100 Hours

  I should stay away from him because when he’s angry, he acts without thinking. But someone has to talk him down before he does something stupid.

  “You okay?” I ask softly, while everyone else starts walking.

  Holden turns on me. “First chance I get, I’m taking that bitch down.” Spittle flies from his lips and he speaks through clenched teeth. “Are you with me, Genesis? Because if you get in my way, I’ll take you down too.”

  As he marches past me down the dark jungle trail, I see the fury raging in every step he takes. I am terrified that even if the rest of us are ransomed, Holden is never going to get out of this jungle alive.

  32 HOURS EARLIER

  MADDIE

  “It’s Monday night.” I sit on the foot end of our mummy-shaped sleeping bag and stare up at the trees through the transparent top of our tent, listening to the chorus of croaks and chirrups all around us. Everything feels oddly peaceful. “We’ve missed the car that was supposed to pick us up at the parque entrance. But Genesis’s plans change on an hourly basis, and there’s no cell reception in the park. Abuelita won’t consider us truly missing until we’re at least twenty-four hours late.”

  At the head end of the sleeping bag, Luke takes off his outer shirt and rolls it into the shape of a pillow. “Even if they didn’t get my text, when I’m not back tonight, my parents will call in the National Guard. Or whatever the Colombian equivalent is.”

  “Do they know who you’re with? Or where you went?”

  “I told them, but there’s no telling how much they processed.”

  “They don’t care where you’re going or who’s with you?”

  “It’s not that, really. My friends whose parents are divorced think it’s great that mine are still so into each other. But the thing about happily married parents is that sometimes they’d be just as happily married even if they weren’t parents.” He shrugs and unties his boots. “But once they realize I’m gone, they will definitely sound the alarm.”

  “Good.”

  “So . . . how do you want to do this?” Luke stares down at the sleeping bag so deliberately I realize he’s avoiding looking at me. But there’s nothing he can do about the flush creeping up his neck. “I’ll sleep on the ground. You can have the bag.”

  “It’s only fair if we share.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  I unzip the bag, but spreading it out in the cramped space is like playing Twister in a cardboard box. Luke’s face gets redder every time I bump into him or have to duck beneath his arm, but he stays inside the tent, as if he needs to prove he’s comfortable sharing it with me.

  “We should get some sleep,” I say at last. “We need to be up at first light.”

  My legs ache and my head is throbbing, and now that we’ve stopped hiking, I can’t imagine taking another step before the sun comes up. Though it can’t be any later than eight p.m., I’ve never felt more exhausted in my life.

  After a couple of awkward attempts to get comfortable without touching each other, we finally give up and lay spine to spine, with Luke nestled between me and Moisés’s rifle.

  His warmth against my back feels surprisingly intimate in the chilly night. I am suddenly conscious of every breath I take, because he can feel the movement. I can’t remember how to breathe at a natural pace.

  If I breathe too fast, he’ll think I’m nervous. If I breathe too slowly, he’ll think I’m asleep, and I’ll have to pretend I am.

  “Hey, Maddie,” Luke whispers.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Terrified,” I tell him. “You?”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  I can feel his heart race through the back of his shirt, which makes me wonder whether he’s more scared of armed kidnappers . . . or sharing a tent all night with me.

  31.5 HOURS EARLIER

  GENESIS

  It feels like midnight as we finally trudge into the terrorists’ base camp, but the sun’s only been down for a couple of hours. It can’t be any later than eight or nine p.m.

  The camp is lit by fire pits, torches strapped to poles, and gas camping lanterns—the kind trembling men carry into dark caves in scary movies. There are at least a dozen men standing around, drinking coffee from dented metal mugs, but most of them don’t wear military uniforms or carry rifles. Several are chatting in English with no obvious accent.

  I can tell from the way Holden’s focus skips over the men that he’s counting. Trying to calculate our chance of an escape, now that we no longer outnumber our captors.

  “Get back to work,” Sebastián shouts and most of the men dump their coffee on the ground and head into the jungle on a well-worn footpath opposite the direction we’ve come from.

  Indiana studies what we can see of the path, even once the men are out of sight, and I realize he’s listening to their footsteps. Waiting to see how long it takes for them to fade.

  Penelope groans as she looks around the camp. There are no showers. There is no electricity. No running water. No beds.

  At the center of the clearing is a small hut with a thatched roof and no windows—the kind indigenous tribes have been building for centuries. An acoustic guitar hangs outside the hut from one of its posts. Several fire pits are spaced around the site, each surrounded by a carpet of large leaves and straw mats.

  Two long, improvised, open-sided tents hold rows of hammocks stretched between the support posts, but the third tent is an anomaly. It’s a sturdy green military-style pavilion, enclosed on all four sides, so that we can’t see who or what is inside. That tent is obviously the headquarters of the terrorist organization.

  “This is so third world,” Penelope whispers.

  But what she sees as gritty, makeshift accommodations is actually a well-established and surprisingly functional base of operations. The terrorists have everything they need to live here indefinitely, and they’ve obviously been here for a while.

  “¡Vamos!” Silvana shouts, and as we trudge behind her on a tour of the camp, Indiana nudges my shoulder with his.

  “All the comforts of a prison camp,” he whispers.

  “None of the hope of a rescue,” I shoot back, and Indiana laughs softly.

  “Los baños.” Silvana pulls back the curtain hung in front of a hand-built bamboo stall on the far end of the clearing and shines her flashlight inside to reveal a plastic toilet seat nailed to a wooden platform. “After you go, sprinkle lime.” She points to an unlabeled bucket. “But don’t touch or inhale.”

  “How very civilized,” Holden mumbles.

  “You will bathe every other day,” she orders, pointing at a stream that defines one side of the clearing.

  Penelope groans softly. “How long are we going to be here?”

  Silvana gestures to clothing hung from vines used as clotheslines over our heads. “Wash your clothes and hang them up to dry. If you don’t stay clean, you will get sick, and if you get sick out here, you will die.”

  “She’s right,” Indiana whispers. “Fungi will grow in any dark, damp environment, including socks and underwear. That’s the whole reason commandos were known for ‘going commando’ during all those jungle wars.”

  Penelope makes a disgusted face.

  “You must boil water for drinking, and you may not leave camp without permission and an escort. If you fail to follow orders, I will start cutting off bits of you to send to your loved ones.” Silvana wiggles her left pinkie finger in an absurd threat. “Now go to sleep.” She points at the closest of the fire pits, assigning it to the hostages.

  We stake out spots on the leaves and grass mats around our pit, and while everyone else rolls out sleeping bags, I begin picking up all the twigs and broken branches I can find in the clearing. Gathering firewood is just an excuse to eavesdrop, but the only thing I learn from what I overhear is that several of the men working for Silvana and Sebastián are, in fact, American.

  I lay the scraps of wood on the ground, and start arranging them in the
stone-lined pit.

  “Wait. Start with this.” Indiana kneels next to me and drops a handful of crunchy greenish-brown material in the bottom of the pit.

  “Dried moss?”

  He nods. “The aggressively malodorous gentleman guarding the supplies was kind enough to give us some tinder.” His hand brushes mine as he takes several twigs from me. “Most people go with a lean-to or teepee construction, but a pyramid design makes the longest-lasting campfire.”

  I lift one brow at him. “Then why are you making a log cabin fire?”

  He frowns. “I’m not—”

  “Give me those.” I take the twigs and arrange them in a large square around the tinder, then begin stacking that square with progressively smaller ones.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” Indiana whispers as he watches. “Tell me the truth—have you been taken hostage before?”

  I laugh. “Only by a father determined to escape everything but nature, at least twice a year.”

  When the pyramid is ready, Indiana lights an extra twig at one of the other pits and uses it to start our campfire. I settle onto a mat with my back to the jungle and watch light flicker on his face while he stokes the blaze.

  Somehow, two days’ stubble has made Holden look tired and ragged, yet Indiana looks rugged and strong.

  He sits back on his mat and even when he catches me staring, I can’t look away. So we watch each other next to the fire, and though we’re surrounded by both our captors and our fellow hostages, this moment feels somehow private.

  Somehow . . . ours.

  “What’s your real name?” I whisper, staring into eyes that look more brown than green in the firelight.

  “I’ll tell you when we get out of here,” he says so softly I can hardly hear him. “I promise.”

  “What if we don’t get out of here?”

  “Oh, I think you’re pretty motivated.” His smile is crooked. And totally hot.

  Suddenly I’m aware that there’s mud on my cheek and moss beneath my nails. “I’m wearing half the jungle,” I say as I scrub my face.

  He takes my hand, then holds it. “It works. You look fierce.”

  I can’t resist a smile.

  Indiana spreads out his sleeping bag next to mine, and as our captors settle in for the night—except a couple of armed men on patrol—I realize that beneath the normal jungle noises, I hear a steady pulsing sound I’ve known all my life.

  I grab Indiana’s arm. “Do you hear that?”

  He closes his eyes, listening. “The ocean.”

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “I think the beach is just down that footpath.”

  Indiana opens his eyes, and he looks as hopeful as I feel.

  Where there’s coastline, there will be boats, and where there are boats, there’s a way to escape.

  MADDIE

  I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

  “Maddie!”

  I open my eyes and find a man’s silhouette hunched over me, two shades darker than the night itself, and my screaming intensifies.

  “Maddie!” He shakes me by both shoulders. “Shhh! Please wake up and be quiet. You’re going to draw every predator in the jungle!”

  I recognize Luke’s voice and realize the shadowy silhouette makes him look much bigger and more threatening than he actually is.

  “You’re okay,” he says as I sit up. “It’s just a dream.”

  “Yeah. I . . .” I don’t realize I’ve been crying until I wipe my face with both hands and find it wet. “I dreamed my brother got shot, and I dug a grave for him, but my dad was already buried there.”

  “That’s messed up,” Luke whispers, and in reply, I fall back onto the shirt-pillow. He lies next to me with his hands folded beneath his head and stares up at the sky through the top of the tent. “It’s still early. We can get more sleep.”

  But I’m not sure I want any more sleep, after dreaming about my brother’s murder. “Sorry I woke you up,” I whisper.

  “You didn’t. I had my own nightmare.”

  I roll onto my side, facing him, and Luke tenses beside me. “What happened in yours?”

  “It’s stupid. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “I told you mine.”

  “Yeah, but your subconscious fears have merit. Mine are just . . . dumb,” he insists, and though I can’t see much more than his outline in the dark, I’m pretty sure he’s blushing again.

  “No fear is dumb. What happened in your nightmare, Luke?”

  He takes a deep breath, still staring up at the trees. “I dreamed I woke up and you were gone. But you weren’t missing. You just left me here and took all the supplies.”

  My hand goes to my heart. I feel like someone just kicked me in the chest.

  I think for a minute, trying to figure out how to respond. I’ve never been the subject of someone else’s abandonment issues. “Luke, I can’t even carry all the supplies on my own. I need you as a pack animal, if for no other reason.”

  Finally he rolls over to face me, and my eyes have adjusted to the dark well enough to see his scowl. “I’m starting to think you and your cousin are cut from the same—”

  I laugh, and his eyes widen.

  “Oh. You’re kidding.”

  “Of course I’m kidding. I’m not going to leave you alone in the jungle. Though you may actually be better off without me.”

  Luke smiles as he rolls onto his back again. “Neither of us is better off alone.”

  22 HOURS EARLIER

  GENESIS

  It’s hardly even light yet when a boot digs into my side hard enough that I wake up gasping. The pain is disorienting, and at first I can’t remember where I am. Then Silvana’s outline comes into focus.

  “Get up, princesa.” Her sneer turns my father’s nickname for me into an insult, yet makes me ache with homesickness. “It’s time to boil water.”

  “¡Arriba! ¡Es hora de levantarse!” She wakes the other hostages with a shouted order to rise and shine. No one else gets a boot to the ribs.

  I sit up and groan at the soreness in my arms and legs. No amount of jogging down suburban streets or working with my personal trainer could have prepared me for a twelve-hour hike through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In the rain.

  “Morning,” Indiana says, and I turn to see him looking up at me from his sleeping bag with both hands folded beneath his head. As if he were stretched out on a towel at the beach.

  How the hell does he make being taken hostage look sexy?

  Indiana unzips his sleeping bag and pulls a small plastic pouch from his backpack.

  “Where are you going?” I ask as he stands.

  “To brush my teeth. I might decide to kiss you later.”

  I don’t realize I’m smiling until I see Domenica grinning at me. She heard every word.

  I dig my toiletry kit from my pack, and when my compact falls out, I remember that I haven’t looked in a mirror in more than two days. Nor have I brushed my teeth or truly washed my face.

  I pluck a camping wipe from my packet and wipe down my face, neck, and arms, but before I can find my toothbrush, Silvana shouts at me from across the clearing.

  “¡Princesa! ¡Agua!”

  Which is just as well. I can’t brush my teeth without clean water.

  While I collect every kettle and empty tin can that will hold water, Julian gives each of the other hostages an MRE—military-style meals ready to eat in thick brown envelopes—and a piece of fruit picked straight from the jungle.

  Penelope giggles and I turn to find her feeding bites of her oatmeal to Holden. They pretend they don’t see me, but I know exactly what Holden looks like when he’s playing to his audience.

  I hope the water she used in that oatmeal gives them some kind of parasite.

  On my way to the stream, I notice that all the rifle-carrying, camo-wearing terrorists—including Julian and Álvaro—are gathered around one fire pit with Silvana. At the other pit, all the unarmed men in dirty tees and ca
rgo pants—including several Americans—sit with Sebastián. Óscar and Natalia stand on the fringes of Sebastián’s circle, and the three of them are the only ones in the group who are armed.

  Now that we’re at their base camp, our kidnappers have aligned themselves into two distinct groups, and they look too comfortable in their circles for this to be a new arrangement.

  Suddenly I understand. We’ve been kidnapped by two groups working together. And if the tension between Silvana and Sebastián is any indication, neither organization is thrilled with the collaboration.

  “¡Vamos, princesa!” Silvana’s shout startles me, and I knock the full kettle into the stream. She and her men laugh while I wade in to fish it out.

  When I have water boiling on grills propped over all three fire pits, I sanitize my toothbrush in one of the kettles. While I’m brushing my teeth, the green walled tent opens, then falls closed behind a man carrying a cardboard box. Sweat rolls down his forehead and drips into his eye. He blinks the sweat away, but never takes his focus off the box, even when he stumbles over a rock on his way to the narrow footpath leading to the beach.

  He’s terrified of that box.

  Unease crawls up my spine as I watch him. Silvana’s bombs are being made here. Twenty feet from the spot where I slept.

  I won’t be sleeping again until this is over.

  By the time my teeth are brushed and I’ve used what passes for a bathroom, the other hostages are almost done with breakfast. Except for Indiana.

  “Here.” He sets a bulky brown meal packet on my lap when I sink onto the grass mat next to him. “I tried to snag you a piece of fruit, but Domenica’s a beast before she’s had some caffeine.”

  “I know how she feels.” I hold up the brown envelope. “If there’s no instant coffee in this thing, my descent into madness will be swift and terrible.”

  Indiana laughs. “I’ll alert the men in white coats. So what will the hostages be feasting on this morning?”

  “‘Menu twenty-two: Asian Beef Strips,’” I read from the front of my packet.