“Wait!” Allie finally hisses, grabbing my arm. “Listen!”
I go to shrug off her arm, intent on following Parker’s instructions, but then I hear something that makes me freeze.
A familiar voice cuts through the night, and my blood turns to ice.
“Well, that was a lot of trouble for nothing, wasn’t it?” Leo’s voice is sing-song, playful. “Nice bait-and-switch, but where do you think you’re going now?” He laughs.
I can’t breathe, can’t move. Is he talking to us? How did he spot us? His voice is coming from around the next bend in the trail.
Allie’s fingernails dig into my arm, but both of us are frozen in place.
Then Leo speaks again. “Wow, Macy. Looking good.”
I glance at Allie in horror. He’s not talking to us. He’s caught up with the other women. And from the sound of it, they’re all directly ahead.
My stomach lurches. What now?
The terrible truth sinks in. Allie and I aren’t in any position to help anyone—including ourselves. We’re just two women on the brink of critical exhaustion, desperate to save a group of even more hopeless women. All of us are trapped, with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nobody coming to save us.
Our raft—probably in pieces downstream of Splinter Ridge—has been torn to shreds by Leo’s arrows. We wouldn’t be able to salvage it, even if we could get to it.
There’s no escape route except the river, and we’d be doomed without life jackets. It’s possible Allie and I could survive a little longer in the water, if we somehow got past Leo and his bow and made it to the put-in at the bottom of Splinter Ridge. But Imani or Macy? Not a chance.
I wonder again how Leo plans to get out of here. It seems like he’s thought of everything. What about escape?
A muffled shriek from ahead twists my heart in my chest.
We can’t just stand here and let him kill them. We have to do something.
I nod to Allie and we creep forward, staying low, using the boulders for cover. As we round a massive rock formation, the path dips steeply downward, leading to a clearing—the put-in for rafters who’ve portaged around Splinter Ridge. We’ve nearly made it to the end of the trail.
What I see below me almost makes my legs give out.
It’s worse than I imagined.
There is absolutely nowhere to hide down there. Nowhere to run. Nowhere at all.
Macy, Pam, Deborah, and Imani are cowering on a strip of sand.
Towering above them is the sheer cliff face, a hundred feet high and impenetrable. And in front of them is Leo, advancing down the steep trail toward them with his bow.
Pam is trying in vain to help Deborah up the rock face, to reach the nearest ledge—but anyone can see it’s impossible. There’s simply nowhere to go.
Leo is maybe fifty feet away from the women. As he navigates the final rocky grade of the portage trail, he steps onto the sand and raises his bow, an arrow nocked. The string is drawn back halfway—not quite ready to fire, but close. He’s savoring the moment.
“You know what’s funny?” Leo says, his tone conversational, like he’s talking about the weather. “When I thought you all decided to go over Splinter Ridge, I actually respected that. Like, legit respect. But then …” He laughs. “I realized—nah. That isn’t the story I want people to tell.” He cocks his head. “That’s a little anticlimactic. Can’t leave the folks at Lifemark working with that kind of material.”
“Fuck you,” Macy spits. She sways where she stands, barely able to hold herself upright. Even from this distance, I can see the angry splotches spreading down her neck in the moonlight.
Leo ignores her. “Nope. The story I want people to tell on your obsessive little subreddit,” he continues, “is the one whereIkill all of you. Not Splinter Ridge.” He grins.
Then he raises the arrow.
I dart my eyes around the clearing, the path, and the canyon wall, searching desperately for anything useful. Anything that might give us one more chance.
Finally, my eyes land on the river.
Something is bobbing in the water, peeking from around a boulder about ten feet behind the rock face where the women are pinned.
