100 Hours

  Indiana takes my hand. His lips meet mine, and his other hand slides into my hair. His tongue traces my lower lip. I groan and my arms wind around his neck.

  His kiss trails along my jaw toward my ear, and I let my head fall back. “Why did you wait so long?” I whisper.

  “Because you should never rush a good thing,” he murmurs against my skin. “And no matter what is going on around us, this is a very good thing.”

  9.5 HOURS EARLIER

  MADDIE

  The radio spits static again, and this time we hardly glance at it. It’s been doing that for the past couple of hours, and though the indication of how close we must be to Silvana’s base camp was exhilarating at first, now it’s a terrifying and exhausting reminder of just how dangerous my quest for revenge really is.

  We could both die tomorrow.

  “Hey, Maddie,” Luke calls as he comes back from the stream with fresh water. “I have a surprise, while we wait for this to boil.”

  Luke takes Moisés’s knife and splits two bananas along the inner curve, still in their peel. He sets each one on the grill, then pries the fruit open and stuffs them with bits torn from our last two giant marshmallows.

  Then he pulls a quarter of a bar of milk chocolate from his backpack. The label reads, “Godiva.”

  “You have chocolate?” I stare at the candy as if it were a mirage sure to disappear any second. “Where did you get that?”

  “I found it in a tent when I was searching for supplies, before you got back to the bunkhouse.”

  I smack him on the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You can’t eat much of it anyway, so I was saving it for a special occasion.” He unfolds the wrapper and begins breaking the bar into chunks, which he wedges between the halves of both bananas, alternating with the bits of marshmallow. “My mom calls these banana s’mores. My dad calls them bonfire banana boats.” He shrugs. “I just eat them.”

  Luke pushes more twigs into the camp stove, then sits back and smiles at me. “You’re supposed to set them in cradles made of aluminum foil, but we make do with what we have.”

  Within minutes, the banana peels blacken. The chocolate is shiny and melted, and the marshmallow bits are gooey. The aroma is amazing.

  Luke carefully pulls the banana boats from the grill, touching only the ends, and balances each on top of one of our empty cans, since we have no plates. We blow on them to help them cool. “Normally, we would scoop out bites with plastic spoons, but since we have no actual utensils . . .” He shrugs and pulls Moisés’s multi-tool from his pocket. “We’ll have to make do with this.” He flips out one of the tools and shows me a shallow metal spoon.

  I frown. “That would have come in handy for our soup.”

  “Yeah, but I forgot I had it.”

  We take turns eating, blowing on each steaming spoonful, and when we get down to the last bite, I scoop it up and feed it to him.

  Luke looks at me as if I’ve just offered him the entire world. He smiles, and I’m mesmerized by a smear of chocolate on his lower lip.

  I lean toward him, and his mouth opens. “Dibs on the last of the chocolate,” I whisper as I wipe the smear away. Then I suck my thumb clean.

  Luke’s groan follows me as I head back to the stream for more water.

  GENESIS

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admit as the crackling fire pit sends sparks up into the night, and the confession feels even more disappointing knowing that Indiana thinks of me as the moon. As a force of nature capable of bending the entire world to my will.

  I haven’t felt so frustrated and powerless since I was a kid.

  Since the night my mother died.

  Indiana threads his fingers between mine and kisses my knuckles.

  Under normal circumstances, I’d call a campfire and a beautiful boy I actually like the perfect spring break combination. Even if Holden does shoot bitter glances at us every time Penelope looks away. But the fact that we’re sitting twenty feet from a dozen terrorists and a tent full of bombs paints somewhat of a bleak filter over an otherwise exquisite moment.

  “There’s a way out of this,” Indiana insists. “We just haven’t thought of it yet.”

  “You’re right about running. The problem isn’t that they have me, it’s that they have explosives,” I whisper with a glance at the green tent. “That’s what we need to take away from them. No explosives, no terrorism, right?” My hand tightens around his as the solution finally becomes clear. “I have to detonate the bombs.”

  Indiana shakes his head. “G, that’s suicide. Even if you survive the explosion, they’ll kill you.”

  I exhale slowly. Then I scoot closer to whisper. “What are the alternatives?” Other than following through on my threat to my father. “I’m going to die either way. At least this way, I’ll have taken their arsenal with me.”

  “Genesis . . .” Indiana whispers, and for the first time since he saw me kneel on the edge of that cliff, I see fear in his eyes.

  Fear for me.

  “This is the only way we can stop them.”

  Finally he leans closer until his cheek brushes mine, and that ghost of a touch makes me shiver. “I’m in.”

  I pull back until I can see his eyes, and I wish we were anywhere else in the world. I wish I’d dumped Holden on the beach in Tayrona, and never followed Nico into the jungle, but the thing I can’t wish, even now, is that I’d never come to Colombia.

  If I hadn’t come to Colombia, I would never have met Indiana.

  If I hadn’t come, Silvana might have used my grandmother as a pawn against my father.

  Indiana leans in for a kiss, then whispers into my ear, “I knew the moment I saw you dancing on the beach that you would light up the night. I just didn’t think you’d take that so literally.” He pulls back and holds my gaze. “But what the hell? At least we’ll go out with a bang.”

  But the thought of him dying because he followed me into the jungle makes me feel like Álvaro is already cutting me open.

  “You . . .” I slide one hand behind his neck and pull him close for another kiss. “I need you to take advantage of the explosion to get everyone else out of here.”

  “G, this is a two-pronged operation. They’ve moved some of their stuff to the beach, but the rest of it is in that tent.” He runs his hand over my shoulder and down my arm. “Even the moon can’t be two places at once. You need help.”

  “I’m not going to let you—”

  Indiana swallows my argument with a kiss. “This isn’t your call, G.” Another kiss. “I make my own decisions.”

  “You’re supposed to make out when you’re done arguing,” I whisper against his earlobe.

  “We are done arguing.” He drops a series of kisses along my jaw until he finds my mouth again. “You lost.”

  I never lose. But I know when to change tactics.

  “Okay,” I say when we’re both breathing heavily. “We’ll have to do it tonight, before my dad calls back. But we have to get into that tent first. We need to know what kind of explosives we’re dealing with.”

  And while he works on that obstacle to our plan, I’ll figure out how to keep him out of the line of fire. . . .

  9 HOURS EARLIER

  MADDIE

  I lift my foot, and the wet earth beneath me makes a sucking sound. “It’s too wet to sleep on the ground.”

  Since we stopped for water—and banana boats—the beach has gradually narrowed until patches of sand alternate with a scraggly, marshy coastline that reminds me of the swamps of Southern Florida.

  “I know,” Luke says. “We’re going to have to sleep in one of these trees.”

  “In a tree?” I look up, but none of the branches are tangled or close together enough to hold one sleeping human, much less two.

  “Well, hanging from the tree, at least.” He puts his rifle on the ground and begins unbuckling a bundle I’d assumed was a second sleeping bag, which we couldn’t fit in our one-man tent. r />
  The material is actually a bright blue hammock.

  “Should I be worried about snakes, or some other arboreal predator up there?”

  “I don’t think so. This’ll be like a tent, just in a tree, and we’ve slept together with no—” He chokes on his own words, and I try to hide my laugh. “I mean . . . Not that we’ve slept together. We’ve just slept in close proximity. Together. Damn it.”

  I laugh harder, and he tosses his hands into the air, giving up.

  “Excuse me while I stick my head in the ocean and take a deep breath.”

  “You better not. We’re in this together.”

  Luke’s smile is the brightest thing I’ve seen since the sun went down.

  I hold the flashlight while he ties each end of the hammock to a different thick branch. Then I watch, fascinated, while he saws small branches from the same tree with Moisés’s multi-tool, leaving two-inch “hooks” from which to hang our backpacks.

  I climb into the hammock and Luke climbs in after me, then pulls a sheet of mosquito netting over us. We can see through it, of course—what little there is to see in the dark—but the netting feels like a boundary between us and the rest of the jungle.

  We are alone, suspended in our cocoon.

  The curve of the hammock rolls us toward the center, gravity closing the distance between us, so I settle into the arc of Luke’s arm with my head on his shoulder and my arm over his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt. Every breath he takes makes me more aware of how much of him I’m touching.

  How much of him is touching me.

  “Luke?” I whisper, because I’m right next to his ear, and the dark seems made for soft voices.

  “Yeah?”

  I prop myself up on my elbow so I can kind of see his face in the dark. “I’m going to kiss you, but I don’t want to imply gratitude of any kind. This will be an ungrateful kiss. The most thankless of kisses. Purely recreational. Okay?”

  “That’s quite a disclaimer,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “Do I need to sign something?”

  “Shut up.” I lean down and kiss him. Just a touch of my mouth to his, until I know—

  Luke kisses me back, and his moan sends a warm ache through me.

  He rises onto one elbow and slides his other hand down my back. We’re both breathing hard, and suddenly the one-man hammock seems built for two after all.

  “Hey, Maddie?” Luke says against my cheek.

  “If you ask me how many experience points I think that kiss was worth, I’m going to knock out all your hit points with one blow,” I warn him.

  Luke laughs, and his hand trails down my hair and over my back. “I was just going to ask if you want to do that again.”

  I really, really do.

  7 HOURS EARLIER

  GENESIS

  Around nine p.m.—three hours before the deadline—I look up from the chessboard to see Silvana, Sebastián, and one of the American guys who spends most of his time in the green tent head down the footpath toward the beach, from which we’d been hearing odd metallic pounding sounds for the past hour. They each carried a flashlight and a closed cardboard box. The five captors who haven’t gone down to the beach will be leaderless for at least the next half hour, by my guess, based on previous trips.

  This is my best chance to sneak into the green tent.

  “Hey,” I lean over the board and whisper to Indiana. “I need you to get the guards’ attention while I slip into the tent. And I’ll need a heads-up, if anyone else tries to go in.”

  He glances around the clearing, then gives me a heated smile. “I’d rather sneak in there with you. But I’ve got you covered.”

  I move to the fire pit closest to the military tent and pretend to be gathering empty containers. Indiana heads toward one of the open-sided tents across the campsite, and casually lifts Óscar’s guitar from the tent pole where he hangs it to keep it out of the rain. Indiana sits on a stump with the guitar, and when he plays the first chord, I’m so surprised by his obvious skill that I almost forget why he’s playing in the first place.

  “¡Alto!” Óscar shouts.

  Indiana plays a few chords. Everyone turns to look, including the guards. Then he starts singing.

  His voice is clear, mellow, captivating.

  Almost reluctantly, I take four slow, quiet steps to my left and slide through the entrance into the military tent. I have no idea how long they’ll let him play, so I assume I’ll have no more than a minute before I’m missed.

  It takes the first five seconds for my eyes to adjust to the lower light level.

  I scan the two closest folding tables, where scraps of wire, rolls of electrical tape, and the guts of some electronic device I can’t identify are spread out. Definitely bomb-making materials.

  A third table stands at the rear of the tent, and I search the ground and every surface I pass as I make my way back, adrenaline firing in my veins.

  Then the table comes into focus. Two rows of cell phones stand upright, like toy soldiers lined up for battle.

  I lean forward for a closer look and see that each one is taped to a small, square package, connected to the phone with thin wires.

  My heart racing, I pick one up, and am surprised by how much it weighs. The package on the back is soft, like clay, and the words stamped on its paper wrapper read, “C-4 High Explosive.”

  I’ve seen enough action movies to know what C-4 is and to understand that they’re using the cell phones as triggers. One call to the phone will detonate the C-4 it’s strapped to. But . . .

  No.

  I squint in the dark for a closer look at the phone in my hand. The screen is cracked in the corner, just like Maddie’s. I bend to look at the others. Second from the left, a block of C-4 is taped to a phone still in the purple designer case I gave Penelope for her birthday.

  The terrorists have turned our cell phones into bombs.

  My palm slick with sweat, I carefully set Maddie’s phone back on the table. Each improvised device is no taller or wider than the phone it’s taped to, and no more than two inches thick.

  In the movies, a brick of C-4 that size will blow open a safe. It might demolish a whole room. These bombs won’t teach the United States much of a lesson.

  And even if they would, there’s no reason they need to be assembled in the jungle and not on US soil.

  A piece of this puzzle is missing.

  “¡Baja eso!”

  Outside, Óscar shouts in Spanish for Indiana to put down the guitar.

  “No hablo español,” Indiana replies. The he starts singing again to a chorus of laughter. But I know his time is up, and so is mine.

  I scan the rows of phones until I find mine, then carefully tuck it into the waistband of my shorts. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but I am not letting them use my phone to kill people.

  “Put it down!” Óscar shouts from outside, and I flinch so hard the bomb falls from my waistband onto the floor. My heart jumps into my throat.

  I’m about to be blown up by my own cell phone.

  But nothing happens. C-4 must be very stable.

  Pulse racing, I pick up the bomb and slide it deeper into my waistband this time. On my way back to the tent entrance, I notice a box of phones that haven’t been made into bombs, and suddenly I understand how the explosives are supposed to work. The unaltered phones will be used to call the bomb-phones, which will trigger the explosion.

  Holden’s is on top of the pile. The Eminem quote on the back of the case is a dead giveaway.

  I snatch it and slide it into my pocket.

  I peek between the tent flaps to make sure no one’s watching before I rejoin the other hostages.

  When he sees me emerge from the tent, Indiana stands and gives a deep bow. The hostages all clap, except for Holden. Óscar snatches his guitar and shoves Indiana toward the others with the barrel of his rifle.

  My hands are still shaking by the time I slip back into the c
ircle around the fire pit. Indiana sits down next to me and takes my hand. He has no idea that I am dressed like a suicide bomber, and I can’t tell him without drawing attention.

  Terrified, I glance around to see if anyone saw me, but the guards are gathered around a fire making tea, teasing Óscar in Spanish about the fact that Indiana is a better musician. Pen and Holden are whispering to each other on the other side of our pit.

  Rog is watching us. Watching me.

  But he only gives me a smile and a small nod, then retreats to the edge of the clearing to lean against his favorite tree trunk.

  “Genesis.” Domenica scoots closer to me as I subtly tug my shirt down, terrified that my stolen bomb will be discovered. “What did you find in there?” Her last few words carry no sound, so I have to read them in the shape of her lips.

  She saw me.

  6 HOURS EARLIER

  MADDIE

  I sit up straight, suddenly wide-awake, and the hammock sways beneath me. “Luke! Did you hear that?”

  He mumbles something unintelligible, so I shake him.

  A second bang echoes toward us. Luke sits up, disoriented, and nearly turns the hammock over before he realizes where we are. “What was that?”

  Before I can answer, we hear a third bang, and now he’s awake. “Where did that come from?” I ask, staring into the dark jungle. “Can you tell?”

  He turns toward the sound, digging his phone from his pocket, then pulls up the compass app. “West.” When he closes the app, I see the time on his home screen. It’s not quite ten p.m. We only slept for half an hour.

  His phone has no cell service, and its power is down to 3 percent.

  “Come on!” I toss back the mosquito netting and turn on the flashlight. “If it came from the west, it has to be Silvana and her men.”

  Luke grabs the flashlight and turns it off again. “We can’t hike at night, Maddie. If we use the light, they’ll see us coming from a mile away.”

  “Okay, then we’ll walk on the beach, but stick close to the tree line so we can hide again if we need to. Let’s go!”