Defensive Action. Jenna Kernan

       Chapter One

      “Turn around or keep going?” Haley Nobel muttered to the car’s empty interior. There was no one in the rental with her to answer and she realized it was the first time she had been outside alone, all alone, in years.

      The GPS app had taken a holiday during her drive in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State and the darkness had fallen like a curtain outside her shadow-blue 2018 Ford Taurus. Beyond the windshield there were no twinkling stars. No bright moon. No mystical glimmer of the aurora borealis. Just blackness with the only sign of life being the deer that had darted across the road a few miles back and nearly given her a heart attack.

      Adult adventure camp was looking increasingly like the colossal mistake she’d expected it to be. She had about as much business being back here as that deer would have on the Number 7 Subway.

      “Where am I?” she asked the silence about her as she peered at the gas gauge that had dipped below a quarter-tank of fuel.

      She shivered against the chill, trying again to adjust to the heat on a night that was forecast to dip into the thirties. She’d forgotten that summer nights were so much colder up here in the mountains.

      Her light L.L.Bean jacket looked rugged in the catalog but it was designed for wind and rain, not cold. There wasn’t even a fleece liner. Inside one of the front pockets was her impulse buy, offered at checkout for 25 percent off, a Victorinox Rambler pocketknife including scissors, file, two screwdrivers, bottle opener, toothpick, wire-stripper, tweezers, key ring and a blade long enough to use to slit her own throat for being stupid enough to let her father convince her to leave her upstairs apartment in the building she owned in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to redeem his Hanukkah gift to her.

      She’d been planning the specifics of this week for six months and it was already here. Back in December, she’d thought her father had a point. She did need to get back out there. But rocketing down zip lines was a little too out there. Besides, her job furnished all the thrills and chills she needed, strictly virtual, of course.

      She’d tried to get him to take the gift back but he’d said it was nonrefundable and then told her that she needed to stop acting like she was the one who had died.

      That cut deep, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt he might be right. But perhaps going out with friends for drinks would have been a better start than kayaking in white water.

      Haley had told her father that her life held plenty of risks, which wasn’t exactly true. Hacking wasn’t dangerous if you were paid by the company you were hacking, which she always was. Her father thought she was paid by local businesses to build websites and manage social media accounts.

      Her dad also thought she sat alone in her room all day taking customer service calls and playing video games. The video games part was true. But she had adventures in the real world. She’d recently gotten highlights in her light brown hair, which no one noticed as the color she picked was so close to her original shade.

       You’re not the one who died, Haley.

      As if she could just flip a switch and make herself like she had been, bring her sister back and go on bumbling along doing stupid stuff as if there would never be any consequences for either of them. She could not go back to that girl, not after losing Maggie. And if that were even possible, it would definitely take longer than one week. But when it came to telling her father she was not going, she just couldn’t do it. Maybe she could stay in a hotel near the camp, take a few photos and send them home. Snagging a video of one of the other female campers as she careened down the zip line would be good, too.

      Except yesterday dad had pointed out that the camp was technology-free. How had she missed that nugget on the web page?

      Maybe her dad was right about her having lost her joy. Was joy tied to doing stupid things, like jumping off a forty-foot cliff into freezing cold lake water?

      What was even the point of that anyway?

      If anything happened to you, too, it would just kill me. Her mother’s words played in her head along with the declaration that no mother should have to live to see the death of a child—until she had.

      Haley blew out a breath. When had she started sweating?

       If anything happened to you, too...you two...

      Dad wanted her back out there. She saw the gift for what it was: a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to remind her of what she’d put aside. Meanwhile, Mom sent Haley links to articles on tick bites and how to recognize poisonous snakes.

      What was she doing? Rock climbing...hiking...canoeing? Bouldering...which, judging from the website photo, was just risking a fall from an unreasonable height onto a bed of broken shards of jagged rock. She was no longer the adventurous one. Not since losing Maggie made her the only one.

      What got her into the rental car in the first place was the thought of having to hide out all week in hopes that no one would notice she had not gone through with it. Having told her coworkers that she’d be offline and in the mountains, it was now impossible to back out without everyone knowing she had done so.

      Whose stupid advice was it to declare your intentions publicly?

      Oh, right, her dad’s again.

      And she somehow felt that working out at her gym and hiking from Midtown to Lower Manhattan failed to prepare her for hiking along ledges while carrying a pack that would make