Double Black Diamond
thought of eating or drinking made me feel worse, though.The gondola swept through the air over narrow runs that ranged from open and smooth to narrow and pitted with trees, bumps, and stumps. People zigzagged down the slopes at various speeds. While we watched, one woman took a spectacular fall, her skis and poles flying in all directions.
“Ooh, yard sale,” Gage said. In her purple coat, the woman looked like a squirt of grape jelly against the snow. She squirmed, trying to right herself, as we watched.
“We’re supposed to get a dump tonight,” Ali said. “Maybe some free riding tomorrow, VV?”
Veena rolled her eyes. “Like Nate would let me. Not this close to the Games. I think if he could get away with it, he’d hold my hand walking down stairs.”
Ali snorted.
Veena’s long-time private coach, Nate Schneider, was a retired pro snowboarder. According to Brown, Nate coached Veena at Lake Tahoe in California, where she learned to ride. He followed her here, thanks to her parents’ financial support. Not for the first time, I wondered how much money the Venkatesans actually had.
I hadn’t heard of Veena’s father, Rohan Venkatesan, before SSA hired me, but in my briefings, I’d been told he was a mega-successful tech entrepreneur who made bank creating and selling start-ups. Only half-jokingly, the media called him the Golden God because everything he touched made money, including his current nanotechnology venture. I’d figured out nanotech was really small stuff that could be made into other stuff. Or something like that.
“Do you two snowboard like Veena?” I asked Ali and Gage.
“Ali rides, but I ski,” Gage said. “Veena said you want to learn. Which are you going for?”
“Snowboarding.” I thought I might as well learn the sport my client does.
Ali and Veena hooted with approval, but Gage groaned and shook his head with mock sadness. “Wrong decision.”
Brown had created my cover story. Rich, bored, and unhappy at my old school, I’d transferred into VMA mid-year to learn to ride. My parents, friends of the Venkatesans, apparently had more money than sense. Veena had a private room, so she’d offered to take me in as a roommate for the rest of the year so I could meet people. And to top it off, I would be in all of Veena’s advanced classes. It was shaky, but the best we could come up with.
“You’re gonna love riding,” Ali said.
“Give it three days to get on your feet,” Veena said. “You’ll be ripping pow-pow in no time.”
“Ripping what?” I asked.
“You know.” Ali smirked. “Shredding the gnar.”
I stared. Was she speaking Australian?
Gage planted a boot beside me on the bench. “It’s snowboard-speak. Translation: you’ll be riding very difficult terrain in waist deep powder with style and attitude before you know it.”
They laughed, so I did, too. After a minute of silence, Gage and Ali eyed each other, then Veena, who stared out the window.
“So how long have you been a bodyguard, Nic?” Gage asked.
Veena whirled toward him, mouth open with horror.
“That’s so rad,” Ali added.
“Radical. Cool.” Gage explained.
I threw Veena a disapproving look. If she was going to tell everyone about me, I might as well not have a cover story.
She glared at her friends. “You weren’t supposed to tell her you knew! I wasn’t supposed to talk about her!”
“Oh, c’mon VV, we weren’t gonna be able to pretend we didn’t know,” Ali said.
“We won’t tell anyone else, promise.” Gage put a fist over his heart.
Veena peeked at me. “They’re my best friends. I had to tell them. Are you mad, Nic?”
“Who you tell is up to you,” I said. “But it would be best if the whole school didn’t know. The fewer the better.”
Ali tucked a foot under her and leaned forward. “Okay, let’s get down to it. How many people have you killed, Nic? Really.”
Gage peered at me, his head cocked. “And how old are you?”
“Twenty,” I said.
Ali whipped off her hat. “Shut the front door. You’ve killed twenty people?”
“I haven’t killed anyone. I’m twenty.” Barely. But they didn’t need to know that. Their admiring looks felt good, to be honest.
The gondola swung inside another building at the top of the hill. I stumbled out of the door when it opened and into the arms of Dave from Grand Junction, Colorado. He righted me, yelling that the lifts were closing soon over the racket of machinery and music.
Outside, blinding rays of late afternoon sun reflected off the snow and into my face. I fished my sunglasses out of my pocket, and once they were safely on, pried my eyes open.
We were at the top of the hill, but not quite the top of the mountain. In the distance, snowy peaks jutted into the blue sky in all directions, while ski runs unspooled like toilet paper below us. Off to the right, a huge vehicle with tracks instead of wheels trundled by, flattening the snow under it, and near it, a little wood house sat with a couple of snowmobiles parked outside. Ski Patrol, the sign said. A group of skiers set off down the hill while a few snowboarders sat on the snow to strap their back feet onto their boards. It was all very wintery.
Veena, her friends, and I trudged up a hill to the left toward a wooden sign announcing we were entering Vail Adventure Ridge. Above us, long, smooth grooves were cut into the snow and divided by sides of ice as tall as a person. Every few seconds, people on huge inflatable inner tubes hurled themselves down one of the grooves, squealing and laughing as they went.
Some tubes shot down like speeding powdered donuts, their riders hanging on for dear life, others rotated in lazy circles. A moving walkway lay alongside the chutes to bring people and tubes to the top. I texted Brown where we were.
Another guy in a blue Vail jacket stood guard at a corral of extra tubes. Shawn from Ft. Worth, Texas fist bumped Veena and her friends. He looked around and jerked