Without being able to see her, Imogen and Beck had no way to gauge how Tilda was processing Beck’s idea. Did she think it was a good one? Or was she looking at the trail behind her, wishing they could go back?
“Okay. Let’s try that,” came the reply a moment later.
The Blum sisters grinned.
“You got this!” Imogen said, cheering her on from afar.
With the walking stick now on her left, Beck reversed directions and headed around the promontory.
Imogen sat on a rock, drank from a canteen. It was Beck’s turn and she would help Tilda: infuse her with the special thing Beck possessed—an ability to make people feel okay. That’s why she wanted to be a doctor. She did it with an invisible wand and sometimes no words. But with a certain look, a quirk of her lips, a person might suddenly feel better.
It seemed like only a minute later that Beck rejoined her, sloughing off Tilda’s trendy pack. And seconds after that, Tilda appeared—eyes like laser beams on the path ahead of her.
Tilda walked over to safer ground, gasping with her tongue out, relief graffitied across her face. “Holy crap.”
“Wasn’t so bad,” said Beck.
If Imogen hadn’t known better, she might have thought her sister was a hypnotist. “Not as bad as I thought,” Tilda said, under her spell.
“You did it!” Imogen rejoiced, throwing her arms in the air.
“I did it!” Tilda embraced her in a celebratory hug.
They wound south. For much of the day they’d had a distant wall of Muav limestone for company—with five hundred sheer, vertical feet of Redwall limestone atop it—and the scrubby bushes that dotted the Tonto Platform. After successfully navigating the Promontory of Catastrophic Possibilities, they’d fallen into a meditative rhythm. Walking. Thinking.
As they started the descent into Boucher, at the elevation of the Tapeats sandstone, things got steep and rocky again. It struck Imogen as funny—yesterday was only yesterday, but in the Canyon your legs and endurance acquired their own sort of expertise in a short amount of time. Ahead of her, she could almost see Tilda thinking the same thing. They’d survived going down the Hermit Trail, and inched around a monolith without stumbling. It wasn’t that everything became easy by comparison, but the body and mind developed new standards by which to evaluate the terrain.
Boucher “camp” appeared to be deserted. It didn’t have designated spots, but the whole area was broad and flat in comparison to other places in the Canyon. Beck seemed to know exactly where she wanted to go: she headed toward the creek.
“Is this it?” Tilda asked.
“Yup. Home for the next four nights,” said Beck.
“Nice.” Tilda looked around for a second, and then resumed following Beck.
Knowing they were only yards away from setting up camp, Imogen let the other two go on ahead.
“You coming?” Tilda asked, turning around.
“Yup, just gonna enjoy…a minute to myself.”
Tilda grinned, as if she understood, and walked on.
Back home, Imogen often found it exhausting to be among people for hours on end, even when she was enjoying herself. But that wasn’t necessarily true in the Canyon. She wondered why backpacking with friends felt as good as being alone.
Here, the presence of other people felt different; or maybe she was different. Civilization had gone awry, with its buildings and highways, its digitalization and consumption. Binge-watching TV. Humans had adapted to a meaningless structure of work and wealth that resulted in a fundamental loss of identity. Here, you could return to the natural order, enjoy the two-part state of doing-the-necessities-to-survive and sitting-around-doing-nothing, unburdened of existential angst.
Maybe she was overthinking it, but it felt different here nonetheless. Imogen inhaled. Searching for archaic memories, she let her breath permeate deep into her lungs, her soul. The colors were so rich she could smell them: flamingo rock, terra-cotta dirt, cornflower sky. The air carried a fragrance full of patterns—lizard skin, raven feather, vaporous cloud. Even the distant night had a scent, the musk of the coming hunt, the deep yearning to survive. Everything spoke softly. Everything remained: the gossip of fossils and the whispered bones of millennia. She heard the agave sigh, the succulence held in its bayonet leaves a private song. Everything sang in the sun.
Imogen might have continued pondering these things, gazing around at the rocks and trees, larger than the cottonwoods had been at Hermit—might have even scribbled a few lines of poetry on her tiny notepad—but something caught her eye. A spark of unnatural color. Shiny lavender.
It was a few paces from her but its iridescence and angular edges drew her attention. Backpackers were pretty good about hauling all their garbage out and leaving the land as pristine as they’d found it. And in such an isolated place she hadn’t expected to find litter, especially within moments of arriving. Perhaps it was an oversight, a bit that had blown away?
She squatted down carefully, not wanting the weight of her pack to send her hurtling onto her face, and picked it up. A torn scrap, a corner. Silver on the inside like a candy bar wrapper. But no. It wasn’t from a candy bar.
Imogen recognized it. Tilda had brought enough to eat two per day.
The stolen protein bars?
A shiver scuttled up her arms even under the desert sun. She took in her surroundings more carefully. No signs of a tent or gear. It didn’t look like anyone had been here recently. But the proof in her hand said different. The scrap looked fresh, unblemished by exposure to dirt or sun.
Beck and her dad had talked about Boucher canyon many times. Imogen knew that somewhere nearby was a partially dug mine, gouged right into the billion-and-a-half-year-old Vishnu schist by Louis Boucher himself, back when he’d lived in the Canyon as a guide and prospector. Would someone stay in there? It seemed like a weird idea to her, to choose a cramped rock tunnel instead of enjoying this splendor. But people could be weird. Mr.—or was it Monsieur?—Boucher had also built himself a little rock shelter, like an igloo, though she hadn’t laid eyes on that yet either. The roof had long since caved in and Imogen didn’t consider it likely that anyone would camp there.
Her eyes scanned farther up the creek, past where Beck and Tilda had dropped their packs. There, the opposite bank was a steep wall, fifty or sixty feet high. Erosion had made pockets in the sandstone that resembled cave mouths, and one of them was wide enough and deep enough to camp in. From afar she couldn’t discern the shallow cave from other imperfections in the cliff face, but she knew Beck and their dad had found the hidden shelter on a rainy day. If a person was standing just within the archway Imogen thought they’d be visible, but she wasn’t sure.
So it was possible they weren’t alone. It was possible someone else had come out to Boucher—it wasn’t like they could reserve it for themselves. If it was the asshole, at least he wasn’t following them. But it was troubling if the person who’d helped himself to their food bag was here. And more troubling still if he was hiding.
Or maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe someone else—not necessarily a he—with a taste for expensive protein bars had passed through a day or two before, heading east or west—there was no way to know for sure. Or…her paranoia wasn’t ready to give in: What if the Canyon meant to test her, in more than physical ways?
In Esther’s Ghost, after her friends decided she was delusional, Esther had to unravel the mystery of her attack alone. She researched the history of the mansion-turned-apartments where she lived—and the robber baron who’d built it—suspicious that he might have never fully vacated the premises. But finding someone who had committed a crime became exponentially trickier when he lacked a corporeal form.
The skin of Imogen’s exposed forearms looked like a softer version of the prickly pear at her feet. Now she was just spooking herself. It was a good story, but it was unlikely they were dealing with an invisible antagonist.
Imogen tucked the scrap into the pocket of her shorts and continued across the flatland toward the patch of earth Beck and Tilda had claimed as home. If she mentioned it to Beck, it would probably be best to leave out the latest theory, life imitating art and a phantom thief. She could already hear her sister telling her, not for the first time, that she watched “too much TV”—though Imogen spent just as much time with her growing library of scary books. Sometimes it helped to read stories that were scarier than the real world. At least in fiction the protagonist usually survived.