“Oars first, they’ll give us height,” Pam says, and I smile despite myself. She’s in vet mode.
She sees me grin and smiles back. Her face has gone waxy with exhaustion, her sunburned skin red and lips chapped, but her eyes are clear. “I’m no swim team star, but I am a crafter. Helps me de-stress.” She laughs. “I doubt it’ll have that effect right now, though.”
Deborah tosses a coil of rope at her feet. “This should help bind everything together. It looks pretty long,” she says, breathless. “Maybe there’s more in the bottom of the blue bag.”
Allie unbuckles her life jacket first, and the rest of us follow her lead—including Imani, with some assistance—while Pam collects our supplies. She works with impressive quickness, strapping some of the life jackets around bundled clothes, stuffing Mylar blankets and food wrappers into empty rain jackets to give them shape.
Imani has slumped even farther down in the bottom of the raft, her eyes glassy and breath shallow as we work. The stump of her elbow is fully visible now, the bandage long gone. The flesh is cut clean where the wire sliced through muscle and sinew, and the blood is seeping again, despite Pam re-tightening the tourniquet. The smell of it, raw and metallic, wafts on the breeze every so often. But there’s no time to re-bandage the wound.
Imani blinks at us, trying to focus. “Tell me … what to do,” she says, voice slurred.
“You just hang on and get ready to move,” I tell her, though my throat tightens around the words. I push our last half-empty water bottle into her hand and wait until I feel her fingers grip it. “Have another few sips of water, and rest. We’ve got this.”
The wind changes and the current picks up as we come around the next bend, moving faster even though none of us are rowing anymore. My heart skips as I try to count down how many minutes remain before we reach the point where he’ll be waiting and watching for six women silhouetted on a raft.
Six whole, visible women.
“Kaia,” Pam calls. “Help Allie tie these two paddles together. Make a spine and arms. We need the guide dummy to look most realistic, it’ll be the one he sees most clearly. Our Macy.”
Macy tries to smile in response, but her face is so swollen it barely flinches.
I kneel beside Allie, fingers clumsy on the wet rope. We lash the paddles in a rough T-shape, cinching them tight. Then Pam wraps a rain jacket around the top to create a torso and pulls a life jacket over it, tightening the straps until it holds its form. From a distance, with the low light … it could be a person.
“Two more,” Macy rasps.
Pam and Deborah manage another figure, but we’re running out of clothing and supplies. Without a word, we collectively remove the windbreakers we’re wearing, the extra layers of pants we pulled out of the dry bags earlier.
Macy’s hands are shaking so badly she can barely tie the knots on the final figure. Pam takes over, her jaw clenched in determination. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” she says gently. “Just human enough.”
I swallow hard and keep working. We have to be getting close to Splinter Ridge.
Rope bites into my palms as I pull it tight around a paddle-and-jacket rig. My vision blurs from droplets of spray as the raft crashes through a short rapid that none of us even bother to row through.
Finally, six shapes sit haphazardly in the raft—slumped, life-jacketed, eerie in the dwindling light. And maybe, just maybe, believable enough to pass as body doubles.
Allie leans back, hands on her hips, chest heaving, as she looks at Macy. The guide oars are all that remain for steering now, but that doesn’t matter anymore. “How much farther?”
Macy grimaces as she angles the raft toward the canyon wall. “We’re pretty much there. Past that big outcropping of boulders, he’ll be able to see us. If we’re getting into the water, now’s the time to do it.”
36
I give one last tug on the slick, nylon straps of my dummy’s life jacket and climb toward the back of the boat. Without the life jacket and the extra clothing layer I sacrificed for stuffing, I feel naked. The bite of the evening air is sharp now, but in mere minutes, I’ll be in that cold black water—trying to control this raft and maneuvering it directly toward Leo.
Beside me, Allie’s body is rigid, fists pressed into her thighs.
“Ready?” I ask her.
She doesn’t turn her head, just keeps staring out at the river like she’s trying to see through the canyon walls. “Yeah,” she says, so quietly I barely hear her.
Tiny waves slap the hull like impatient hands, urging us to get moving.
“Time to go,”comes Parker’s voice in my ear, along with the weight of a palm on the small of my back.
I rest for a moment in the safety of the sound, in the reassurance that he’s here with me, no matter what happens next.
The sensation lasts only for a moment, though. It’s time to move.
Our plan is completely insane. But at this point, staying on the raft is a death sentence for all of us.