She heard the whump-whump of the helicopter first. “Down!” she said in a hushed voice to the others. “The chopper!”
Their single-file lane instantly broke, each girl diving toward the nearest mesquite bush or darting into a moon shadow cast by a boulder. Lindsey’s shoulder hit a rock. The nearest bush snapped. She winced in pain and inhaled the pungent scent of sage. Gloria killed the light of the one allotted flashlight.
Damn. Even if they weren’t spotted, hiding would cost them precious minutes. At sundown, Lindsey’s team, the Dianas, won the horseback relay on the Sonoran Loop of the competitive track. By 10:30, they had come in second on the bicycle course. This put them in a close second overall with the Persephones, their most serious competition. With a bit harder push, they could capture the lead. All girls at the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women were assigned upon admission to a support group—a sort of team or coven or sisterhood—and each group picked their name from a character in Greek or Roman mythology.
The Dianas were tired but pumped, and Lindsey needed the big win as much as she’d ever needed anything. Her dad would be waiting in the park’s amphitheater along with the other girls’ parents. Mom would be there, too, of course, but Dad would be so incredibly proud of Lindsey if—no, when—the Dianas won this major test. His high expectations for her were the main reason he’d sent her to Athena, the extremely low-profile, highly selective, and premier high school for girls in America, really in the whole world, and Lindsey simply couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing him. Not even once since she was twelve and she’d lost her nerve and didn’t even place in a skiing race had she disappointed her stern but loving dad.
She felt something, looked down, and realized that her legs were exposed—and that a scorpion had crawled up onto her boot, tail raised. Lindsey froze.
The searchlight of the chopper sliced back and forth through the darkness, approaching them and driving critters skittering in the brush toward them. If the scout in the chopper ID’d the Dianas, they’d be penalized fifteen minutes. The Academy, partially supported by secret Department of Defense funding and from such government agencies as the CIA, NSA and FBI, also had close ties to nearby Luke Air Force base. The men there enjoyed helping out in the annual event.
Rachel Stein gasped and swatted at Lindsey’s shoulder. “Your legs.”
“Freeze, chicas!” Gloria commanded, just before the beam missed Rachel by inches.
They wore desert camouflage hats with leafy twigs stuck into the band, black turtleneck shirts, camo pants, fingerless black gloves and hiking boots. Each carried a two-liter water bottle, Lindsey’s now less than half full, ChapStick and simple food items. The team also carried water-based paint balloons for tagging, one knife, one pen flare and one simple first-aid kit. The designated leader always held the flashlight and the rappelling line and pitons, which had come in handy twice so far.
When the chopper finally passed, Lindsey flicked the scorpion off. She started to stand, but what felt like claws tore through her shirt. She swore. A cluster of razor-sharp thorns from a scrubby cat’s claw acacia had shredded her forearm. Man, oh, man, she hated this plant. Ecologist Edward Abbey had said that everything in the desert either “bites, stabs, sticks, stings or stinks.” He was right.
The way her classes had combined concepts, like biological adaptations and survivalist training, constantly amazed Lindsey. If women were to make things better, they had to hone every asset, every ability. Be all they could be, as her dad, a former army special forces commander, would say. Principal Christine Evans even brought in accomplished instructors to teach Lindsey’s favorite subject, art. Her dad, however, encouraged art studies only as a hobby. Mom’s income as a textbook illustrator hadn’t brought in much money and so didn’t measure up to what Dad believed Lindsey could achieve.
“Water break and alpha change,” Gloria said. “Lindsey, take us in.”
“Right.” A quick swig of water, a chunk of power bar and a handful of peanuts, and they were off again, Lindsey in the lead. “Okay, they almost caught us because we’re in the wash. We need to bend south, anyway.” She set a faster jogging pace.
The chopper followed trails and the long, meandering dry washes that gleamed white in the moonlight, the idea being to drive the five teams into challenging terrain. The White Tank Mountains were essentially a series of ridges running east and west. The Dianas had already crossed or skirted three main ridges. With one more to go, they’d soon be in the public area with its many trails. Before coming in, though, they had to find a “treasure” in Waterfall Canyon. Each team’s prize would be in a different location and they would know it because it would bear the initial of their name.
The distant lights of Phoenix lay like a spill of diamonds to the southeast, and even in the ravines, gullies and canyons, the city’s ambient light was obvious. The girls kept Polaris shining over their left shoulders. In this park, Lindsey knew where she was, even at night. She hiked through it several times a year and had spent the previous evening poring over maps.
She risked sweeping the flashlight beam across a rocky stretch. From the other side of the ridge, coyotes suddenly yipped the way they did over a fresh kill. Chills ran up her back at the sound. She held up her hand for a stop signal, and listened hard. When the yips grew fainter, team members audibly breathed again.
Leaving the wash would slow them down but the chopper was a bigger problem. “Go!” Lindsey said, and they scrambled over the rocks toward a protected arroyo.
This was a good time for one of their cheers. In a low voice, she chanted, “Dianas know no fear!” The others responded, instantly and softly: “No way, Jose!”
Lindsey called, “Dianas persevere!”
The response: “You bet, Suzette!”
Then all together, “Go, Dianas!”
They normally screamed the last line, but now each spoke barely above a whisper. If they alerted other teams to their location they risked getting pelted with dye balloons. If yellow glow-in-the-dark paint splattered a team member’s clothing, the team would suffer a ten-minute loss for each girl hit. The Dianas were definitely the team to beat. Pelting any of them would be a bragging-rights victory. All Athena girls wanted to be like the famous Cassandra team that graduated five years ago, and the Dianas were shaping up to match the Cassandras’ exploits and achievements.
“Over rock and ridge, gully and gravel, the Daring Dianas trekked on,” Crystal said softly in her exaggerated movie voice-over tone, “jogging with goat-footed precision, panting and sweating, moving ever closer to victory.” She wanted to become a screenwriter.
Out of the inky silhouette of a stand of organ-pipe cactus, black blots seemed to spew toward them, emitting tiny screams and squeaks. Bats. Lindsey raised her arms around her head, and the high-pitched noise rose and then apparently stopped as the bats’ echo-location went into an overdrive inaudible to humans. They veered off then, shy things that they were, perhaps scared up by a great horned owl.
She’d felt no panic, no pounding pulse. Lindsey had seen only one snake so far, a mildly venomous nocturnal lyre snake coiled in a rock crevice, its head raised. She’d not even blinked as she faced its stare and directed others to move back, and then, finally, moved away herself.
Athena and the desert had been good for her courage. Understanding the desert’s creatures had erased a lot of blind fears. Snakes. Bats. Coyotes. Scorpions. She understood them now, knew how to act and so had conquered the terrors they had given her at first. She could rappel down cliffs that once would have
