Partner Games
Page 6

Yeah, I hated the cops.
 
~~ * * * ~~
 
Georgie and I sat on the floor at the back of the train station, eating power bars and watching the rest of the teams slowly roll in. Two by two, pairs dressed in brightly colored outfits and wearing backpacks wandered in and then raced for the ticket counter like it was going to disappear if they didn’t get there right away. It was kind of funny.
I mentally tallied teams as they arrived. The father-son blue team was the next to show up, and then the purple ladies with the red hats. Then brown, and orange showed up. As the other teams showed up, they settled in next to Georgie and I until we had a little circle of racers hanging out on the floor together at the back of the small train station, all chatting and talking together.
Well, mostly talking. I hugged my legs and listened in, content to watch people socialize without feeling the need to participate.
Everyone had tickets on the train ride after ours. We’d get in to Aguas Calientes almost a full hour and a half ahead of the others, which was exciting. We were in the lead…if you didn’t think about the missing teams.
The only teams missing were the Dr. Moms (in yellow), the pink BFFs, and the Houston team in teal. Oh, and the black team – the ones everyone had taken to calling ‘the One Percenters’.
“Do you think they’re really bikers?” Georgie asked the woman sitting next to her. It was Annabelle from the orange team, a sweet-seeming Southern girl. She sat in the lap of Jendan, her partner and clearly her fiancé, if the sizable rock on her finger was any indication.
“I think so,” Annabelle said, brushing a lock of blonde hair out of her face and offering her water-bottle to her partner. “I’ve seen cuts like those before.”
“Cuts?”
“You know, the jackets.” She gestured to her arm, as if indicating a lack of sleeves. “They’re called cuts. It holds all their patches and shows their affiliation or something.”
“How is it you know so much about bikers?” Jendan asked Annabelle, clearly amused. He rubbed her back absently, and it was clear he just liked touching her. It was sweet and made me a teeny bit envious of their relationship.
“I was a waitress. You get to know a lot of people,” she said in a teasing voice. “That, and I had a second cousin in the Hell’s Angels.” At my wide eyes, she giggled. “Just kidding, I watch a lot of Sons of Anarchy.”
I liked Annabelle and Jendan. Sure, they were a little touchy-feely, but they were cute together. It was obvious they were in love and they were on this trip to have fun. Plus, they seemed to be in a good mood, in contrast to Gwen and Elon, newlyweds who spent most of the night arguing with each other. Eventually, Gwen burst into tears and stormed off, and Elon stalked out of the train station.
So far, not my favorite couple.
Actually, Jendan and Annabelle were really the only ones I did like. Everyone else seemed to ignore me in favor of my glamorous twin, which was all right during social time. But when people talked strategy and then ignored me? It ticked me off.
The only one that had focused on me was the guy from the One Percenter team, Swift. The hot one. I blushed thinking about him. He was probably up to something, too. Maybe he thought if he flirted with the ugly twin, he’d get somewhere with us.
The thought just made me bristle.
Georgie and I chatted with Jendan and Annabelle for a lot of the night. They both had a little more in common with my twin. Jendan, it seemed, was a former stuntman, and he and Annabelle had met on Endurance Island. I didn’t see the show when it aired, but now I wished I had. Were J&A (as we called them) as nice and friendly as they seemed, or were they playing dirty? I had no clue. They could have been really good actors and I’d still think they were being sincere. I wasn’t so great at reading people.
Reading fossils, yes. People? No.
Eventually, things quieted down in the bus station, and we curled up with our World-Races-issued jackets and went to sleep using our backpacks as pillows. I cuddled up next to my twin and before I went to sleep, prayed that we’d do well tomorrow in the race.
Surely we’d be in first place in the morning. With that much of a lead, we were poised to destroy the other teams in any sort of challenge that they might throw in our direction.
As I drowsed to sleep, I wondered what happened to the black team and Swift. Had they already gotten lost? Were they going to be the first ones out of the game?
Why did that send a note of disappointment through my body?
 
 
Chapter Four
 

“I’m wearing her down, I think. She only glared at me twice today.” — Swift, Team One Percent, The World Races  
 
“Look,” Georgie said, grabbing my arm. “There he is! There’s Pachacuti.”
Lifting my eyes, I followed where Georgie pointed. I huffed and puffed in the thin altitude, trying to keep up with my sister as she ran forward. Peru was gorgeous in the morning light, but completely foreign to a California girl like me. Aguas Calientes was sandwiched deep into the mountains, and it felt like all the oxygen had been left below. It was going to take me some time to get used to the change in altitude.
The train had pulled into the town and the word that immediately popped to mind as I saw the town was ‘crowded’. Everything in Aguas Calientes seemed crammed around the main street of the city. Colorful banners and vendor booths crowded the walkways, and tourists wandered past. All around us, the green mountains rose high above the town, so tall that the peaks were lost in the clouds. The weather was gorgeous – crisp and clear and just a bit chilly, so we wore our Race windbreakers and a pair of red knitted hats with a pom-pom and ear flaps that Georgie had wheedled out of a local vendor. My twin made a joke that since we were tall and skinny and dressed in red, we looked like tampons.
Har de har.
We’d cut through town, squeezing past the vendors crowded around the train station, looking for the square. Sure enough, before a big yellow and red building stood a statue of a man with his arms extended. At the base of the statue’s feet, a man in Peruvian garb waited, holding one of the now-infamous World Races disks. From watching previous seasons, I knew the disk held the next clue and instructions for the challenge.
We greeted the man (who was wearing a hat similar to ours, I noticed). “Can we have our clue?” Georgie asked. He held it out and Georgie immediately handed it over to me. “You read.”
I took the disk from her and flipped it over, reading the instructions on the back aloud. “Follow the marked trail up to Machu Picchu. Look for your next clue at the Temple of the Sun.” I squinted up at the looming green mountain. Snaking up the steep green side was a tiny white path that zigzagged back and forth. “Ten bucks says that’s our path.”
“Let’s go, then,” Georgie said. “We need to hustle. We’re not in first place.”
I shrugged my backpack off and tucked the disk inside it, frowning at my twin as I did so. “What do you mean, we’re not in first place? Everyone else is an hour behind us.”
“Except for four teams, right? Because they never showed up at the station. There must have been another train.” She nodded at the Peruvian guy with the stack of clues. “He’s standing in front of a stack of disks and I counted them while you were reading. There’s three missing. That means three teams are ahead of us and one team is nowhere to be found.”