The Edge Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Shen

  The Itch

  Planked

  Approach

  Call to Prayer

  Base Camp

  The Climb Master

  The Team

  Search and Rescue

  Peace

  The Eagles’ Nest

  Survivor

  Into the Dark

  Split

  Ship of the Desert

  The Hike

  The Ghost Cat

  Grave

  The Walking Dead

  Blunder

  The Cave

  If

  Up Top

  The Pelt

  The Edge

  The Gorge

  The Darkening

  From Above

  The River

  Holiday

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from PEAK

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Roland Smith

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Jacket art © 2015 JIMMY CHIN/National Geographic Creative

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Smith, Roland, 1951–, author.

  The edge / by Roland Smith.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Peak.

  Summary: Fifteen-year-old Peak Marcello is invited to participate in an “International Peace Ascent” in the Hindu Kush, with a team made up of under-eighteen-year-old climbers from around the world—but from the first something seems wrong, so when the group is attacked, and most of the climbers are either killed or kidnapped, Peak finds himself caught up in a struggle to survive, shadowed by the Shen, a mysterious snow leopard.

  ISBN 978-0-544-34122-7

  1. Mountaineering—Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Juvenile fiction. 2. Survival—Juvenile fiction. 3. Snow leopard—Juvenile fiction. 4. Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Mountaineering—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Snow leopard—Fiction. 4. Leopard—Fiction. 5. Hindu Kush Mountains (Afghanistan and Pakistan)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S65766Sh 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014044086

  eISBN 978-0-544-63653-8

  v1.1015

  For Alessia

  The Shen

  The snow leopard makes an impossible leap.

  Twelve feet.

  Maybe fifteen.

  Up the sheer rockface.

  Landing on a narrow shelf as if she is lighter than air.

  Her two cubs stand below, yowling for her to come back down. She stretches out, her dusky white paws hanging over the ledge. Her long, thick tail flicking back and forth like a metronome.

  She looks down at the cubs, yawns, wraps her tail around her body, then closes her pale green eyes.

  “THAT’S RUDE!”

  “They need their mommy!”

  Paula and Patrice. My twin sisters—well, half sisters—the two Peas. Like two peas in a pod. Seven years old. Just. I’m the third Pea. My name is Peak. Not Pete. Peak Marcello.

  The two Peas and I share the same birthday. They were born, on the day I turned eight, to my mom and my stepdad, Rolf—a good guy, but very different from me.

  Paula was holding my right hand. Patrice my left. We were at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, not far from our loft on the Upper East Side.

  “Maybe the snow leopard needs a little break from the kids,” I told them.

  “Are you saying you need a break?” Patrice asked.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Paula said.

  They look alike, they sound alike, they think alike.

  “Lucky for you I wasn’t thinking that at all,” I told them.

  They smiled. Same smile. Same missing teeth.

  Different clothes, though. They don’t believe in dressing the same. “Twins dressing the same is goofy!” Every morning they have a little meeting and decide who will wear what. No arguments. Fashion is not their thing. Music is their thing.

  Piano.

  Prodigies.

  Both of them.

  Me? Not so much. Unless you count the ability to climb sheer rockfaces and buildings a talent. Although buildings are out now or I’ll be locked up until I’m eighteen.

  “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the climb.”

  “What?” Paula asked.

  “Nothing.” I hate it when my private thoughts come out of my mouth without me knowing it, and it had been happening a lot lately. What was that about?

  “You could climb up there,” Patrice said, pointing at the mother snow leopard.

  She was right. I had already figured out three routes up to the ledge. I couldn’t help myself. It’s what I do.

  “Not as gracefully as the snow leopard,” I said.

  “There’s no snow,” Paula pointed out.

  “Not in July.” It was a sweltering ninety-two degrees in the city and was supposed to get hotter.

  “It’s still a snow leopard, even without the snow,” Patrice said.

  “Did you see snow leopards on the mountain?” Paula asked.

  She’s asking about Everest. I was up there a couple months earlier, but standing at sea level in the sticky heat with the twins, it seemed like a century ago.

  “The only animals on Everest are yaks and birds.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s no food except for camp garbage.”

  “Snow leopards don’t eat garbage,” Paula said.

  “Birds do,” Patrice insisted.

  Patrice was right. The birds also picked at the frozen corpses at the higher altitudes, but I didn’t tell them this.

  “What do they call snow leopards in Tibet?” Paula asks.

  I tried to remember. I hadn’t picked up much Tibetan or Nepalese on Everest, but it seemed like one of the other climbers called it . . .

  The twins’ smartphones started playing Chopin’s polonaise Op. 53 in A-flat major. The only reason I knew the piece was that they had been practicing it for at least a year. I’d heard the music so many times, I thought I might be able to play it on the piano myself.

  “Texts!” they shouted in unison, reaching into their pockets.

  That would be one text from either my mom or stepdad. They always text all of us so no one feels left out. Somewhere my smartphone was buzzing too, or maybe not, because I hadn’t charged it in a week. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure where I had left the phone. Probably in my bedroom, or maybe in the kitchen. Drove my parents nuts. They couldn’t threaten to take it away from me, because I didn’t want it in the first place. I understand the idea of smartphones, but I think smartphones look dumb.

  Almost everyone in front of the snow leopard cage was holding a smartphone—talking, listening to music, snapping photos, thumbing texts, tweeting, whatever. I’d rather hold the twins’ hands than a smartphone.

  “Mom,” Patrice said.

  “She wants us to go to the bookstore,” Paula chimed in.

  “Right away.”

  Mom co-owns a small bookstore with a friend.

  “Shen!” I shouted.

  The twins’ eyes went wide. The crowd stared at me.

  “Shen,” I repeated, more quietly. “That’s what they call the snow leopard in Tibet.”

  The Itch

  MOM’S BOOKSTORE IS called the Summit Bookshop—not surprising, as she was a world-class climber before I was bor
n. But the shop carries very few titles about climbing or mountaineering, and those it does carry are written by climbers she knows personally, including my bio dad, Joshua Wood, whom I rarely see and, to be truthful, don’t miss much.

  The store was doing okay, considering most people are reading their books on electronic gizmos now. It stays in business because of Mom’s taste in books.

  When Mom stopped climbing, she started reading—everything. No TV or video games for me, the twins, or Rolf. We spend our spare time with words and music. Oh, and climbing—at least in my case, but not so much since I came down from Everest. Instead, I’d been hanging with the twins, which saved them from hanging out in the bookstore all day. We’d been going to museums, plays, concerts, and movies almost every day.

  So far I hadn’t gotten the itch to climb, but I knew it was coming. It was just a matter of time.

  We left the zoo, walked up Fifth, took a right on East Sixty-Sixth, then walked into the air-conditioned Summit Bookshop. It was jammed with people getting out of the heat. Mostly nannies. On weekday afternoons, the place looks like a daycare center. Mom has a little coffee shop in the corner of the store and makes more money selling coffee and pastries than she makes selling books.

  The nannies sipped iced lattes, chattering in several languages over their cooing babies and crying tots, talking about their real children, who lived long subway rides from where we lived. The twins ran over to the strollers and started making baby noises in perfect harmony.

  Mom came out of the back room carrying an armload of books with a padded envelope balanced on top. “How was the zoo?”

  “Hot, but we were having a good time. What did you need the twins for?”

  “I didn’t need the twins. I needed you. And knowing you wouldn’t have your phone, I used them as intermediaries. I wish you’d carry your phone.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Right.” She set the books down and handed me the envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Vincent dropped it by.”

  Vincent is my literary mentor, a.k.a. English teacher, at the Greene Street School. The school is filled with little geniuses like the twins. Then there’s me. Everyone there has to have some kind of special talent. It was decided, without asking me, that I was the school’s writer. To pass to the next grade, I had to write about my experiences on Everest in a couple of Moleskine journals.

  I knew what was in the envelope without opening it. I’d carried Moleskine journals to the summit of the highest mountain on earth—well, almost to the summit.

  “Are you going to open it?” Mom asked.

  I tore the envelope open. Two Moleskine journals. Blank. Big surprise. There was a yellow sticky note on the cover of one of the journals in Vincent’s careful printing.

  Write something in First Person Present Tense. V.

  “Looks like Vincent has an assignment for you.”

  “I already completed his assignment on Everest,” I pointed out. “And school doesn’t start for more than a month.”

  (Note to Vincent: First person present tense is a ridiculous viewpoint. To start with, it’s unbelievable. You’re writing as if what is happening to you at that very moment is actually happening right then, but the reader knows that’s not true. How can something be happening to you while you’re writing about it in a journal? And don’t tell me that the writer is merely transcribing what happened in real time. FPPT is a literary trick, but I’ve used some of it in this journal, so you’ll know that I can do it. And I can’t believe that you dropped off an assignment a month before school starts. What’s the matter with you?)

  “It won’t hurt you to keep your writing brain working until school begins,” Mom said. “You’re a good writer.”

  I wasn’t a good writer. Yet.

  “Writing is no different from piano,” Mom continued. “You have to practice to be good at it.”

  “Except when you’re practicing piano, you’re not writing the music—you’re playing other people’s scores. When you write, you need to have something to write about.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. But Vincent’s assignment is not why I pulled you from the zoo. You have some old friends waiting for you in my office.”

  “Who?”

  “Go see for yourself.”

  JR, WILL, AND JACK. We’d been on Everest together.

  With them was another guy I didn’t know. They were gathered in front of Mom’s climbing wall. The wall is covered with beautiful photos of her in her former climbing days, clinging and dangling at impossible inverted angles on sheer rock walls along with my real father, Joshua Wood.

  “She was called the Fly,” I said as I walked into the room.

  They all turned around.

  “She’s incredible,” JR said. “It’s great to see you, Peak.”

  It was great to see them, too. We shook hands.

  “This is Ethan Todd,” Jack said. “The newest member of our team.”

  Ethan gave me an engaging grin. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it.

  “Ethan is our new tech guy and climbing guru,” Will explained.

  “Of course,” I said. “You’re Ethan ‘Sarge’ Todd. You topped McKinley and rode a snowboard down to the bottom.”

  “Guilty.”

  “At the bottom you were chased by a wolf.”

  “It was a young wolf, and he, or she, wasn’t serious—just curious.”

  “Why do they call you Sarge?”

  “Long, boring story.”

  I liked Ethan, and I was happy to see JR, Will, and Jack. My bio dad had hired them to film me summiting Everest, which hadn’t worked out the way my dad, or the film crew, had planned.

  “What brings you into town?”

  “A couple things,” JR answered. “We finished the Everest documentary and signed a distribution deal with ESPN. It airs next month.”

  “I look forward to seeing it.”

  “It came out pretty well. You’re in it of course.”

  I wasn’t happy to hear that I was in it, but I wasn’t surprised. Originally the documentary was supposed to be about me—the youngest person to summit Everest—but that didn’t happen. I stopped ten feet from the top and videotaped my friend Sun-jo becoming the youngest person to summit Everest—but that’s another story. It’s just as well that it wasn’t me. I’d watched some of the tape of JR interviewing me. Awkward is the kindest thing I could say about it. Sun-jo had been much better on camera. “A natural,” as JR put it when we were filming on the mountain.

  “Remember Sun-jo’s interview with the avalanche hurtling down behind him?” Will asked.

  It wasn’t really an avalanche. The rocks were tumbling, not hurtling.

  “Dynamite vid!” Jack said.

  I wondered what they were doing at the store. It wasn’t like ESPN was across the street. They had to have taken a cab or a subway. They didn’t walk. Not in this heat.

  “I appreciate you dropping by,” I said.

  “It wasn’t just to say hello,” JR admitted. “We have a proposition for you.”

  “An invitation,” Ethan said.

  “An opportunity,” Jack added.

  “What’s up?”

  “We have another gig,” JR said. “Are you interested in a little climb?”

  “Is my dad involved?” I didn’t care if he was. I was just curious.

  JR shook his head. “Have you heard of the Peace Climb?”

  Cause Climbs. There are dozens of them every weekend all over the world. Climb for Cancer, Climb for Creatures, Climb for Love, Climb for God, Climb for Whatever, advertised in the back of all the climbing magazines. I’m not against causes, but I prefer to climb alone if possible.

  I told them I didn’t know anything about it.

  “Do you know who Sebastian Plank is?”

  “Of course.” Sebastian Plank was the richest man in the world, or so it was said. He had his digital fingerprint
in a dozen billion-dollar high-tech businesses. Rolf was one of the two-hundred or so attorneys he had on retainer. Our loft was probably paid for by Plank, even though—as far as I knew—Rolf had never met him.

  “Plank is sponsoring the climb,” JR said.

  “Paying for the whole thing,” Ethan added. “First class all the way. Private jets, catered food, the best climbing gear money can buy.”

  I’d always wondered about this worthy cause travel deal. My parents had a lot of friends who spent their free time and money traveling around the world to third world countries for a week or two at a time, planting food, digging ditches, and building houses. It seemed to me that the people they were trying to help might be better off with the cash their friends spent to travel there. Mom says I’m too cynical. She’s probably right.

  “How many climbers?”

  “Two hundred plus,” JR answered. “All under eighteen.”

  “From every country on earth,” Ethan said.

  “Not quite every country.” Jack started counting off the excluded countries on his fingers. “North Korea, Somalia, Papua New Gu—”

  “Okay, okay. Most countries.”

  It didn’t matter how many countries were represented, because I wasn’t really interested in climbing with two hundred plus, or even two, people.

  “I appreciate the invite, but it doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.”

  Surprise and disappointment spread across JR’s face. It was the same expression he got on Everest after we concluded one of our many horrible video interviews.

  “Plank personally requested your participation.”

  “Why?”

  JR shrugged. “As I understand it, everyone else had to apply for the climb. You’re the only climber he specifically requested.”

  If they had to apply, I was surprised I hadn’t heard about the climb. I subscribed to several climbing zines and kept up with a half dozen climbing forums on the web. I didn’t remember hearing anything about Plank sponsoring a climb.

  “We already asked your mom,” Will chimed in. “She said it was up to you.”

  I wasn’t surprised by this. After I had gotten busted for climbing skyscrapers and returned from Everest, she’d been all about personal responsibility and freedom of choice. Her summer mantra was “You make the choices. You own the consequences.” Although since I had returned from Tibet, I hadn’t made any consequential choices.