Page 105 of Valley Girls
They started into the woods, on the wide path leading to Mirror Lake. Tourists were still out and walking, and Rilla scanned every person on the path and the stands of trees and looming boulders for anyone who might have wandered into the woods.
Lauren called out their names occasionally, especially when big clumps of people came by. But by the time they hit Mirror Lake and Half Dome rose straight above them, there were only a few tired-looking stragglers, and none of them were the hiker they were looking for.
“All right, we’re going off-trail,” Lauren said, veering off into the brush in the twilight. She radioed a similar update.
Rilla followed Lauren’s pace—slowing down when she found herself a few steps ahead, picking up when she fell behind. At first, it felt as if she’d surely miss the hiker—it’d be just her luck. But she fell into a rhythm and soon there was nothing but the dim trail. Walker’s body moved behind her. Lauren and Kamika to her right. They moved as one unit, as a team, as the trail ended and they began picking their way through the rocks and brush—slowing even more to carefully sweep the rocks and call out.
“Listen,” Lauren ordered them as they broke out of the woods. A river bed opened wide before them. It was almost dark—that deep purple haze of evening and all the light gone from Half Dome.
Perched on a boulder in the dry riverbed, Rilla stopped with the others and tilted her head to the wind. Straining to hear its cries.
Nothing came.
“At least the sky is clear,” Walker said.
“One less thing to worry about,” Lauren agreed.
They crawled around a boulder bigger than Thea’s house, breathing hard, but quietly sending their headlamps around them.
“Canyons have their own strange forces,” Lauren said. “I never like a call into Tenaya. To me, it means I’m going after a body.”
Rilla tried not to shiver in the dark as they worked their way to the far edge of the Valley and the walls of granite began to close in on them. The night became darker. The stars were only a strip above them. A faint trickle of water caught on the wind, and by the time Rilla was certain they had to be halfway through the canyon, they stopped at the edge of a dark pool. “Well, we’ve reached the start,” Lauren said.
Rilla tilted her head and the small burst of light of her headlamp swept up a wall of granite with a dark, narrow gash in the middle. From the darkness, a strange sound came—water, but water as Rilla had never heard before. It echoed, like the sound was liquid and dark.
“He has to come out somewhere along here,” Lauren said. “If he’s coming out.”
It wasn’t wide—just a rocky sweep between the big walls of granite on either side and the rocks rose higher in front of them. A thin waterfall poured over and pooled in the middle.
Rilla sat and clicked off her light, relieved after her long night and long day to be sitting. Her gaze flickered to Walker, in the dark. He’d spent most of the night with her, knowing he’d have to do something like this.
“Are we still supposed to be looking?” she asked him quietly.
He turned off his light. Lauren had a large flashlight sweeping across the narrow valley as she talked on the radio, but the darkness seemed to suck it in, not illuminate anything.
“We’re at a choke point,” Walker said. “It’s narrow enough here if anyone comes through, we’ll see.”
Lauren nodded. “Most people only think of something like a grid search—which is actually the most ineffective way of searching. In all the places between here and Olmstead Point, the only way they can come through this point is by coming right here.” She swept her light across the waterfall and the rocky hillside between the granite cliffs. “So, we send a group of searchers on the other side. Experienced canyoneers. They sweep the inner canyon and we make sure no one leaves.”
“It feels weird,” Rilla said. “The canyon is there.”
“Some people say it’s cursed,” Lauren said. “The army killed the son of Chief Tenaya toincentivizethe Ahwahnechee from the Valley. And the story is, he cursed the canyon. But I think the earth just hangs on to the memory of injustice and revisits it on people. No one can escape the past, not even the land.” She flicked on her headlamp. “All right, you guys stay here. Call if you see anything.”
Lauren and Kamika disappeared across the tight gorge, but their lights bobbed along. If she strained, she could just make out their shadows.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said to Walker. Hating herself even more that when someone else’s life was on the line, she was still thinking about her fight with Thea.
“Shoot.”
“Am I ... Am I ...” She swallowed, trying to find the courage to ask. “I know I’m out of my league. I know I’m new. But am I still ... a gumby?”
He laughed. “No. You’ve been new, but you’ve never been that. You’ve always been smart and careful. Even when you had bad habits from Petra, you fixed it right away, Caroline said. You are trusted.”
“Am I inexperienced?”
This time he didn’t answer right away. “Yes and no. But I think we all have to nurture a feeling of inexperience. It can keep us safe and cautious. But without letting it make us overly afraid. I think. And yeah, you haven’t had as much experience as some. But more than others. Most people would not have progressed as fast as you have.”
She nodded. It didn’t really help like she thought it would.
