Autumn crossed her arms. “Not exactly. The plan was changed a couple of hours before the game began.” She glanced at Kyle. “Right?”

“That’s right,” Kyle said. “I was supposed to show up at Candlestick Point with the rest of the game runners. Instead I got the call to pick you up.”

“Why you?” Jo said.

He considered it. “Because Coates had to get the speedboat. And because I have a commercial driver’s license.”

Jo looked at Autumn. “Who are you guys? Why are these hijackers after you? What’s their goal? Because it sounds like they planned this very thoroughly.”

Kyle kicked pebbles with the toe of his boot. “Her daddy’s got megabucks.”

Autumn glared at him, and her eyes seemed to brighten with pain and alarm.

Gabe said, “Anybody else here have deep pockets kidnappers can empty?”

Autumn said, “My dad’s a hedge fund manager. Dustin’s dad is a lobbyist in Washington.”

“Excuse me for being intrusive, but how rich? How powerful?” Gabe said.

Autumn’s shoulders rose.

“I’ve served in countries where kidnapping is the equivalent of grabbing cash from an ATM without having to wait in line. But in America, generally you need at least eight digits in your bank account before a kidnapper will think it’s worth risking the federal prison time. So?”

“My dad arranged this weekend. He’s done Edge Adventures scenarios himself. Everybody knows he loves this stuff. It’s because of him.”

She looked around at her friends. Her eyes were shimmering. Then she turned away and hid her face, staring at the river.

“So what’s the kidnappers’ plan?” Gabe said. “Grab you, stash you in a barn up in the back of beyond until your dad ponies up the cash?”

Peyton hugged herself. “Who cares? Somebody has to climb back up to the road and flag down a car.”

Jo looked up the side of the gorge. “Not that way.”

“Why not?”

“Retracing the fall line’s too steep and slippery. And, like Kyle said, Von’s up there and his partners are coming,” Jo said. “We do need to contact help. But we have to do it safely.”

Peyton wiped her nose. “But somebody’s going to be looking for us, right?”

Gabe turned, a tight expression on his face. “The wrong people.”

Peyton made a no, stupid face. “The police. Forest rangers.”

Dustin said, “How come you think that?”

“The guys who picked us up from the beach in San Francisco weren’t the real Edge Adventures guys.” She looked at Kyle. “Right?”

“I never seen them before,” he said.

“So the real Edge guys, they’ll be looking for us.”

The river whispered in the background. She looked wired and hopeful.

“No,” Autumn said.

“Why not?” Peyton said.

“Because the hijackers got rid of the team from Edge.” Autumn looked at Kyle. “Back at Candlestick Point you kept calling, and they didn’t answer.”

Kyle stared at her. He had an intense gaze, his eyes a hard brown with an almost golden ring around the edge of his irises. His gaze wasn’t a thousand-yard stare, but it was depthless.

“She’s right. They’re toast,” he said.

Peyton shrank into herself and worried her bracelet again. Autumn’s eyes seemed haunted. A weighted silence pressed on them.

“But we didn’t show up at the hotel,” Peyton said.

Autumn said, “We aren’t scheduled to check in yet. Nobody’s looking for us.”

“But . . .”

“Peyton, why would anybody search for us in the Sierras? The game’s supposed to be in the city.”

Jo said, “How long will it be before somebody in San Francisco knows something’s wrong?”

Autumn looked stricken. “None of our families expect us to call until the end of the weekend.”

“You mentioned a hotel.”

“The Mandarin Oriental. But if we don’t show up, they’ll just cancel the reservation.”

Lark said, “They wouldn’t call the police. That’s for sure.”

Peyton looked helpless. “Won’t somebody?”

Autumn turned. Her face was angry, and she looked fed up. “We’ve been abducted. Don’t you get it? They figured a way to grab us so nobody would notice.”

Peyton said, “You mean nobody knows where we are?”

Jo shook her head.

Gabe raised a hand. “Help me understand what happened earlier. You went to the beach at Candlestick Point.”

Kyle picked up a stick. “Yeah. Then this new gang showed up, wearing ski masks.”

“They hijacked the Edge Adventures team and then hijacked your group.”

“That looks about the size of it,” Kyle said. “I thought the trip up here was another twist in an evolving scenario. Coates kept switching things up at the last minute—I figured this was just another curve ball.”

Gabe held out his hand. “Give me that stick and get yourself a bigger one. Get seven bigger ones.”

He took out his buck knife.

“What’s that for, Chief?”

“We’re not going to sit here unarmed. We’ll carve spears.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Kyle ambled toward the trees.

Jo said, “They ambushed you at Candlestick Point. Why not grab you on your way to class at USF? Why grab everybody on your birthday party weekend?”

The wind swirled through the gorge. It was beginning to feel chilly. Jo was beginning to feel chilled emotionally again. Why take the whole party?

Autumn’s hair haloed in the breeze. “Because the police were informed it was a game. They wouldn’t interfere.”

Gabe and Jo both gaped. Simultaneously they said, “What?”

“That’s how Edge runs mock abductions. They call the cops beforehand, so nobody tries to make an arrest.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Jo said.

Autumn hunched into herself. “It made perfect sense at the time.”

And it had horrific implications. Jo glanced at Gabe and could tell that he was thinking the same thing.

She saw why the hijackers had grabbed the whole group to begin with. But with Autumn under their control, why hang on to the extra captives?

There was no reason to keep all of them around. They had been taking them into the wilderness to get rid of them.

The kids were out of the frying pan, for the moment. But they were skirting the edge of the fire. She didn’t want to state things so baldly, not yet. But she needed to convey her sense of urgency.

“Nobody knows where we are except us and Von. And if Von climbs the hillside up to the logging road, he’ll flag down his buddies or contact them by phone.”

Autumn’s shoulders rose and dropped. “What do we do?”

“We have to contact the authorities.” Jo looked at Gabe. “Somebody has to go for help.”

Gabe stepped forward. “We’re in a survival situation. So listen up. I’m going to tell you about SERE.”

“What’s that?” Dustin said.

“Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. It’s the military’s survival training. And you’re about to get a crash course.”

Unhappily, Stringer climbed from behind the wheel of the Volvo SUV. Haugen stalked to the driver’s side, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Get in the back,” he said. “Sabine, you ride shotgun. Log on from my phone. Hook up the laptop.”

He jumped in and accelerated away from the truck stop, tires squealing.

The Hummer had wrecked. Friedrich was dead. Von had escaped but didn’t have control over Autumn’s group. They were stranded at the bottom of the gorge, but not fenced in.

He pushed his foot to the floor and raced up the highway, accelerating past eighty, eighty-five, ninety. Sabine reached over and flipped on the headlights.

“We’re still on schedule,” she said. “Reiniger’s plane won’t land for another hour. We have the initial video and the photos of the Edge game runners. Nothing has changed.”

“And when Reiniger demands proof of life?” Haugen said.

“He won’t. Not yet. He’ll be in shock.”

He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “This should not have happened.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Stringer. “Why did nobody predict that these college boys might mount an attack?”

From the sour look in Stringer’s eyes, Haugen knew he was reading the implication accurately: Why didn’t you predict it?

Sabine tried to stay calm. “Von is maneuvering into position. All he needs to do is get close enough to see them. He can pin them down. One shot, they’ll hear the echo and dash back inside the limo. They’ll cower.”

Haugen glanced at her. “Get Von on the phone again.”

“Why?” she said.

He shot a hand out and grabbed her around the throat. “Now.”

Quickly, silently, she grabbed his forearm and dug her nails into his flesh. Hard.

He let go of her.

“Both hands on the wheel, Dane,” she gasped. The look she gave him was filthy.

He put his hands at two and ten. His vision was flashing red. He reached back across the SUV to stroke her cheek, and like a cobra she slapped his hand away.

“I will tell you why we need to phone Von,” he said. “Because he needs to understand the rules of play. They’ve changed.”

Stringer leaned forward. “How?”

“One gunshot, fired into the rocks or the river, will scare these kids back into the Hummer. One gunshot fired into somebody’s head will convince them the risks of escaping are worth it.” He wrung his hands on the wheel. “He needs to save his gunfire for when it counts.”

He looked again at Sabine. “He needs to wait to kill them until I’m on the scene.”

“Unless they try to escape,” Sabine said.

“Unless. Then all bets are off.”

Jo said, “How many people were in the group that took you?”

“Five,” Kyle said. “And one was a woman. The two clowns who drove us into this gorge, they wasn’t in charge. Another man was giving them orders.”

Autumn said, “The tall man who drove the speedboat.”

Kyle appeared to think about it. He nodded.

Gabe said, “So we should count on at least four hostiles coming for us, heavily armed and determined to recapture the group.”

Everybody looked at Autumn. Thinking: or recapture her and kill the rest of them.

“The quickest way to get help is to contact the local sheriffs. And we still have to find Jo’s and my cell phones,” Gabe said.

“On it,” Jo said, and headed for the Hummer.

“We can’t just sit here,” Dustin said.

“I’m not suggesting it. Somebody’s got to climb out of here. But we can’t all go.”

“Then what are you saying, man?”

“Noah shouldn’t be moved unless it’s absolutely necessary. Peyton, you’re going to have difficulty hiking severe terrain. Ideally, we’d move to a defensible position and get under cover. But for now we stay here and protect ourselves.”

Peyton looked tired and shaky. “How?”

“Night’s coming. The temperature is going to drop, maybe below freezing. And there’s a storm blowing in.”

“You gotta be shitting me,” Dustin said.

“We can’t build a fire because it would pinpoint our location in the dark. If you brought warm clothes, get them. Put them on, keep them zipped up. Stay dry.”

Jo circled to the wrecked driver’s compartment of the limo, avoiding Friedrich’s crushed body. The door was open, twisted like a bird’s broken wing. She squirmed inside. The interior of the vehicle had deepened into gray shadow.

She rooted around. She heard voices in the passenger compartment. Lark and Autumn had crawled inside.

“You okay, Noah?” Autumn said.

He rocked his hand side to side: so-so. “Had better days.”

Lark pressed her lips tightly closed. For a second she looked like she might cry.

Jo said, “You all right back there?”

Lark shook her head. “Hardly.” Then she got hold of herself. “But we will be. Right?”

“That’s the plan.”

Jo crabbed through the wrecked driver’s compartment, flinching away from broken glass and twisted shards of metal. She sifted through trash and debris until, at the bottom of it, she found her cell phone.

“Got it,” she said.

The phone was powered up and didn’t look damaged. She dusted it off.

No signal. They were too deep in the gorge. She kept looking for Gabe’s cell, but had no luck.

Autumn was looking around the interior of the Hummer. “None of our stuff is here. They took it.”

“What about the luggage compartment?”

A freighted pause. “But . . .”

Autumn glanced at Jo. Her expression practically begged, Don’t make me.

“I’ll go with you,” Jo said.

She climbed back through the twisted door into the cooling evening, and trudged with Autumn to the rear of the Hummer. Autumn opened the latch on the luggage compartment. It creaked open about two feet. Autumn moaned and shook her hands, the universal sign for grossed out.

The army duffel bag was visible. In the crash, the body had been dislodged and slid halfway out. Jo recognized the outfit the corpse was wearing: the tactical black of the hijackers. She didn’t recognize the corpse. His skin was pale white. A gunshot wound pocked his temple.

“Just got to grit our teeth and grab any gear that’s back there,” Jo said.

She knew that what she was asking Autumn to do was tough. But they had not one single second to wallow in self-pity. They had to get on with it. Tough was what they had to be. Some of them were going to have to climb out of the gorge past Von—while it was still light, and he might target them through his gunsight. They had to. Traveling in the dark was a recipe for death.

Whimpering, Autumn reached into the luggage compartment and pulled out a black sports bag. She stumbled back from the Hummer, shuddering. Dropping the bag, she unzipped it and began rustling through it.

“What . . . ,” she said, her voice shaky. “What is . . . ?”

Her chest heaved. “What is this doing here?” She straightened. She looked ready to bite somebody. “Who did this?”

“Did what?” Jo said.

Autumn pulled a cowboy hat and a lasso from the bag. “The Bad Cowboy. This is his stuff. What is it doing here?”