“Ryan!” My brother’s name scrapes my throat raw, but he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even move. “Ryan, look at me!”
He’s still breathing, yet the pool of red beneath him keeps expanding.
One of the guerrillas races across the clearing, shouting, “Dame tu chaqueta.” He drops onto his knees next to Ryan, and when he looks up to take the jacket one of the other gunmen offers, I realize I know him.
Sebastián. From the bar in Cartagena. I don’t understand. I kissed him. Now he wears camo and holds an automatic rifle while he presses the jacket to my brother’s wound.
Sebastián’s focus settles on the pendant hanging from a chain around Ryan’s neck. His forehead furrows and his hands clench around the jacket. His eyes close, as if he’s praying.
Finally Sebastián stands and orders one of the other men to take over for him. “Maddie.” He meets my gaze. “Lo siento.”
My tears run over. “You’re sorry? Do something!” I shout. Putting pressure on the wound isn’t enough. “Call someone who can help!”
Sebastián gestures to two men, who lift my brother, then carry him into an orange tent. I can’t see him.
“No! No, Ryan!” Desperate, I turn to Sebastián. “Bring him back!”
Sebastián shakes his head and gives me a somber look.
Moisés drags me away, and I scratch and flail and kick, but I may as well be fighting a concrete wall. I scream as the world collapses beneath me.
I scream as people stare at me, and point guns at me, and shout orders I can no longer hear.
And once I start screaming, I don’t know how to stop.
43.5 HOURS EARLIER
GENESIS
The gunshot echoes in my head and Ryan hits the ground. Shock hits me like a punch to the chest. “No!” I lurch toward my cousin. Rifles swing in my direction.
Indiana pulls me back and pins me against his chest. I feel his breath against my ear, but I can’t hear what he’s whispering.
Maddie shouts as she kicks and claws at the man trying to drag her away from her brother, but I can’t hear her either. I can’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears.
Indiana won’t let me go.
My hearing comes roaring back. Gunmen are shouting. People are crying. The tour guide’s little dog is barking so forcefully that her whole body shakes.
But Maddie . . .
Maddie starts screaming, and everyone else falls silent. Her voice is an earsplitting tide of grief and anguish as she fights to get to her brother.
The rest of the world slides out of focus as I stare at Ryan, willing his lungs to expand. Willing him to breathe.
Come on, Ryan.
The wound is too big. There’s too much blood.
This can’t be real.
Please, God, let this not be real.
Finally Ryan’s back rises, so slightly I’m not even sure of what I’m seeing.
“Julian!” Silvana grabs the shooter’s rifle and slams the butt into his nose. Blood bursts from Julian’s ruined face, and he howls until he starts choking on it.
“Ryan!” Maddie screams, but his name is half swallowed by sobs, and I can hardly see her through my own tears. “Call someone to help him!” she demands again, but Silvana only shrugs.
“There’s no point.”
“No!” Maddie’s legs fold, and Moisés has to hold her up. Two men carry Ryan into a tent.
Indiana lets me go, and I lurch toward my cousin. But then I stop, frozen. I know eight ways to take down an unarmed opponent, and three methods for disarming one. But I can’t take on this many armed men at once.
Maddie finally fights free. Moisés aims his rifle at her, but looks to Silvana for an order; after Julian’s nose, the guerrillas are afraid to act on their own.
Maddie keeps screaming and backing away from the gunman. Her voice is hoarse. Her eyes are wide and her hands are shaking.
Silvana nods to one of the gunmen. “Shoot her.”
“No!” Sebastián lunges for her, but I’m faster.
I push Maddie behind me and stare, breathless, at the rifle now aimed at my chest. “I’ve got her!” I shout, my pulse thundering in my ears. They can hear me because Maddie’s voice is almost gone. “She’s my cousin.” I reach back and grab her arm to keep her behind me. Out of the line of fire.
Silvana frowns, and I can see the order hanging from the tip of her tongue. She wants Maddie facedown on the ground, and nothing less than absolute obedience will satisfy her.
Sebastián steps between me and the gunman. “¡Deténganlas! ¡Las necesitamos!” he shouts at Silvana. Sweat breaks out on my forehead while I wait to see if his insistence that they need us will outweigh Silvana’s ego.
She scowls and aims a dismissive wave our way. The gunmen lower their rifles. Breath I didn’t realize I was holding explodes from my lungs.
Sebastián marches past Silvana and tugs Maddie out from behind me.
“Lo siento.” He points toward the tent where they took Ryan, and my grief swells. “An accident.” Then he turns back to Silvana. “Madalena vendrá con nosotros.”
“Fine,” Silvana snaps. “Madalena comes.” Then she addresses the rest of our group. “You have five minutes to gather food and supplies, but nothing that can be used as a weapon. Anyone who runs will be shot.” Her focus finds me, then slides to Maddie, who’s staring at the ground with an unfocused gaze. “Anyone.”
I hate Silvana with the fire of a thousand hells, and that is exactly what I will bring down on her before this is over.
I lead my cousin toward the tents with the others, escorted on both sides by armed men. As we pass the tent they put Ryan in, she reaches for the flap, still sobbing.
“Maddie!” I hiss as I pull on her arm. Silvana is already marching toward us, pistol drawn.
Indiana steps up on her other side, and we help her into her own tent.
Alone in mine, I dump my backpack, then quickly repack only the essentials. A change of clothes and my waterproof blanket. My remaining protein bars and packets of tuna. Bug repellent. My flashlight. Every bottle of water I can find. I roll up my sleeping bag and strap it to my bag, then step out of my tent.
Óscar rummages through my things and tosses out the flashlight, because it’s big enough to be used as a weapon. Which is exactly why I packed it.
“What are they going to do with us?” Penelope whispers from my left as she settles her backpack onto her shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” Rog says as the only other female kidnapper searches his bag. “When they get what they want, they’ll let us go.”
Penelope shudders and wraps her arms around herself. “What if what they want is us, dead?”
“They’re not going to kill us,” I say as I watch Domenica’s and Indiana’s bags being searched. “They’re going to march us deeper into the jungle.”
“How do you know?” Pen asks.
“They need us alive.” For now.
43 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
A shadow falls into my tent. “Maddie.” Genesis puts one hand on my shoulder and I flinch.
“They shot Ryan.” It’s not what I meant to say. But all I can hear is the echo of gunfire. All I can see is my brother, covered in blood.
“I know.” Genesis dumps my backpack and starts sorting through my things. “We have to pack.”
“I’m not going.” I’ve already lost my dad. I can’t lose Ryan too.
She rolls up one of my clean shirts and shoves it into my bag. “If you don’t, they’ll shoot you.”
“If I go, they’ll let Ryan die.”
“There’s nothing we can do for him.” Her voice cracks, and for just a second, I can see her pain.
Rage crackles like fire inside me. I rip my bag from her hands. She has no right to that kind of pain. She wasn’t there when we got the call about my dad. She didn’t visit Ryan in rehab. Letting him party with her friends made him worse, not better, and she doesn’t have any right to—
br /> Genesis holds my gaze, as if she can read my thoughts. “I love him too, Maddie.”
I can’t think.
My cousin tugs the bag from my grip and starts shoving things into it.
“We can’t leave him,” I whisper.
She sets the bag aside and starts rolling up my sleeping bag. “Staying here won’t help Ryan, but it will get us killed.”
She’s right. I need a better plan. “Did you bring a satellite phone?”
“No. The whole point was to be out of reach for a while.” She buckles my sleeping bag to the bottom of my pack, then picks up a small glass vial that was hidden beneath it. My missing vial of insulin. “Do you need this?”
My eyes fill with tears again as I stare at the vial. “I lost it.”
Genesis slides the vial into a pocket on the side of her hiking shorts and zips the pocket closed. “We can’t let that happen again.”
“He wouldn’t have been shot if I hadn’t lost it.” I can’t stop my nose from running.
Genesis sets my repacked bag in front of me. “Julian pulled the trigger. Not you.”
“So we’re just supposed to leave Ryan here?” My words sound half choked. Fresh tears blur the inside of my tent.
She lowers her voice until I’m practically reading her lips. “They’ll pay for this, Maddie. I swear. But until then, you need to keep your mouth closed and your head down.”
My tears won’t stop coming. “But he’ll die if we leave him.”
“We’ll die if we don’t.” She exhales slowly. “And what good would we do him then?” I can practically see her shoving pain and fear back from the surface of her thoughts. Turning it all off like she did when her mom died.
That scares me more than an entire crew of armed kidnappers.
GENESIS
“Sebastián!” Nico strains his neck to look up from the ground, where he’s bound with fifteen other hostages. “Don’t do this!” His focus flicks from me to our captors. “Take me, please. Let me help!”
“Leave him!” I shout as I swing my backpack onto my shoulder. The thought of having that backstabbing bastard around makes my skin crawl. “He’s done more than enough!”
“Genesis, I didn’t . . .” Nico struggles to lift his head high enough to see me. “This wasn’t—”
“¡Cállate!” Silvana shouts, looking up from the map Sebastián holds. “Or I’ll put a bullet in you myself.”
Nico’s jaw snaps shut, but he keeps watching us.
“¿Estás listo?” Silvana asks Sebastián.
“Sí. Vámonos.” Sebastián folds the map and shoves it into his back pocket while Silvana gives an overhead “round-’em-up” signal to her other men.
No one speaks as we’re marched out of the clearing flanked by seven of the nine gunmen. The eighth is in the tent with Ryan, and the remaining gunman stands over the captives bound facedown on the ground.
Indiana walks at Maddie’s side as she plods in front of me. Penelope and Domenica stare at the ground as if they’re afraid that seeing or hearing too much will get them killed. I take in every detail. As my father says, forewarned is forearmed.
My father also says Colombia isn’t safe. But how was I supposed to know he was serious about that, when his everyday level of paranoia sentenced me to years of Krav Maga, self-defense, and survival classes?
If he’d told me there was a specific threat in Colombia, I never would have paid the pilot to bring us here. My friends and I wouldn’t be heading into the jungle at gunpoint.
Ryan wouldn’t have been shot.
Maddie sobs as we pass Ryan’s tent. Then she lurches away from Indiana, headed for her brother.
I grab for her arm, but I’m too late. Sebastián catches her around the waist and hauls her back to me.
“Anda, Maddie,” he whispers in her ear.
To me, he says, “Ayúdala, o ella va a salir lastimada,” and the warning sends chills all over me.
“What did he say?” Indiana asks as Sebastián jogs toward the front of our group, pulling his map from his pocket.
“He said that if I don’t help her, she won’t leave the jungle alive.”
I take one of Maddie’s arms and Indiana takes the other. For the first few steps, we have to drag her along. She’s determined to stay with Ryan, even if that means being buried with him.
I can’t let that happen.
Maddie may feel responsible for what happened to Ryan, but all of this is my fault. I dragged us into the jungle. I have to get us out.
42.5 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead.
I walk without seeing the path. Without truly hearing the birds, and frogs, and monkeys. I can’t process anything through the funnel of grief narrowing my focus to that one moment. To the sight of my brother falling to the jungle floor.
“Maddie,” Genesis whispers as we crunch into twigs and push dense clumps of brush aside. “I need you to keep your head in the game. Don’t make me avenge Ryan all on my own.”
Avenge?
I force the world back into focus. She looks just like her dad.
Fine. Let her avenge Ryan. Genesis is great at revenge.
I have to get back to my brother. But if I run, I’ll just get shot. I need a distraction. Or an opportunity.
I pull free from my cousin’s grip, and when I don’t bolt this time, she leaves me alone.
Genesis thinks I’ve given up. But she’s about to find out just how much we have in common.
42 HOURS EARLIER
GENESIS
“Yo no quería esto.” Julian’s nose has finally stopped bleeding, but his whispered insistence that this isn’t what he signed up for sounds like a nasal whine. “No me gusta esa puta.”
Moisés nods.
Obviously there’s dissension in the ranks, and if that’s about more than the broken nose, I should be able to exploit their anger and drive a wedge between our captors.
But it would help if I knew why we were being kidnapped. Unfortunately, I know nothing about the Colombian political situation, except that Maddie says both the drug wars and the guerrilla revolution—the main sources of the violence my father remembers—are practically over. Either she’s wrong, or this is about something else.
Silvana knew who I was. The gunmen called my name as they searched the tents. My father will let me go anywhere in the world, except Colombia. This has to be about more than local politics.
This is about me. But why?
My dad and his mother moved to Miami when he was twelve. My uncle David was born six months later, and he was obsessed with his Colombian heritage, but my dad never talks about his childhood in Cartagena. As far as I know, he hasn’t been back since the day he left.
I squat on the trail to retie my boot lace, letting Rog and my friends pass me until I’m within eavesdropping distance of Óscar and Natalia, the other female kidnapper, who’re bringing up the rear. But the only thing I learn from their smutty whispering is that she’s definitely not his sister.
As I stand, a gunshot echoes through the jungle.
Maddie turns to me, her eyes wide and swimming in tears.
“No,” I whisper as I take her arm. “No, Maddie, it wasn’t Ryan.”
“How do you know?” she asks through halting sobs.
I know because they don’t need another bullet to kill Ryan. All they have to do is leave him alone.
“¡Vamos!” Silvana shouts, and Maddie jumps. Indiana takes her backpack and wraps one arm around her shoulders, urging her forward.
A second shot rings out from behind us, and Penelope starts crying. Then she stops walking.
“Get her moving, or she’s next,” Silvana orders, marching backward so she can look at me.
I swallow a groan and wrap my arm around Penelope. I can’t let her die, even if she did totally stab me in the back.
“Hey,” I whisper close to her ear. “You have to keep walking.”
“
I can’t.” She grabs my arm, and her grip is so tight my fingers start to tingle. “They’re going to kill us. We’re next.”
“They’re not going to—” We both flinch as the third shot rings out.
Rog closes his eyes and bows his head for a second.
“March!” Silvana shouts.
I tug Penelope forward as the fourth shot echoes toward us. We march, her hand tight around mine, as bullet after bullet is fired, each separated by a short pause.
Pen flinches with each one, but I count them.
Seventeen shots. But we only left behind sixteen hostages tied up on the ground.
41 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
The forest goes gray and silent around me. I hear nothing but the echo of gunfire.
Seventeen shots, sixteen bound captives. Including Nico. It only makes sense if I count Ryan.
Unless they found Luke.
Guilt brings fresh tears to my eyes.
My legs stop moving, but Indiana tugs me forward. “We don’t know what this means,” he insists. “They could have fired into the ground, to make us think they’re willing to kill. To keep us in line.”
I cling to his logic, because it’s what I need to hear. If they’re willing to kill us, why would they try to save Ryan? Why not shoot the other hostages in front of us?
Nothing has changed. My brother could still be alive.
I cling to that thought as our path steepens, and I have to grab on to bamboo and handfuls of vines to pull myself over obstacles in the trail. I am sweating too much and drinking too little water. But then the narrow path turns downhill, and hiking gets easier. I watch for a chance to run.
“Five-minute break!” Silvana shouts when we reach a clearing, and I exhale slowly.
Holden, Penelope, Indiana, and Domenica gather around Genesis on fallen logs while they snack on food from their packs.
Queen Genesis could hold court in hell, with nothing more refreshing than boiling water to offer. Nothing has changed, socially. Yet she doesn’t even seem to be listening to them.