Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) (14 page)

“So our fourth place is
last
place now.” I groan.

When I’ve witnessed this self-pity in others during races, I always want to give them a slap and tell them to get over themselves. Yet here I am, wallowing.

“We are contenders,” he insists.

“If you say so.”

“I do.” He turns his attention back to finishing his food.

Because it’s the evening before the big finish, we are shepherded through falling snow to the media tent, where the newsquackers group us all for a joint interview, positioning us along one side of a table in order of our current rank in the race. As each racer takes a chair, I notice he or she is also moving stiffly. We all sport bruises and scrapes on our faces and hands. Some of our competitors probably wear elastic bandages like mine beneath their clothing, too. I am reminded of salmon swimming upstream, how they all keep going despite getting so beaten up along the way.

“And last but not least,” Mrs. Wrinkle, playing the chirpy organizer tonight, points to the final two chairs. “Team Seven!”

Maybe not least, but certainly the most depressing. Sebastian and I glumly take our seats.

The first question is why we want to win. Duh. I struggle to come up with something that sounds noble, and by the time the cameras turn my way, I’ve got it. “I want to win for my Mom and Dad.”

There’s a catch in my voice as I say the last word, and I press my lips together and blink to keep tears at bay. I’m not acting. I’d like to think I make Mom and Dad proud, wherever they are now.

The cameras and microphones move back up the row. The next question: If you win, what would you do with the prize money?

Catie says she’d donate it to the Special Olympics. Marco says he’d use it to buy a spectacular vacation for his whole extended family—all forty-two of them. Yeesh.

I wonder what Maddie would have said.

When they get to Sebastian, he rubs a thumb across the whiskers on his chin for a second. “Maybe buy a nicer house for my mom and dad.” He tosses his head and clarifies. “My
real
dad, not The President. And I’d put some money into my landfill mining project.”

They focus on me. “How about you, Zany?”

I would save Bailey.
My eyes tear up again, and I quickly look away. “I have a plan for it.”

A reporter presses me. “Your plan sounds important.”

“It is.” I swallow to tamp down the rasp in my voice before saying, “I have a friend whose life is in danger. I would use that money to save him.”

Naturally the reporters want to know
whose
life. If I told Bailey’s story, it would ignite a Net firestorm. There’s a sizeable percentage of the population who would argue that Bailey is not worth saving. While a few might consider me a hero, I don’t want to be at the forefront of any debate.

So I shake my head. “I don’t want to give false hope.”

Some of my competitors look perplexed by my statement. A few squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Most viewers will assume that I’m talking about some medical procedure that an insurance company has refused to pay for. That’s another of Garrison’s economic control policies that polite people don’t discuss. Corporate profits always trump individual lives; it’s a basic principle of life in the Twenty-First Century.

Catie Cole stares at me with glistening eyes that make me wonder if she’s lost someone important lately. Then my brain gloms onto the fact that Catie’s father is always with her, but I’ve never heard anything about Mrs. Cole. What happened to Catie’s mother?

The press conference finally ends and we all move off to our sleeping tents.

“There’s money attached to second and third place,” Sebastian reminds me.

I shake my head. Five hundred thousand to split for second, two hundred fifty thousand for third. Not nearly enough for what I need. No bank would give a seventeen-year-old minimum-wage employee a loan for the rest. “I don’t want second or third.”

“There are only four teams left. And there is still a whole day to complete the course, Tarzan.” He grins and gives my shoulder a little pat.

I want to believe he has a point. We are still both in relatively good shape. Maybe a miracle will happen and the three teams ahead of us will encounter major problems tomorrow. Although I hope nobody else dies, I am evil enough to wish sprained ankles or getting lost in the jungle on my competitors.

I try to envision winning. And I try to imagine how to ask Sebastian for the whole million.

Outside, the wind moans around our encampment. Snow crystals scour the sides of our tent. When I go out for my nightly ritual, I find a totally different world than last night. The full moon is only a blur in the swirling snow above. The stars are completely obliterated. There’s little point in looking up, so I stand with my eyes closed, inhaling the cold clear air, feeling the snow brushing my cheeks, hoping the weather clears up by tomorrow morning, and trying to think of something to be thankful for in addition to surviving one more day.

My thoughts land first on the tiger. She was so fearsome and proud, and yet so sad and alone. Seeing a tiger in the wild—that was miraculous, even if it was terrifying at the moment. Next, I remember the myriad shades of blue in the icy crevasse, and I decide I am grateful for getting to see the inside of a place like that. Then my brain replays the sheer terror and agonizing tension of our climb out, and finally my partner’s kiss.

“I am grateful to have Sebastian Callendro for my partner,” I whisper to the snowflakes stinging my face.

A hand lands on my forearm, startling me out of my private mental screening of the day’s events. The leather glove on my sleeve belongs to the suit shadowing me. He impatiently tilts his head back toward the tent.

I step inside the flap and shake off the snow that has accumulated on my jacket and hair. Sebastian, perhaps smarter than I, didn’t come outside with me this time to say goodnight to the world. He’s lying on his bed with the covers up to his neck, staring at the canvas stretched overhead.

“Sounds cold out there,” he remarks.

“Got that right.” I turn my back and unzip my jacket and begin the process of stripping down to my thermal underwear for sleeping.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says.

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

He ignores my snarkiness. “A crocodile, a land mine, a tiger, a crevasse.”

“And a partridge in a pear tree,” I sing as I slide into my bed. The sheets are cold against my bare feet, and I slide out again to put my socks back on.

“Haven’t run across that partridge yet,” he says, yawning. “Maybe tomorrow. But no worries, because I think Team Seven might be immortal, Tarzan.”

My entire body aches as I bend down to pull on my socks. “If I were immortal, I wouldn’t hurt this much.”

“Maybe that’s part of the deal.”

Now there’s a horrible thought, that you could be doomed to suffer throughout life but never die. Naturally my masochistic memory works to disprove this possibility, rewinding to Maddie’s death scene and then back to my parents’ bodies on our living room floor. Here one minute, and gone the next.

“Nobody is immortal,” I tell him.

Why would anyone want to be? You’d have to watch everyone you love die over and over again.

I have a hard time getting to sleep. Apparently Sebastian does, too, because after a half hour or so, he whispers, “You awake, Tarzan?”

“I am now. It’s freezing in here.”

“I’m too cold to sleep.” He’s beside me, lifting up the edge of my down comforter. “Shared bodily warmth?”

I choose my words carefully. “Get in. You can
sleep
beside me.”

He yawns and slips into my bed, pressing his back against me. I slide my arm under my pillow and roll over onto my side away from him.

“Is Aaron your boyfriend?”

My pulse skips a couple of beats. “What?”

His voice was soft. Maybe I didn’t hear that right.

He flips over and slides an arm over my waist. “The other night, when you were pretending to be Amelia, you shouted for Aaron.”

Apparently my subconscious has loose lips. It’s a damn good thing I live alone. I hope Sebastian can’t feel my galloping heart. “Really? I shouted for Aaron?”

“You did. Is he someone special to you?”

I struggle to devise a good explanation. “I can’t believe I did that. That’s warped. But I guess it all goes together. Aaron is not my boyfriend; he’s Amelia Robertson’s baby brother. Aren’t dreams weird?”

“Yeah, they usually are.”

“I guess you could say Emilio’s my boyfriend. Emilio Santos, the guy I’ve been videochatting with. He’s in the army now, though, so it’s not like we’re really
together
.”

I’m talking too much.

“So is Emilio the guy whose life you want to save?”

“No. If Emilio’s life needs saving, the army damn well better do it.”

“Bailey?”

“What? Did I scream Bailey’s name in my sleep, too?”

He chuckles softly. “You were talking about Bailey to your friend at the zoo.”

“Bailey’s another friend of mine. He’s a nice guy, most of the time. I think you’d like him.”

“Does Bailey have cancer or something?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Most people wouldn’t understand my relationship with Bailey.

“Why do you need to save his life?”

I think about whether it’s safe to tell him. “Bash, does anyone in your family hunt?”

“Wow,” he says, “Way to change the conversation.”

“Just answer the question. Have you ever killed anything with a rifle?”

“I’ve gone turkey hunting with my uncles a couple of times. And my Dad goes bear hunting every year.”

That answers my question about whether it’s smart to confide in my partner. “Roll over, Sebastian.”

His arm tightens around my waist. “Because I’ve hunted?”

“Because I’m tired of answering questions. I want to sleep. We have a hell of a long way to run tomorrow and I’m sore and tired. Good night.”

Sebastian rolls over and presses his back against mine. His breathing deepens until he starts to snore lightly. I feel the fireflies pulsing on my shoulder as I finally sink into sleep.

We start off the next morning with no other teams in sight. The race crew dismantles tents around us as Sebastian and I warm up, making us feel like guests slow to take the hint that the party’s over.

The wind and clouds are gone. The sun is brilliant at this altitude, glancing off the ice crystals that crust the steep flank of the volcano. We are forced to don our sunglasses. The tracks of our competitors zigzag down the slope in cautious switchbacks, the safest and sanest strategy to use for a steep descent in snow. However, since we are in last place and this is the last day of the race, we can’t afford to choose sanity over any chance to pass the others. So we elect to descend in as straight a line as possible, slip-sliding in the snow on our heels, careening down the mountainside as quickly as we can.

It’s a struggle to keep our balance, but we’ve agreed to go all out today, and I’m not about to slow down and stamp through the snow more carefully. Every muscle in my body is tense and I scan the area below for obstacles as I heel-ski downward. My ankle aches but it’s still in the elastic wrap and seems to be working fine. In the beginning, our descent through the soft new snow is actually sort of fun, except for the icy slush that accumulates in my socks.

As we alternately glide and stumble lower, the icy crust gets harder. In the Cascades near Bellingham, this is similar to spring gravel snow, which scratches the finish off your skis and can erase your epidermis on contact. As we get lower, we find the snow field is scalloped from the sun, which makes it much harder to slide at all. Sebastian and I are forced to do a weird dance to step over some of the higher ridges without tripping, watching all the while for another treacherous crevasse.

Then, on the steepest, iciest slope, both feet slip out from beneath me. I don’t even have time to scream before I start sliding on my backside, way too fast. My pack is beneath me, jabbing its lumpy load of energy gel and water, rope and first aid gear into my back.

I hear Sebastian shout “Tana!” And for a second I’m glad he finally used my chosen name, but then his voice is lost as I zoom past. The crust of ice crystals scours the skin from my bare legs and arms. Ice slithers into my undies and my hair as I bump along the surface. I feel each scallop as I bounce through them, up, down, up, down. It all hurts like hell and I’d give anything to stand on my feet again, but I’m careening out of control at breath-taking speed. If there’s a crevasse yawning below, I’m a goner.

I try to jam in my heels and spread-eagle my arms and legs in an attempt to slow down. These efforts cause me to spin into a head-down position. Great, now I am going to shatter my skull or break my neck before I even see what I am going to collide with. I try to dig my fingers into the snow, but it’s too slick and crusty to get a good hold. I manage to dig in a couple of fingers on my left hand, and my arm nearly rips off as I spin again and return to my head-down position.

This might just be the end. Will I soon see Mom and Dad again? Does Heaven really exist? If it does, then maybe Bailey can join us there, too.

I careen through a hundred more scallops, flopping over the ridges like a rag doll, smacking my head and limbs into the hard crust. Ice slides down my neck. The only thing I can do to help myself at all is clench my jaw so I won’t bite my tongue in half.

Then my body abruptly hurtles off a small rise. I am airborne, zipping through space.