The Contest

  For Brandon VanOver

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  COPYRIGHT

  It was a funeral in every way but one: The body was missing.

  Not missing, exactly. Its location was common knowledge — that was the most horrifying part of all this. The body was nine thousand miles away in a country called Nepal, twenty-seven thousand feet up Mount Everest, the highest point on planet Earth.

  On Everest, everything above twenty-five thousand feet is known as the Death Zone. There, overpowering wind gusts approaching two hundred miles per hour can wrench a strong person clear off the mountain, and bone-chilling nighttime cold of one hundred degrees below zero causes frostbite and hypothermia. Wherever the body was, it was surely frozen solid.

  Twenty-seven thousand feet is above the range of any helicopter. At that altitude, the air is simply too thin to provide the rotor blades with any lift. A stranded climber would have a better chance of being picked up off the surface of the moon than in the Death Zone. Atop Everest, you are your only rescue squad — you and the others who take on the mountain with you.

  It was easy to spot those teammates among the mourners, and not just because of their young age. Their physical bodies fidgeted in the chapel, constricted by grief and tight collars. But their minds were still on the other side of the globe, five miles straight up, in the Death Zone.

  They had that much in common with their unfortunate friend. It was a place they might never truly leave.

  Dominic Alexis arranged the caps and wrappers on his bedroom carpet and examined them for at least the hundredth time:

  E EREST

  He rummaged through the shoebox, searching for the V he knew was not there. R’s. T’s. Dozens of E’s. He had counted once — more than fifty, and that was weeks ago. Even a few extra S’s. Not a single V.

  That was how these contests worked. Millions of the other letters were stuck under the caps of Summit Athletic Fuel and on the inside wrappers of Summit Energy Bars, distributed to stores all around the country. Then they printed up a grand total of three V’s and shipped them to nonexistent addresses in Antarctica, fourth class.

  He was exaggerating, of course. There were V’s out there, even if just a handful. Over the past weeks, the TV news had shown clips of ecstatic young climbers who had spelled out EVEREST to qualify for the five wild-card spots at boot camp. Four of those places had been filled. Only one chance remained.

  At boot camp, the five lucky winners would join the American Junior Alpine Association’s fifteen top young mountaineers for four weeks of intensive training and competition. It promised to be a brutal month of six-hour workouts, night climbs, and marathon hikes carrying heavy packs. But the end result was worth it. The top four climbers would earn places on SummitQuest — Summit Athletic’s Everest expedition, the youngest team ever to attempt the world’s tallest peak.

  A shout from downstairs interrupted his reverie. “Where’s my sand?!”

  It was Christian, Dominic’s older brother. Chris didn’t have to scramble around garbage cans and recycling bins, scrounging for caps and wrappers. His place at boot camp was already secure. He was the number-two-rated under-seventeen climber in the country — second only to the Z-man himself, Ethan Zaph.

  Chris was talking about his good-luck piece — a small glass vial of sand from the Dead Sea. It had been a gift from their grandmother, brought back from a trip to Israel when Chris was a baby and Dominic hadn’t even been born. Chris loved the idea that the sand was from the lowest point on the globe. When he started climbing, he strung the vial on a leather cord so he could wear it around his neck. “I’m taking this sucker vertical!” he would say before an ascent. And at the top of the rock, or cliff, or mountain, he would talk to it: “Far from home, baby! You’re far from home!”

  It was natural that, as Chris became more accomplished as a climber, it would one day cross his mind to take his good-luck piece from the bottom of the world to the top of the world at the summit of Everest. Now, finally, he was getting his chance.

  Pounding on the stairs. “Come on, Dom! I’m packing up my stuff for boot camp!”

  There was no question that, right then, Dominic needed luck more than Chris did. The vial of sand clutched in his fist, he opened the sash of the window and expertly eased himself outside.

  In many neighborhoods, it would probably raise eyebrows to have a thirteen-year-old climbing out a second-story window, but it was a fairly ordinary occurrence around the Alexis home. Sometimes it was just the easiest way down. Vertical was a forbidden direction for most people; for Chris and Dominic, it was as simple an option as left or right. Years before, as little kids, Chris had become the town hide-and-seek champion by scaling a fifty-foot tree for aerial surveillance every time he was “it.” Even Mr. Alexis, when he needed to go up on the roof to check a flapping shingle, never bothered with a ladder. He had grown up in Switzerland, in the shadow of the high Alps, and was responsible for introducing his two sons to “this climbing foolishness.” (Their mother’s opinion.)

  And anyway, a thirty-second climb was better than a face-to-face with Chris over a stolen — ahem — borrowed good-luck charm.

  As far as degree of difficulty went, the front of the house was pretty pathetic. Dominic started down, jamming the edges of his sneakers into the narrow spaces between the bricks.

  As he passed the picture window in the living room, he caught an exasperated look from his mother. He couldn’t actually hear her, but instead read her lips as he dropped to the flower bed:

  “We have a door …”

  But Dominic was already sprinting along Mackenzie Avenue. Preparing for an ascent of Everest required workouts in the five- to seven-hour range, and he had been matching Chris step for step, pedal for pedal, and stroke for stroke. Only when climbing did Chris still hold an advantage. He was almost sixteen, bigger, taller, and stronger than Dominic. He could haul himself up a top rope as naturally as a yo-yo returns to the hand playing with it. Dominic was just a month past his thirteenth birthday, and small for his age.

  The Mackenzie Avenue 7-Eleven was his home away from home. Dominic estimated he had drunk more than forty gallons of Summit Athletic Fuel in the process of spelling E EREST. He’d tried his share of the bars, too, but Summit Energy Bars were like quick-drying cement. After a few of them, your insides turned to concrete. Better to stick with the liquid.

  One more bottle. One last try.

  Out of habit, he checked the recycling bin behind the store first, but it was empty except for a couple of soda cans. Inside, he grabbed a bottle of Fruit Medley. The flavors didn’t matter with Summit Athletic Fuel; it all tasted the same — like weak, slightly salted lemonade backwash. He paid, walked out, and flopped down on the wooden bench next to the store.

  Before popping the cap, he addressed the good-luck charm the way he’d seen his brother do it. “Find me a V and it’s Everest or bust! I’ll take you to the top of the world!”

  Sheepishly, he looked around to make sure no one had overheard. When Chris talked to his little vial o
f sand, it always seemed cool. But in the 7-Eleven parking lot, it was just plain embarrassing.

  He twisted the cap off and peeked underneath.

  Another E.

  Until the wave of disappointment washed over him, he hadn’t realized how much faith he’d had that his brother’s good-luck charm would deliver.

  The leather strap slipped from his fingers, and the vial dropped to the pavement and began to bounce down the small strip mall’s parking ramp. Horrified, Dominic stumbled after it. Losing a shot at Everest was nothing compared with what he’d have to face if he came home without Chris’s Dead Sea sand.

  He scrambled like a crab, but the bottle rolled ahead of him, just out of reach. As he ran across the garage entrance, a hulking SUV roared up suddenly. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the big vehicle squealed to a halt just inches from the boy.

  “What’s the matter with you, kid? Why don’t you look where you’re going?”

  “Sorry.” Dominic picked up the vial and scooted out of the way. Mom had continuous nightmares that climbing would kill at least one member of her family. I’ll bet she wasn’t expecting it to happen like this, he reflected, a little shaken.

  The SUV accelerated up the ramp, pausing at the top. The driver tossed a candy bar wrapper into the trash barrel and drove off.

  It was a Summit Energy Bar. Dominic recognized the logo from where he stood, rooted to the spot. He had climbed towering cliffs, yet walking up this gentle slope to get that piece of paper seemed much, much harder.

  He reached into the garbage and fished out the sticky wrapper. In a way, he almost knew what he would see before he turned it over.

  A V!

  It was a ticket to the top of the world.

  Cap Cicero wasn’t much of a worrier.

  That time climbing Mount McKinley, when the boulder dropped from fifteen thousand feet and whizzed by so close that the wind almost knocked him off the fixed ropes, he didn’t worry. His philosophy was, if it misses you, it didn’t happen. And if it hits you, then you’ve really got nothing to worry about.

  A worrier in the mountaineering business was like a surgeon who fainted at the sight of blood. Neither was likely to make it very far, and Cicero had been racking up death-defying feats and glorious triumphs for thirty-one of his forty-seven years.

  But now, watching the twenty SummitQuest candidates, Cicero fretted that signing on as the team leader might have been a mistake.

  “They’re children,” he told Tony Devlin, who ran Summit’s Sports Training Facility in High Falls, Colorado. “A trip up Everest takes twenty-five pounds or more off the average adult. Half of these kids would fade to nothing.”

  “Relax,” Devlin soothed. “Look at Ethan Zaph —”

  “I know all about Ethan Zaph,” Cicero interrupted. Several months before, Ethan had achieved fame by climbing Everest a few weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday — the youngest person ever to stand on top of the world. “So where is he?”

  Devlin chuckled. “He knows he’s got a spot guaranteed. Why should he suffer through a month of boot camp?”

  Cicero harrumphed, but he knew Ethan Zaph wasn’t the problem. At six foot one and 220 pounds, the kid was built like a lumberjack. Christian Alexis was also adult-sized. But Chris had brought his thirteen-year-old brother with him. Thirteen!

  “That was a mistake,” Cicero told Devlin. “Chris I understand. But the brother? Look at him. I don’t think he’s five feet tall.”

  Devlin shrugged. “We didn’t pick him. He qualified as a wild card through the retail contest.”

  Cicero raised an eyebrow. “Lucky kid. Either that or he really likes Summit bars.”

  “Or maybe he just doesn’t give up until he gets what he’s after,” suggested Devlin. “Not a bad guy to have on an expedition. I hear he’s an A-1 climber.”

  Cicero shook his head. “Too small. Can’t use him.”

  “Do me a favor,” said Devlin. “Don’t cut him just yet. Summit got a lot of publicity out of that contest. We want to make it look like the wild cards have a real shot at the team.”

  Cicero nodded wisely. “And then we cut them.”

  “Not necessarily.” Devlin reached out and pulled aside a sturdy runner with a mass of dark curls. “Here’s one of our wild cards. Rob Barzini, meet Cap Cicero.”

  The boy turned shining eyes on the team leader. “It’s an honor to meet you, Cap. I’ve read up on some of your expeditions.” He grinned broadly, revealing an upper and lower set of gleaming braces.

  Cicero regarded him in dismay. “When can you lose the iron?”

  “The orthodontist says I’ve got another two years to go.”

  Cicero sighed. “Pack your bags, kid. I can’t take that mouth into hundred-below windchill. The cold will bust your braces, and you’ll be running around the Death Zone with a faceful of razor blades.”

  There were a few tears, but Rob accepted his fate and headed off to the office to arrange for an early flight home.

  “You’re a tough man,” accused Devlin.

  “It’s a tough mountain.” Cicero blew his whistle. All around the quarter-mile track, the candidates stopped running and turned to him for instructions. All except Dominic. He kept going, his twenty-pound pack whacking him between his narrow shoulders. The kid sure had stamina.

  Cicero clapped his hands. “Okay, step it up! Double time. There’s no dogging it on the mountain!”

  The running resumed, faster this time. Dominic was practically sprinting now. The supreme effort only had the effect of making him look even smaller as he darted around the bigger kids.

  One time, on K2, Cicero dropped his glove into a crevasse while securing a slipped ladder. He got stuck high on the Abruzzi ridge and had to bivouac — spend a forty-below-zero night in a cramped ice cave with his exposed hand jammed up the opposite sleeve clear to the armpit in order to prevent frostbite. He awoke to the agony of a dislocated shoulder, but he didn’t panic.

  Finding four climbers in this lot. That was a cause for panic.

  Okay, he thought. Zaph and Chris Alexis. He needed only two more.

  His eyes immediately traveled to Norman “Tilt” Crowley, who was lumbering steadily around the track. Tilt — great nickname for a climber — was younger than Ethan and Chris, but almost as big, with the same powerful build and easy athleticism. Plus, he was only fourteen. If Cicero could somehow get him to the top, it would smash Ethan’s record by more than a year. SummitQuest would be on the front page of every newspaper on the planet — which was the whole idea. The purpose of this expedition was advertising, after all.

  He watched as Tilt rounded the curve and came up behind Dominic. It happened so fast that the team leader wasn’t really sure he had seen it. Tilt put his hands on Dominic’s backpack and effortlessly leapfrogged over the smaller boy.

  Terrific, Cicero groaned to himself. The last thing a high-altitude expedition needed was a hot dog.

  His eyes shifted down the line. Sixteen-year-old Joey Tanuda was smaller and less impressive, but rock-solid, with a reputation as a great team player. Also, he had ice experience. Every winter, his parents took him to Alaska to climb frozen waterfalls.

  He knew that Summit Athletic was also pushing to put at least one girl on the team. Bryn Fiedler was the obvious choice. The country’s top-rated female alpinist under seventeen, she was known to be a smart climber. Tall — five foot nine — and blessed with great arm strength, she was also tough. She had to be. Mountaineering was a sport dominated by men. Women climbers had to be bulldogs to get the respect they deserved, and Cicero figured the young ones had to try even harder than that.

  Bryn aside, there weren’t any girls who caught his eye, except —

  The team leader stepped out into the track and plucked a Walkman and sunglasses off Samantha Moon, a fifteen-year-old brunette in a No Fear T-shirt. She was not only keeping pace with the other kids, but also windmilling air guitar as she ran. As the headphones cleared her ears, the pantomine power c
hords stopped, and so did Sammi.

  She stared at Cicero in surprise. “What’s up?”

  “This isn’t a fun run,” he informed her hotly.

  “Who said it was?” she retorted, snatching the headphones from his hands.

  “People die climbing Everest,” Cicero said. “I’ll wash you out right now if you’re not going to train seriously.”

  “I am training seriously,” she shot back. “This” — more air guitar — “is just my style.”

  “Not on my expedition,” he told her.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” She set the Walkman and glasses down at the side of the track and rejoined the running group, leaving Cicero shaking his head.

  Devlin tossed him an offhand shrug. “If you don’t like her attitude, cut her.”

  Cicero was tempted, but he held himself back. The truth was he didn’t know a single top-notch alpinist who didn’t have a bit of a screw loose. Aloud he said, “I’m keeping my options open.”

  Devlin pointed to a fifteen-year-old who sported the brightest orange hair Cicero had ever seen. “What do you think of the redheaded kid?”

  “Easy to rescue,” the expedition leader laughed mirthlessly. “We’ll be able to spot him on the summit ridge all the way from base camp.”

  “Seriously,” Devlin persisted.

  Cicero followed the bouncing shock of hair. He was very much an “in the middle” teenager. Not tall, not short. Not fat, not thin. The kind of kid who’d get overlooked a lot — if it weren’t for that lighthouse beacon on his head.

  “Lazy,” he observed, noting the lackluster stride. “Not a good sign. But like I said, it’s early. What’s the big interest?”

  “That’s Perry Noonan,” Devlin replied.

  Cicero snapped to attention. “The Perry Noonan? He’s here?”

  “That’s him,” Devlin affirmed.

  “Aw, Tony, we talked about this! I’m not doing anybody a favor putting a climber on that mountain who’s not prepared.”

  Devlin met his gaze, and it was Cicero who looked away first.

  “This is my decision,” the team leader insisted. “That’s in the contract. I’m the boss, right?”