99 Lies

  “But I seem to have forgotten my shining armor.”

  I laugh, because the only alternative is crying. “I thought you were dead!”

  Indiana winces as my fingers brush his injury. “We both will be, if we don’t get out of here. Come on.” He tugs me out of my prison cell, and over his shoulder I see another familiar form and a scraggly man bun I would recognize anywhere.

  “Rog?” He’s holding a pistol, and he looks comfortable with it.

  “Time to go.” Rog gives me a fierce grin. “Sebastián’s men are crawling all over this corner of the jungle, and the explosion won’t keep them occupied for long.”

  “That was you guys?” I gape at Indiana.

  “Rog has a surprisingly broad skill set,” he says as he tugs me toward the front door. “Come on. The explosion should bring the army running, and we need to find them before Sebastián’s men find us.”

  “Wait!” I turn back as Rog tries to usher me out the door. “Holden’s in that other room. We can’t leave him.”

  Rog scowls, and I can practically see the argument forming on his tongue. But then he rolls his eyes and shrugs. “I’ll get him. Go.”

  I grab a protein bar from the table near the door while Rog unlocks Holden’s room. As I shove it into my pocket for later, Holden’s door swings open. I hear a grunt, then a pained strangling noise.

  Rog goes stiff with his back to me. His pistol clatters to the floor. He stumbles back, clawing at his own throat, and Holden blinks at him from the doorway, clutching a large, bloody shard of window glass.

  “What did you do?” I shriek as Rog grasps at his own neck, blood pouring between his fingers.

  “Shit! I thought . . .” Holden blinks again, his focus narrowing on Rog. “I thought he was one of Sebastián’s . . .”

  I grab a rag from the table and kneel over Rog, pressing the cloth to his throat. He blinks up at me, his mouth open. There’s so much blood. It soaks through the rag in seconds.

  “Genesis, we have to go.” Holden’s arm lands on my shoulder, but I shove him away.

  “We can’t just leave him.”

  “It was an accident,” Holden insists, though no one’s claimed otherwise. “There’s nothing we can do for him, and if Sebastián catches us trying to escape, he’ll kill us. No matter what your uncle’s orders are.”

  “What? Your uncle?” Indiana looks confused.

  “I’ll explain later,” I promise.

  Indiana nods. “Holden’s right, G.” His voice is tight with regret. Thick with anguish. “Besides, I think Rog is gone.”

  I turn back to Rog and find him staring up through sightless eyes. The blood flow has slowed.

  It happened so fast.

  “Come on.” Indiana takes my hand and I let him pull me up, tears blurring the cabin around me. “He came to help me get you out of here, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  It’s okay.

  MADDIE

  After I hang up the phone, I take one more drink from the bottle, then I sneak it back into the closet. My mother is crying softly in her room. She doesn’t hear a thing.

  I brush my teeth so Luke won’t smell the rum on my breath, and by the time I hear a soft knock on the front door, I feel a little dizzy. When I stand to answer it, the room looks unsteady.

  “Where’s your mom?” Luke says as I lead him toward my bedroom.

  “Asleep.” She stopped crying a few minutes ago. I close the door behind us, then wrap my arms around his neck and lay my head on his shoulder. This is what I wanted.

  “Maddie?” Luke pulls back to look at me. “Have you been drinking?”

  “A little,” I admit.

  He leads me to the bed and turns back the covers. “Lie down. I’ll get you some water.”

  “Stay.” I pull him down next to me.

  “Maddie, I can’t . . .” He looks so conflicted, as if his body and his head want different things. I know the feeling. “You’re drunk.”

  I blink up at him, and his face blurs as tears fill my eyes. “I think my dad’s a terrorist.”

  His frown deepens, and now he looks worried. “I don’t even know what that means. What’s going on?”

  I lean back on the bed and pull the covers up to my chest, like a shield. “Genesis called the hotline number. She said my dad is Sebastián’s boss. That he faked his own death.”

  “Genesis called the hotline? Wait, what?” He frowns, clearly trying to process the new information. “Your dad . . . ? That’s crazy.” He looks as skeptical as I felt during the call. “She was probably speaking under duress.”

  “I heard him.” I take a deep breath, then spit out the words I’ve been trying to come to terms with from the moment I heard his voice. “I think he’s holding Genesis in the jungle. I think everything that happened to us is his fault.”

  I can’t tell whether Luke believes me, but finally he nods, then pulls his shirt over his head. He leaves his shoes on the floor, then slips under the covers with me, still wearing his pants.

  “Go to sleep,” he says as he turns off my lamp. Then he slides one arm over my waist, his chest pressed against my back. The warmth of Luke’s arms and the rum buzz begin to pull me toward sleep. “It’s okay. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”

  7 DAYS, 18 HOURS EARLIER

  No one could possibly blame you.

  GENESIS

  Tears burn my eyes and blur my vision. My hand is shaking. My legs are unsteady as I descend the cabin’s single front step, but I hit the ground running, and I can’t stop.

  “Wait!” Indiana calls softly as he bursts through the front door behind me. To our left is a second cabin—presumably where Holden showered and ate—and to the right, the jungle is on fire. Holden is ahead of us, already running in the opposite direction of the flames. “We need to head west.” Indiana gestures toward the blaze. As if the path to freedom includes walking through fire.

  “Why?” But I stop, fear undulating through me in overlapping waves, urging me to run. In any direction.

  There’s blood on my hands. Literally.

  Holden stops, but doesn’t return. As if he wants to hear Indiana’s idea before he makes up his mind.

  “Because the army bunkhouse where they dragged us from our tents is due west of here. That’s how Rog and I came in.” Indiana wraps his arm around my shoulders, which is when I realize I’m shaking uncontrollably. Surrounded by trees and fire, all I can really see is blood.

  And those unseeing eyes, staring up at the ceiling.

  Indiana rubs my bare arm. “There’s a much more direct route from the bunkhouse back to Cabo San Juan than the one we took last week.”

  Because last week, the bunkhouse wasn’t our destination; it was a detour after Neda twisted her ankle.

  I blink, trying to draw my thoughts into focus. Trying to put what just happened behind me. We’ve all seen enough death. There’s no reason to dwell . . .

  “If it’s that close, Sebastián must know that,” Holden says as he finally turns toward us. “That’ll be the first place he looks.”

  “We don’t actually have to go to the bunkhouse,” Indiana tells him. “The army is looking for you guys, and they’ll be drawn this way by the explosion. We just need to make sure they’re the ones who find us. Which means heading toward the soldiers, not away from them.”

  “Assuming they’re not in on this like the last bunkhouse soldiers. I’m not trekking through the jungle just to get caught again,” Holden snaps.

  “Do what you want.” Indiana dismisses him and tugs me toward the west, clearly eager to get away from the cabin. That same urgency makes my legs ache to run, in spite of my exhaustion. “We need the bunkhouse as a point of reference, at the very least. Otherwise, we may never make it out of the jungle.”

  “Lead the way,” I say. With a relieved smile, Indiana takes off through the jungle on a path that will lead us around the fire, pushing aside branches and stepping over roots as quietly as we can.


  I follow him and, cursing beneath his breath, Holden thrashes his way through the brush after us, despite his protests.

  My pulse pounds in my ears with every step. The fire roars, drowning out my thoughts and any attempt to speak. My head spins, and the trees seem to be dancing around me. I try to focus on what’s ahead of me, rather than what’s behind me, but I haven’t eaten enough for this kind of exercise.

  Indiana is a blur in front of me, stumbling through the sweltering jungle. Grabbing branches for support. He touches the healing gash on his head, then runs his hand through his hair to disguise the motion, but I can see that he’s struggling. I’ve hardly eaten in days, and he’s still recovering from a head wound. I can’t believe we’re even on our feet.

  We have no supplies, except my protein bar and whatever Indiana has in his backpack. If not for the fire, we wouldn’t be able to see where we are going. And with every step I take, I’m terrified that I’ll hear boots on the ground behind us. Voices shouting through the jungle. When Sebastián realizes what happened, he will come after us.

  We should have grabbed Rog’s pistol. In that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to loot his still-warm corpse, but now . . .

  I can’t be this close to freedom only to watch it slip through my grasp. Not again.

  Determination and fear sharpen my focus. One step at a time, Genesis. Just think about the next step. Then the next.

  When we’ve safely passed the fire, Indiana’s pace slows while he swings his backpack off his shoulder and begins digging in the bag. I catch up with him as he pulls out a compass and a flashlight. “Hold this for me?” He hands me the light, and I shine it on the compass.

  Indiana makes a correction to our course, now that we’ve gone around the blaze, and we head due west. “Water?” He pulls a plastic bottle from a pouch on the side of his bag and offers it to me.

  “Thanks.” I take several gulps, then pass it to Holden before I remember that he had water in his room in the cabin.

  I pull the stolen protein bar from my pocket and eat as we walk, hoping to steady my legs and ease the fierce ache in my head. Malnutrition and dehydration have taken a heavy toll on me. Everything hurts, and the jungle has a blurry, unreal quality that has nothing to do with the fact that little moonlight filters through the thick canopy overhead.

  “How long has it been?” I whisper, pushing a branch out of my path. I don’t hear anyone following us, but that doesn’t mean my uncle’s men aren’t out there. “Since that night on the beach? The cruise ship.”

  “That was early on Wednesday morning,” Indiana says. “This is Friday.” He hesitates. “Well, it’s probably early Saturday by now.”

  Three days. “If Uncle David wasn’t trying to kill me, he was certainly trying to break me.”

  “Maddie’s dad? I thought he died,” Indiana says.

  “Turns out he’d just rather be a terrorist than a father. The bombs were his.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.” I step over a dimly lit root arching from the earth. “How long have you and Rog been out here looking for us?”

  “Since Wednesday morning. After the explosion, I woke up in a boat on the beach with no idea what was going on. I stumbled around for a few minutes, trying to remember what had happened, and Rog found me. He said you never made it out of the jungle. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I was afraid that if I went, they’d hold me for questioning, and I . . .” He shrugs, a shifting of the shadows to my left. “I couldn’t leave you out here. So when the authorities started showing up, we got back in the boat and headed down the coast to find some supplies.”

  “So you never went to the hospital?”

  “I only lost consciousness for a few minutes.”

  “You could have a skull fracture! You’ve been hiking for nearly three days with a head wound, looking for armed terrorists!” I stop for a second to study him in the distant flicker of flames. Then I press myself against Indiana and go up on my toes to kiss him. We have time for that.

  Holden makes an angry noise as he stomps past us, but Indiana holds me for a second. Then takes my hand and leads me forward again.

  “Rog was army special forces,” he says as we settle back into the hike. “He knows first aid. He wouldn’t let me head back into the jungle until he was pretty sure it was just a concussion.”

  Special forces. A vet. And he died at the hands of the spoiled rich kid he was trying to set free.

  Though I hadn’t thought it was possible, I hate Holden a little more.

  I let my focus wander back to Indiana, and an isolated ray of moonlight shines on his injury. “That was still dumb.”

  His smile reminds me of the night we met, on the beach at Cabo San Juan. “As dumb as refusing to rescue yourself so you can blow up a terrorist’s arsenal?”

  Indiana wouldn’t joke if he knew about the Splendor, and I’m not surprised that he doesn’t. The explosion is what knocked him unconscious, and afterward, he didn’t speak to Maddie and the others or to the authorities. “The bombs weren’t on a mini-sub, Indiana. They were on a cruise ship.”

  “She killed twelve hundred people,” Holden says from the shadows to my right. “She’s a mass murderer.”

  Indiana blinks at me in the dark, clearly stunned. Then he shakes his head and turns to me, brushing a strand of dirty hair back from my face. “No. G, you didn’t kill anyone. You didn’t put those bombs on the ship. You didn’t know they were there. No one could possibly blame you for that.”

  But he’s wrong. The world will be looking for someone to blame, and Holden is ready to point the finger right at me.

  7 DAYS, 17 HOURS EARLIER

  It’s probably too late.

  MADDIE

  My eyes fly open in the dark and I sit straight up in bed. My dad’s alive. The sudden realization wakes me up like a bucket of cold water thrown over my head.

  Genesis!

  “Maddie?” Luke says, and I gasp, surprised to find him in my room. In the middle of the night. “What’s wrong?” His voice is husky with sleep. The bed creaks softly as he sits up next to me, and finally I remember.

  I called him. And I drank rum. Which would explain why my head feels . . . heavy. Why the room looks a little unsteady.

  I’m still kind of buzzed.

  I reach over Luke to fumble for my phone on the nightstand, and I find myself pressed against his bare chest, nothing but my shirt between us. His body goes utterly still against mine. He even stops breathing. Then he hands me my phone.

  “Sorry,” I mumble as I press the home button. Light from the screen illuminates his face while I scroll through my messages. Nothing from my uncle.

  Genesis called two hours ago. If they haven’t found her yet, it’s probably too late.

  Please, God, let them find her.

  I have to tell my uncle the rest. Even if the words kill me.

  Genesis said my dad’s alive. That he’s there. That he’s behind this whole thing.

  If Uncle Hernán wants more information than that, he’s going to have to call me.

  “How do you feel?” Luke strokes hair back from my face.

  I drop my phone on the comforter and turn back to him. “I—” My mouth is dry, and suddenly that seems to have nothing to do with the rum and everything to do with the fact that Luke’s in my bed. Under the covers. We shared a tent and a hammock in the jungle, but somehow this feels a million times more intimate. “How did you get here?”

  “I took my mom’s car.” He leans back against my headboard, and the vertical lines of his abs stand out with the movement. “But I should probably get it back before she notices it’s missing.”

  “You don’t have a license.” He won’t turn sixteen for another month.

  “You were upset.” He bends to pick up his shirt from the floor, then pulls it over his head. “Are you sure you heard your dad over the phone?”

  I crawl out of bed, straightening my pajama shirt. “I know his voice, Luke.”
br />   Still sitting on the edge of the mattress, he pulls me closer until I’m standing between his thighs, both my hands in his. “Okay, so what do we do?”

  I shrug and sit next to him. “I guess I’ll have to tell my mom.” And maybe . . . the police.

  What if they think my mom and I helped him?

  My eyes fall closed as the reality hits me. I’m the daughter of a terrorist.

  But how can I not turn him in?

  “Do you want me to stay?” Luke takes my hand. He looks worried.

  “No, that’s okay. Take your mom’s car home before she reports it stolen.” She already blames me for “luring” her son into the jungle, where we were kidnapped. Even though, technically, Luke was never actually kidnapped. “Thanks for coming.”

  Dazed from both the rum and from psychological whiplash, I walk Luke to the door and lock it behind him. Then I grab my phone from my room and realize I don’t know who to call to turn my father in.

  Can you call 911 to report a terrorist a continent away?

  We cannot be caught.

  GENESIS

  We’ve been walking forever.

  It’s probably only been a couple of hours, but with freedom taunting me like a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel, every step feels like a mile. Every second feels like a month.

  And I am so tired.

  The bouncing beam from Indiana’s flashlight threatens to hypnotize me. Branches seem to be reaching into my path just to smack me in the face, while roots pop up to catch my boots. The possibility of falling and impaling myself on a stick is the only thing keeping me awake.

  Until I hear the faint snap of a twig behind us.

  Adrenaline races through me and I freeze. Indiana goes still.

  Another snap echoes from somewhere at our backs.

  Indiana clicks the flashlight off. A couple of steps ahead of us, Holden turns, and too late, I realize he hasn’t heard. And we can’t warn him without making more noise.