“Left!” I try to scream, but we’re already plunging down the next drop. A surging wave sends water shooting past my parted lips, cutting off my air.
“No, back! Back!” Deborah is screaming.
It’s too late, though.
As I blink away the water, I try to follow Deborah’s desperate command, digging my paddle into the water—and meeting the unyielding scrape of rock instead.
The raft shudders as the nose wedges into a gap on the left side of the canyon—pinching our boat between two enormous boulders that hadn’t been visible through the spray a few seconds earlier.
Churning water hammers against the rubber sides of the raft like liquid thunder, trying to fold the boat in half as it slams into us again and again. The heavy rubber flexes and squeals beneath us, sending everybody lurching forward, even as the raft stays pinned in place.
“Oh my god, we’re stuck!” Pam cries. She’s already scrambling through the spray toward the back of the boat,levering her paddle between one of the boulders and the raft’s side like a crowbar.
“Come on, everyone! Use your paddle to push off!” Allie calls through the storm of water.
The rest of us follow her lead, jamming paddles against the enormous rock in a desperate attempt to break free of the boulders’ vise grip.
The force of the water holding us in place is unbelievably, terrifyingly powerful.
There’s no way the four of us, already beaten down, are going to break free from its grip.
There are so many ways to die,a strangely calm, defeated voice in the back of my mind whispers, while the muscles in my arms scream with the effort that feels more futile by the second.
It’s not Parker’s voice. It’s my own.
I can’t see Leo anywhere, but there’s no time to look, and for the moment I’m not afraid of him.
Even he can’t maneuver near us in these rapids.
“Keep trying!” Deborah cries, her voice ragged, the front part of her nearly disappearing as she leans farther into the spray ricocheting off the massive rock, burrowing her paddle deeper. “Don’t give up!”
Her beloved hat—the one her sister Beth gave her—blows back into the angry current, but she doesn’t stop battling the force of the waves. I watch the cap get swallowed by the frantic waves, unable to stop myself from imagining how we’d disappear beneath the surface every bit as quickly.
We’re impossibly stuck.
“There’s only two ways to die, Kaia.”There’s Parker’s voice, calm and clear as day, suddenly back in my ear.“You tap out, or you get taken out. Don’t you dare tap, baby. Fight. One more time. When the wave draws back, look at the angle of the boulder’s edge.”
The sound of his voice sends a surge of welcome adrenaline pulsing through me, and I do what he says, my gaze sweeping past Imani.
She has her eyes squeezed shut, leaning into the surf pouring over the edge of the raft, her good arm wrapped around a paddle that she’s somehow managed to wedge against the boulder.
When the recirculating wave smashes against the side of the boulder, I wait for it to draw back. In the brief moment before it surges again, I study the rock’s surface.
There’s an indentation there along the edge of the boulder—barely larger than the width of my paddle’s blade.
I raise my arm and slam the yellow part of the plastic into it, before it’s completely obscured from my view again, and lean all my weight against it. The other women struggle with me, all of us grunting and gasping with the effort.
The raft trembles as the current surges forward—and with a loud groan of rubber on rock, we finally break free.
It worked.We did it.
There’s no time to cheer, though.
The raft careens forward, straight into a trough of roiling water that looks like so many other harmless stretches of whitewater we’ve crossed over the past two days—no hidden traps. Or at least that’s what I think for a second—until the water swallows us.
This is a hole.
One heartbeat, we’re upright and moving forward. The next, we’re vertical, as if unseen hands beneath the surface have reached for the stern and yanked with all their might.
