Out of nowhere came an immense roar. The thunderstorm of the century. The snapping of bones. Hundreds of bones.
“Get out!” Dad flung open the tent flap from where he had stood outside to step into his rain pants. In a blur of movement he yanked Mom and me up, but Mom’s feet got tangled in her bag. He all but hoisted her into his arms and lugged us out of the tent.
She protested, “Wait! Our stuff!”
“Leave it,” Dad ordered, dragging us.
“Mudslide!” I heard someone yell, the alarm echoed in other languages.
Outside was dawning chaos as trekkers from other groups ran through the shared campsite. Another angry roar erupted from the earth. Dad’s grip around my wrist was bruising tight. He glanced left, right. I looked up. And then I saw the dark mass of mud flowing down the cliff, plowing a forest of trees, devouring everything in its path. Quattro had been up there, somewhere. He hadn’t been caught in that mudslide, had he?
“Over here!” Dad barked and tugged us toward safer ground. We stumbled toward an outcropping of boulders. Once there, he stared at Mom, who was wild eyed and shivering. He shrugged out of his raincoat and handed it to her. “You’ll be okay here.”
Mom clutched me to her side as though she would protect me bodily while Dad ran down to the mud pit that had been our campground.
“He should have stayed here with us,” Mom said, blame and worry thickening her voice.
I frowned even as I stared uphill. Come on, Quattro, where are you? “He’s helping everyone else,” I told her.
“But he should be here. With us now.” She repeated the words stubbornly like they were a talk track on an infinite loop. One that had played in her head since the diagnosis. Since their wedding. Since they met. He should be here with her, protecting her always.
I peered down into the drizzling gloom. Made out Dad sprinting heedlessly toward the tent Grace and Stesha shared, racing into the avalanche of mud, rocks, tree limbs sliding down the mountain, cascading toward our campsite.
Our tent was gone. Swept away. So was Grace and Stesha’s tent, which had been next to ours.
Grace. Stesha.
Where was the woman I was supposed to watch over? Reb’s grandmother? The Gamers? Ruben and our porters? And Quattro? I yelled for them now, screamed their names, prayed they were safe. Where was everybody? I spotted Dad darting around the perimeter of our campsite. Another round of yelling.
“Here, here,” Stesha panted, surrounded by the crew of porters, who set her and Grace on this safe ground. All of them fully dressed, ready for an early start. Grace even had her backpack, which one of the porters had been carrying and now dropped at her feet.
Grace said dazedly, “We were just having our morning tea.…” Then she threw her arms around the men. “Gracias, gracias. Damn, how do you say ‘hero’ in Spanish?” There was no time for more; the men were already returning to the destruction.
“Has anyone seen Ruben?” Mom asked, looking frantically down at the campsite. “Or Helen and Hank?”
Even as she said those names, a woman screamed, high pitched and frantic: “Help!”
At the edge of the mudslide, I spotted a half-swamped tent, sited for maximum viewing. Helen was pinned inside, waving desperately. I started down the slope despite Mom’s screams for me to stop. “Shana! No!”
A witch’s grip, nails digging into my arm. Mom must have flown after me. My answering yell—“Let go!”—was swallowed by the noise of another part of the cliff shearing off. I scanned the mountain. Quattro! Where was he?
And then there he was, dashing downhill with his dad, both of them racing straight at the screaming woman below. With headlamps on their foreheads and wearing their backpacks, they looked like a search-and-rescue team, prepared for this disaster. Quattro’s dad—this skinny ghost of a man—waded through the mud and yanked Helen out of the tent. Quattro and one of our porters now threw their powerful arms around her. Two of our porters pointed in our direction. I could almost see the sagging relief in Quattro’s body when he spotted me. They carried Helen to us.
“There’s Ruben!” Mom called, spying him as he circumnavigated the far edge of the mudslide, helping other trekkers out of the danger zone. “Nine o’clock.”
Stesha scanned the campsite, a captain unwilling to leave her ship until everyone was accounted for. “Where’s Hank?” She caught my eye. “Do you see Hank?”
“You’re bleeding,” I told her, and patted my pants for the handkerchief Mom insisted I carry with me at all times, only to remember that I was in my fleece leggings, clutching my rain gear like a security blanket.
Not that it mattered, since Stesha shrugged off all concern. Helen wrenched her arms free from Quattro and the porter and staggered toward us, demanding hysterically, “Where’s Hank? He was with me in the tent. But then”—she waved—“he was gone.…”
“Gone?” Mom asked her, frowning.