“This is our trail,” Elzabeth said.
“If I may,” Charles said, moving forward, and I wanted to stomp on his foot or something because I was sure he was about to say something insufferable. “Your trail followed a loop, didn’t it? You started at a different trail that circles around, passes through our camp, and ends up back at base. While we went straight out and straight back.” He looked around at the rest of us. “I imagine their route was about twice as long as ours.”
George laughed. “So you guys got the wimpy kiddy route? That’s super rich.”
My face burned, and I didn’t know if it was because I was embarrassed, angry that they were laughing, or angry at the instructors for going easy on us. I could have hiked the long trail, I knew I could have.
“It’s not like they gave us a choice,” I said.
“Oh, I know. They’re just taking good care of you.”
“Yeah, you just laugh it up,” Tenzig said, as if he were the one doing the teasing.
“If you’ll excuse us,” George said, making a show of shouldering past us, leading the others down the trail. They really were walking faster than us, as if the hike to
ok no effort at all. Angelyn threw us a smile.
“How do you like that?” Ethan said.
“Come on,” Tenzig said, marching faster.
I just stared. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“We can keep up with them,” he said, his voice echoing from ahead.
“No, we can’t!” Ladhi said.
“It’s not worth the trouble,” I added.
“You losers stay behind if you want,” he said, continuing on, huffing for breath.
“We’re not going to lose points for being late,” Ethan said. “But we’ll lose points for not sticking together.”
“I’m not walking that fast,” Ladhi said.
I sighed. “Let’s just go. We’ll catch up eventually.”
We hiked on at the same pace we’d been going. As long as we could still hear voices ahead, we couldn’t be doing too badly. If Tenzig was smart, he’d hang back right at the end so we all showed up at base together. Then he could have it both ways.
The trail was familiar this time, at least. We’d passed these trees, rocks, curves before. We didn’t have to check the GPS. Just keep slogging. No matter how tired we were, we’d get to rest at the end of it. It would all be over.
Someone ahead screamed.
A chaos of noise followed. Voices shouting, another scream, a clatter of rocks.
I ran, not stopping when Charles yelled my name.
Around the next curve was a place on the trail where a rocky slope led down to a meadow. Now I could see the geology of it: constant slides cleared the trees here as rocks broke off from the cliffs above and tumbled down the precipice. Rocks I understood, and they behaved on Earth just the way they did on Mars.
The group of Earthers had been caught in one of these rockslides. Even now, pebbles and fist-size stones were tumbling after the couple of boulders that had broken off and crashed on top of them in a bit of terrible timing. The air was hazy with dust.
Most of them had fallen to crouches on the trail and were starting to get back on their feet, brushing off dust, looking around. I ran into Tenzig, who had stopped at the edge of the clearing.
The scream sounded again—from below. I looked.
Angelyn had fallen from the trail and now held on about four meters down, lying flat against the slope, clinging to a rock. If she let go, she’d keep going, scraping against the rocks another thirty meters down with nothing to stop her fall. Dirt and pebbles dislodged around her, knocking into her, loosening her grip. She kicked her legs, digging her feet into the dirt to try to get a better hold, but the movement only made her anchor more unstable. She even still had her pack on; it was dragging her down.
I dropped my pack off my shoulders and looked for rope. Ladhi—she had one of the ropes on her packs. Charles had the other. Where were they? Just as I turned to call to them, they came running up on the trail behind us. They stopped to take in the situation like I had, eyes wide.