mind fixed on the long rows of polished automatic rifles. Military weapons.

When we step onto the next level, I can feel the vein on my neck twitching, the blood pounding behind my ears. But then I look around me, and just for a moment, the guns fade from my mind. The room up here couldn’t be more different from the one below. Instead of bare, angular walls, there is shape and color. Curved black beams support the ceiling and round out the corners. Crescent chairs and circular gray tables, some of them built around the tree trunks that shoot up through the floor, are positioned comfortably around the room, and curvy red couches are clustered around white globes that actually contain small fires. Wavy black and gray tiles spiral outward from the largest tree trunk in the center of the room. I’ve never seen anything so elegant or spacious. There’s enough seating to accommodate hundreds of people.

Colossal windows stretch from the floor to the ceiling on every side, but the world outside is slightly darkened. These must be one-way windows—windows on the inside, mirrors on the outside.

Several counselors lounge comfortably on the couches and chairs, chatting and laughing. I see Aponi among them. She leaves the group and joins us.

Jeremy takes us to a table at the far side of the room, behind which sit three more counselors. On the table are laptops and scanners and other pieces of equipment I don’t recognize. Aponi puts a hand on Charity’s shoulder and leads her to the person on the far right, leaving me with Jeremy.

“Nice work, kid,” he says as takes me to the person on the left. “I had fifty bucks riding on you. Thanks for pulling through.”

I wonder hazily who was betting against me.

“What’s the name?” the counselor asks when we’re standing in front of him.

“Aura Torres,” I answer. My stomach cramps further when I hear how hoarse my voice sounds. What will happen if they find out I’m not her? An icy sweat breaks out at the base of my neck, and suddenly I’m thinking about the rifles downstairs, about the bets my counselors placed on who would make it here alive, about the camouflaged netting and tinted windows and Naira’s harsh eyes.

The man finds the name on his computer. “Do you have your I.D.?” he asks.

His question slowly pushes through the sludge in my brain. I plunge a clammy hand into my coat pocket and pull out Aura’s school I.D. My fingers shake slightly as I hand it to him.

“Will this work?”

The man slips the I.D. underneath the scanner attached to the laptop. Then he carefully studies the image on the screen.
He’s going to realize it’s not me.
I find my switchblade again.

“Put your thumb on this,” the man says, pushing a small electronic pad toward me.

I place my sweaty thumb on the screen, wait for the words of accusation.

But the man just nods his head and types something into the computer before grabbing a thin gray instrument from a stack on the table and plugging it into the laptop. More typing. Then he removes Aura’s I.D. from the scanner and returns it to me. He unplugs the gray device.

“Give me your hand,” he says. I extend my arm, trying to keep it steady. “This is your Quil.” He takes the gray rectangle and snaps it around my wrist.

My eyes widen. A second ago, this thing was solid. As I look at the gadget, numbers appear on the smooth band and rotate around my wrist.
2:30.

“Your number is two hundred and seventy-three,” the man says, handing me a sack lunch he retrieves from the floor. “You’re in
wakemo
fourteen. Dinner’s at seven.” I nod and turn dizzily away from the table, clutching the paper bag.

“Where’s
wakemo
fourteen?” I ask Jeremy as we walk away from the table.
What’s wakemo fourteen?

“I’ll show you,” he says. Then he stops and scrutinizes my face. “Hey, are you okay? You look really pale.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say. “You must not get outside much.”

“Are you kidding? I totally bronzed this summer.”

“Could have fooled me.”

He leads me to a circular doorway near the stairs, and I softly release my breath.
Keep it together, Kit.

The doorway opens into a spherical glass tunnel that leads us out of the building. We’re still suspended above the ground, and I gape through what must also be one-way windows at the forest floor below, a good twenty feet beneath my shoes.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Jeremy asks. “Need me to carry you?”

I snort. “Yeah right.”

“Well, c’mon then.” He grabs my hand to pull me down the tunnel, and my breath escapes in a hiss. He looks at the bloody cloth wrapped around my palm then drops my hand. “You should probably put something on that,” he says.

“Thanks, Mom,” I reply, shoving my hand in my pocket.

A screen door marks the end of the tunnel, and we step through it onto a large wooden porch. Branching out from the porch are five rope bridges—the ones I noticed from the ground—each going in a different direction. Jeremy chooses the fourth bridge. The swaying motion doesn’t help my lurching stomach, so I grip the rope railing and stare at a damp spot on his back.

The bridge takes us a hundred feet or so to a wood cylindrical building propped in the trees. Pine boughs shade its circular windows, and a rope ladder extends from the platform on which we stand to the ground below. A sign by the door reads, “13.”

Three more bridges extend from the platform, and Jeremy leads me past the treehouse onto the first bridge. We stop at another treehouse, this one with a “14” on its sign.

“Clean up, get some rest, and we’ll see you at dinner,” Jeremy says. “And seriously, I mean it. Clean up.”

I make a face, but he just grins and walks back across the bridge. I watch him for a moment before turning to face the entrance. Then, breathing in deeply through my nose, I push the door open with my shoulder and enter the building.

The interior walls are also made of wood—seamless, smooth panels that mimic the inside of a tree. There are only two things in the room: a door and a ramp. Peeking through the door, I find a bathroom, complete with showers, sinks, and toilet stalls. I breathe out and return to the foyer.

Straight ahead, the floor meets the ramp and curves up and around the perimeter of the building, like the spiral staircase at the
wakenu
but without the stairs. In the center of the spiral is a metal pole that extends from the floor all the way to the ceiling. I walk over to the ramp and begin my ascent, running my fingers along the polished wood. Square panels on the ceiling glow warmly, adding their light to the dappled beams that enter through the windows.

Every few feet, a niche is carved into the outside wall, forming a space for some shelves and a bed.
A sign on the first mattress says it’s reserved for the
wakemo
counselor, but the rest of the beds are free game. On the mattresses sit piles of folded clothing, towels, and travel-sized toiletries.

I go all the way to the top of the ramp. Twenty bunks in all, and none of them touched. Apparently, I’m the first person to be sent to
wakemo
fourteen. I decide to take the uppermost bed—there’s something secure about the way the mattress is nestled into the corner where the wall meets the ceiling; plus, this way people won’t be walking past me all the time.

I sit on the edge of my mattress for a moment, stare at a knot in the wood, force my mind to stay empty. When the pressure in my chest has returned to its usual level of tightness, I gather up the towel and toiletries, get off the bed, and walk toward the pole. I wrap my towel around the metal so the friction won’t hurt my hands then take a deep breath and slide down, putting the weight in my legs. It’s a long drop, longer than I thought it would be, but when I get to the bottom, I decide I enjoyed it.

In the bathroom, I remove everything except for my necklace and the strange watch—I can’t figure out how to take it off my wrist—and step into one of the showers. Instead of a perforated spray, the water spills onto the beige tiles like a small waterfall. I wash my dizziness away with the sweat and dirt, concentrating on the drops that spring off my skin as the flow splashes onto my arms. The water stings my hands, but I make sure the wounds are thoroughly cleaned.

The warm drizzle runs over the pendant resting on my chest, and I rub my thumb across the swirling design. The bone was white when my father gave it to me. Now it’s yellow with age. For a second, I can remember his face, but, as always, the memory wilts, and I can’t summon it back.

I return to my bunk clean but barely able to place one foot in front of the other. On one of the shelves I find a small first aid kit, and I generously apply ointment and bandages to my palms. Then I investigate the clothing on my mattress. There are three khaki-colored pants, six tee shirts—two tan, two green, and two brown—and plenty of undergarments, including bras. The clothes look small, but when I try them on, they stretch to fit my body exactly. The fabric is lightweight and cool and, surprisingly, not very tight. I pull off the shirt I’m wearing and try another one. Same thing, a perfect fit.

Somewhere in my mind I know that this doesn’t make sense, but when I realize that I’ve been staring blankly at the shirt in my hand for a good thirty seconds, I push the clothes off the bed and onto the shelves. That’s something to figure out another time.

Time. I look at the watch. Three o’clock. How did we do it? How did
Charity
do it?

Charity! I never finished thanking her, never found out her real name. Maybe I’ll see her at dinner.

Dinner. My stomach rumbles, and I reach for the paper sack the counselor gave me. Inside I find a sandwich, an apple, a granola bar, and a water bottle. In no time at all, I’ve devoured the food and emptied the bottle. I yawn. Now it’s time to sleep.

As I crumple my trash into the paper bag, I notice a piece of paper inside. I pull it out. The words along the top read, “
Maitanga
Tura
.” I glance at the first line. It’s also in the strange language, but there’s an English translation: “Rule 1: Fires after dark are strictly prohibited.”
That’s weird.
Why wouldn’t they want to light fires? I think about the netting and mirrors, the fact that the location of the camp is a secret.
Why?
What are they hiding?

I hold my stomach and look back at the paper. Perhaps there’s more information in here, something that will clue me in to what’s going on. I keep reading the rules, but my eyes have trouble focusing. I squint at the words. There’s something about curfew, making too much noise at night, proper waste disposal, wildlife … As I read the same sentence again and again, the words begin to warp and blur. I set the paper down and lean back into the pillows. I’ll just close my eyes for one second. Then I’ll figure it out.

I blink and stare at the wooden boards above my head until I remember where I am. I sit up. There are other girls in the bunkhouse now—I can hear water running through the pipes in the bathroom below, footsteps on the ramp, two people laughing. I blink again and look at my watch. I’ve been asleep for three and a half hours. It’s almost time for dinner. I yawn and stretch.

A pretty girl pokes her head around the curve in the wall. Her hair is curly and brown and slightly damp, probably from a recent shower. Her hazel eyes crinkle.

“
Tanaka
! You’re awake!” she says. “I was just about to come get you. I didn’t want you to be late for dinner.”

I stare at her, my brain struggling to process. “Thanks,” I finally stammer.

“No prob. We’re going to be neighbors for the next week, so I thought I’d better start the relationship off on good terms. Although to be honest, I wasn’t sure what was going to be the best way to wake you. I figured maybe I’d throw a pillow or something.” She laughs. “My name’s Lila.”