“Sebastián wants to know why she’s pushing us all so hard,” I whisper.
“Porque el envío se realizará en esta noche,” Silvana answers.
“Because the shipment will be in tonight,” I translate.
Indiana takes my hand and pours several nuts into my cupped palm. “What shipment?”
“I don’t know. They’re being very careful with the details, because they know some of us speak Spanish.” What Holden speaks is more the pig latin version. “Thanks,” I say, holding up the peanuts. Then I toss them into my mouth.
Sebastián breaks away from Silvana with a huff of disgust and takes up a position at the rear of the group.
This could be my chance. My friends are all here because of me, and when Silvana decides they’re too much trouble, she’ll kill them. Even if a couple of them are worth a fortune.
Unless I can convince Sebastián to let us go.
“I’ll be right back,” I whisper to Indiana. Then I drop back to walk next to Sebastián.
“What do you want?” His accent is thick, but his words are clear.
“I want an end to this before anyone else dies, but I’m not going to deal with Silvana.” I’ve seen my dad work people over in business a million times. Running an international shipping company is all about forming relationships. Part flattery, part truth, and all Valencia spine. “You, I’ll negotiate with.”
“Negotiate?” Sebastián rests his hands on his rifle as we walk, settling in for what he clearly thinks is a game. “What are you bringing to the table?”
“Cash. Name your price.” I wait a heartbeat, while he decides whether or not to take me seriously. Then I move in for the kill. “For all of us.”
Offer them something they want, but on your terms, Genesis.
My father taught me that strategy when I was eleven. It’s been useful at school, and even more useful with Holden. But out here, it might save lives.
Sebastián’s dark brows rise. “You think you can get your papá to pay for six hostages?”
“I can get him to pay for eight. He doesn’t know Maddie and Ryan are . . . gone.” I shove back my grief and rage and push through with my initial offer. “If you knew my dad, you’d know he’ll give me whatever I ask for, and he can have a plane here in a couple of hours. You’ll get credit for bringing in the ransoms. What do you want? A hundred grand each?”
Sebastián laughs, and I have to work to unclench my jaw.
When in doubt, add another zero, my father’s voice says in my head.
“One million each. That’s eight million dollars.” My dad keeps more than that in his emergency safe at home.
But now Sebastián looks insulted, and alarm bells go off in my head. I have no idea how much they were going to demand for our release.
“Name your price. Just let me call my father,” I insist. But he’s already shaking his head. Frowning. I’m missing something. “Unless . . . this isn’t about money?”
My backpack suddenly feels heavier than it did a second ago. Have I read this whole thing wrong?
“Why is everything about money with you Americans?” Sebastián demands, and those alarm bells swell into a siren. “We need your papá’s resources.” He pulls me to a halt and leans in until I can’t see anything but his gaze burning into me. “We need Hernán Valencia to remember where his loyalties ought to lie.”
MADDIE
“Holy shit.” Luke blinks, stunned, and the unused rock falls from his hand. “I can’t—” He blinks again, then scrubs his face with both hands. “Do you think he’s okay?”
“I hope not.” Moisés is breathing, but the gash on the back of his head is oozing blood and already swelling into a huge lump. “How did you do that?” I push myself to my feet. “Do you play baseball?”
“Only on my Xbox. I didn’t even have my eyes open, Maddie. Total lucky shot.” He puts one hand on top of his baseball cap, still stunned, and the reality finally hits me.
Somehow, he’s still alive. And un-captured. And he just saved my life.
“Luke—” I pull him into a hug, and he feels a lot more solid than I expected. “I thought you were dead.”
He returns my embrace with an awkward one of his own. “I left camp to pee right before the soldiers came, and when I heard them rounding everyone up, I hid in the brush. Are you okay?”
“No.” I let him go and swipe at my face with shaking, dirt-caked hands.
“We should probably . . .” He slides the automatic rifle out of the gunman’s reach with his foot.
The gash on the back of Moisés’s head is still steadily leaking blood. “I wish you’d killed him,” I whisper.
“I don’t.”
I glance at Luke in surprise. “He and his friends—” The word gets stuck in my throat. “They murdered my brother!” They all deserve to die for that.
“They’re killers. I’m not. We need to tie him up.” Luke plucks the nylon cord from Moisés’s relaxed fist, then squats over his thick thighs, but I can only stare as I struggle to keep the world in focus.
None of this feels real.
“Hey, Maddie? A little help?”
I squat in the dirt and lift Moisés’s arms into position behind his back. Luke winds the cord around the gunman’s wrists, then ties some kind of complicated knot.
I home in on his fingers. “Where’d you learn that?”
“Scouts.”
Of course he’s a Boy Scout. Because what else would get a fifteen-year-old math genius/gamer out of the house on weekends?
“I’ll get more rope.” I slide a large knife from the sheath strapped to Moisés’s belt and march to the nearest tent, where I cut a long section from one of the cords holding it in place. When I get back, Luke has emptied everything from the gunman’s pockets. He’s found a small fishing kit, a bottle of water, a folding multi-tool, and a large, clunky two-way radio.
“Here.” I hand him more cord to tie Moisés’s ankles together. “Does that radio work?”
“Yeah, but we’re not within range of any others. All I heard when I tried it is static.”
“If we were in range, we’d hear . . . what? The other kidnappers?”
Luke shrugs as he finishes his knot. “Assuming we’re tuned to the right frequency.”
My gaze is drawn back to my brother.
Ryan’s eyes are closed. He looks like he’s sleeping, but he’s gone, and I’m never going to get him back.
My brother is never going to wake up. But Moisés will.
Rage pours in to fill the hole left in my heart as I stare at the unconscious gunman. I pull my foot back and kick his thigh as hard as I can. But there’s no reaction, and that only stokes the fury crackling inside me.
So I kick him in the ribs. Again and again.
Something cracks, and he wakes up screaming.
GENESIS
“Silvana,” I call in a loud, clear voice as I make my way to the front of the line. Holden gives me a small shake of his head, and Penelope looks terrified. Indiana’s gaze skips from captor to captor, assessing their reactions with his usual quiet intensity.
Rog watches me somberly, and I have no idea what he’s thinking.
“What’s wrong, princesa?” Silvana sneers. “Need a break to repair your nail polish?”
“Let’s end this.” I still don’t want to deal with her, but if that’s what it takes to drive a wedge between our captors . . . “I’m prepared to give you whatever you want.”
Sebastián shakes his head at me in warning.
“You’re prepared . . . ?” Silvana laughs, and most of her men chuckle. “You’re just a spoiled little girl.”
“You’re right. My dad will give me whatever I ask for. Let me talk to him.”
“So you can tell him your cousins are dead?” She shakes her head, and her earrings jangle. “Get back in line.”
“I swear I won’t tell him.”
“And I should believe you because you look so sweet and innocent? Hernán Va
lencia’s daughter would take food from orphans, if that’s what it took to get her way. Just like her father. Let’s go.”
Anger burns beneath my skin like hot coals. “I am just like my father.” In the sense that she has no idea what either of us is really capable of. “I’m not going to tell him about Maddie and Ryan, because pissing you off wouldn’t be in my best interest. So just tell me why you need his resources and I’ll make it happen.”
Silvana stomps toward me, mud splattering around her boots with every step. She grabs my jaw in a bruising grip, and I fight the urge to pull free, because I know what this is. Like Holden, she needs to believe she’s in control—right up until the moment I show her that she’s not.
“Resources?” Her furious gaze slides from me to Sebastián, confirming that I’ve just driven the wedge between them deeper. He wasn’t supposed to tell me that.
“What do you want? Trucks? Boats? What are you trying to sneak across the border? Or, who are you trying to sneak across?”
Silvana snorts, and her men grumble angrily.
“Why do Americans always assume everyone else wants what they have?” Álvaro demands.
“Because they’re spoiled and egotistical,” Julian answers.
“We’re not smuggling people into the States. We’re going to use your dad’s ‘resources’ to teach you and the rest of your privileged, arrogant countrymen a lesson in humility.”
Chills wash over me as Silvana’s gleefully cruel smile drives her point home. My dad’s resources can deliver anything to anywhere in the world, in a matter of hours, but I doubt she plans to teach us a lesson with reams of paper and pallets of lip gloss.
She’ll use Genesis Shipping to smuggle weapons. Or explosives.
Bombs.
Silvana and her men aren’t just kidnappers. They’re terrorists.
Fear freezes my tongue to the roof of my mouth, but I hold her gaze to disguise my horror.
If my dad cooperates to save my life, he’ll be helping them kill who knows how many hundreds of innocent people.
MADDIE
I kick Moisés again. Then again. And again. With each blow, he cries out, cursing me in Spanish.
My next kick splits his lip, and blood pours from his mouth.
“Maddie!” Luke shouts, but I hardly hear him over Moisés’s grunts and the roar of my own raging pulse.
My boot splits open Moisés’s cheek. I pull my foot back for another blow, but Luke wraps his arms around me and drags me away from my target.
“Let me go!” I thrash and kick, trying to break his grip, but he’s stronger than he looks.
“Maddie. Killing him won’t bring Ryan back.” He has to say it right into my ear to be heard over Moisés’s shouting. I really did hurt the bastard.
“I know.” I stop struggling and he lets me go. “Let’s shut him up before he brings every gunman in the jungle running.”
“I got it.” Luke heads for the line of tents, then comes back with a scrap of white cloth and a roll of duct tape so quickly that he could only have gotten them from his own stuff.
He shoves the material into Moisés’s mouth, then tapes over it with a strip of duct tape. A striped bit of elastic sticks out above the tape. “Is that . . . underwear?”
Luke shrugs. “It’s clean. It’s the only thing I had that was small enough to fit into his mouth. Not that my underwear is small.” His face turns bright red. “Not that it’s big either. I mean . . .” Finally he gives up with a sigh. “Stop talking while you’re ahead, Luke,” he mumbles.
“I’m not sure you were actually ahead.”
I kneel at my brother’s side and carefully unclasp his medallion. It’s all I have left of him and of my father, so I fasten it around my own neck and tuck it inside my shirt.
Luke clears his throat as he backs toward the bunkhouse, obviously reluctant to intrude on my private moment. “Um . . . I’ll go get the shovel. I put it in the utility shed.”
“You . . . ?” I blink at him in sudden understanding. “You buried him?”
Luke shrugs. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”
“Thank you.” I stand and pull him into another hug, and my tears fall on his shoulder. “You . . . Thank you.”
When I let him go, he gives me a self-conscious nod, then scruffs his hat over his curls and heads toward the bunkhouse.
While Luke is gone, I position Ryan’s arms over his chest, then I start pushing the dirt over him again. Moisés has stopped yelling behind his gag, and the ambient wildlife sounds have faded into the background—for a moment, it feels like the entire jungle is honoring my brother with a moment of quiet.
Fresh tears blur my vision as I work, and I am sniffling again when Luke’s hand lands on my shoulder.
“Let me do it.”
I stand, and he gently shovels dirt over my brother’s face while I fight fresh tears. “Ryan nearly died once before,” I whisper. “Last year. After our dad died. He started drinking, and I used to find him passed out. Barely breathing.” My finger traces the pink line on the back of my arm. “So one night I showed him what he was doing to himself.”
“That’s how you got your scar?” Luke asks as he wipes sweat from his forehead.
I nod. “At my cousin’s Halloween party. I matched him drink for drink, until I passed out and my arm went through a glass bottle. He checked into rehab the day I got out of the hospital, and he hasn’t had a drink since. He—” My voice breaks. I clear my throat and start over. “He decided to live.”
GENESIS
“Teach us a lesson?” Penelope hisses as she pushes her way between me and Indiana on the narrow trail. “They’re going to punish us just for being American? What did our country ever do to them?”
“Poison their crops, livestock, and people with herbicides,” Domenica says over her shoulder, from a few feet ahead. “And not just in Colombia. It happened to my uncle’s farm in Peru.”
“That is not true!” Penelope insists.
Domenica actually laughs. “Your country’s ‘war on drugs’ involves crop duster planes bombing Colombian coca and poppy farms with toxic chemicals that make people sick. They cause miscarriages. And they’re devastating to poor farmers, who don’t profit from the drug trade like cartels do.”
Penelope rolls her eyes and steps over a mud puddle. “There is no way—”
“And your CIA sponsors backdoor deals with one drug cartel to assassinate members of a rival cartel, to cripple the drug trade.”
“She’s right,” I say. My dad followed that story pretty closely when it broke, then he signed me up for another self-defense class. At the time, I thought he was being paranoid.
“Are you with us or them?” Holden demands through clenched teeth.
“There is no us or them,” I snap, annoyed when he takes up a position on Pen’s other side. “These terrorists don’t represent all of Colombia any more than we represent all of the US.”
“Well, the part they represent wants to blow up the part we represent,” Penelope insists, with a glance at Holden. “It should be pretty simple to decide which side you’re on.”
“None of it is simple.” Indiana steps up on my other side. “These guys don’t have the right to bomb the US just like the US doesn’t have the right to kill their crops and poison their people.”
“What they don’t have the right to do is make us pawns in their homicidal political statement,” Holden says, so softly I have to listen hard to hear him over the twigs crunching beneath my boots. “If Gen’s dad refuses to ship their bombs, they’ll start picking us off one by one to show him they’re serious. We have to get out of here before that happens.”
“And go where?” I whisper. “People who wander into the jungle unprepared usually don’t make it out.”
“We’ll take everything we can carry and head back to the base camp.” Holden’s pack gets caught as he climbs over a log on the trail, and Penelope reaches up to unhook him. “There’ll be another helicopter tomorro
w, and we can report these psychos as soon as we’re out of here.”
“That’s the only way we’re going to get out alive, Gen,” my former best friend says.
Maybe so. But . . . I glance around to make sure none of our captors are close enough to hear. “Silvana gave my dad a twenty-four-hour deadline. If he gives in, she’ll get her plane, or ship, or whatever she’s asking for by tomorrow. A cargo plane is the worst-case scenario. Assuming we even make it to the base camp in time to catch the helicopter, if she asked for a plane, she could already have gotten her bombs into the US—or flown them into a building. It’s only a two-hour flight to Miami.”
“What are you saying?” my boyfriend demands.
“No one else knows about this, Holden.” I give them a moment to let that sink in. “There’s no one else to stop this terrorist attack. There’s only us.”
36.25 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
“Let’s round up everything we can carry.” I jog toward the abandoned tent city, fired up in spite of my exhaustion by the driving need to be on the move. “They have a six-hour head start.”
“Who?”
“Do you still have your cell phone?”
“Yeah.” Luke pulls it from his pocket. “The signal isn’t strong enough for a call, so I texted my mom but I can’t tell if it went through.”
My gaze falls on the small bunkhouse. “Surely there’s a radio.”
“They smashed it. This is all we have.” He pats the two-way radio now clipped to his belt.
“Tayrona’s a day’s hike to the east, right?”
“I don’t know.” Luke shrugs. “I lost track of our direction during the detour to the bunkhouse. If we start on the wrong heading, we could be lost in the jungle for days.”
“Okay.” I can’t afford to get lost. My insulin is almost gone. “And that helicopter that brings supplies for the soldiers comes every other day, right? So it won’t be back for at least twenty-three hours.”
“I think so.”