Prologue
“Emma! Maggie! Where are you? I promise I won’t kick your asses if you answer me right now.”
Jaye Ramsey waited with bated breath and then called out her friends’ names again. Laughter and idle chitchat carried on the breeze from strangers several yards away and panic burned under her skin. Jaye gripped her phone, hit redial and the line connected with Maggie’s voicemail. Then she called Emma’s cell again. No response, but she didn’t expect one. Emma wandered off by herself over an hour ago and Maggie disappeared soon after. She texted Zoe Messter and Juliet Desimone—the other two women who’d traveled with them on vacation—for an update of their search but her friends’ luck was just as bad as Jaye’s.
Emma Miller, soon to be Mrs. Emma Davis, wanted one last hoopla with her best friends before she tied the knot. She’d always dreamt of visiting Bolivia, in particular the magnificent salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni. Maggie Collins needed a vacation after seven years of veterinary school and Zoe, Jaye’s go-to lawyer for legal advice, just won a huge court case and needed time to wind down. Juliet, however, hoped to recuperate on this two-week vacation. Her husband died a few years ago in a mountaineering accident and, even though she now dated someone else, Juliet couldn’t let go of the past.
Jaye stuffed her phone back in her purse and buttoned her denim jacket. Though she felt strange wearing thick denim in July, winter hit South America in the middle of the year and she already missed the north of the Equator summer. Her beloved grandmother begged her and her friends not to visit the salt flats but they hopped on the plane anyway. Determined to have fun and return home without any problems, she needed to prove to her grandmother time travel only existed in movies and TV shows like Star Trek.
Grandma might not be crazy after all, Jaye thought as she turned in circles, desperate to catch a glimpse of her friends. Emma and Maggie just upped and vanished. I might too.
An inch or so of recent rainfall sloshed around her boots and the partially-cloudy sky reflected off the rain-covered earth like in a mirror. Several prehistoric lakes dried out several thousands of years ago to form the Salar de Uyuni and the earth’s crust, a few meters thick and composed of salt, covered a pool of untapped lithium-rich brine for over four-thousand square miles. Considered the world’s largest mirror, scientists used the flats to calibrate satellites in space due to its flatness and tourists traveled from all over the world to experience the archaeological wonder.
Jaye and her friends arrived in Bolivia yesterday, checked in at the Palacio de Sal, the famed hotel made of salt, and then prepared for a three-day Jeep tour to see the flats that morning. They explored the immense area for hours until Emma wandered off. Jaye, her friends and their native tour guide decided to split up so they could broaden their search area—they locked the GPS location of their Jeep rental into their cell phones—and agreed to meet back at the Jeep in two hours. She showed a picture of Emma, and now one of Maggie, to every tourist she met, but no one recognized them. If she couldn’t find her friends soon, she’d have to alert the local police and hotel officials of their disappearance and Jaye definitely didn’t want to inform Emma’s fiancé or Maggie’s parents.
Her grandmother’s warning echoed in her mind: “Never go off alone, Jaye, you might not come back.” Leave it to the eccentric Leonora Harris Ramsey to predict the future—at least in Emma and Maggie’s case—but Jaye wouldn’t leave Bolivia until someone found her friends.
Vibrant shades of orange and red streaked the blue sky, puffy white clouds turned dark and grew in size, and the temperature dropped. The wet salt flats reflected the sky so that she appeared to walk on the clouds, and the vast expanse continued for miles. She felt so alone even though she could see people in the far distance and she suddenly wished she’d listened to her grandparents.
“Damn it, Grandma. Why did you tell me crazy stories when I was little? Why do you believe you’re from the eighteenth century?” She kicked up a few inches of water and the mirrored sky shimmered. “Magic doesn’t exist. Time portals aren’t real. Emma and Maggie are just lost, that’s all. Nothing supernatural happened to them.”
What if Grandma is right?
“Emma! Maggie!” Jaye cupped her hands over her mouth and tried to push the ridiculous notion from her mind. Her friends knew about her grandmother’s time travel claim—Grandma Leonora often talked about her life in the English countryside and how she treasured modern conveniences like refrigerators and flushable commodes—but no one other than Jaye’s grandfather believed the wild tales. That’s love, I guess. After her parents died, her grandparents adopted her and Jaye always feared men in white coats would lock her quirky grandma in a padded room.
A nippy breeze lifted her dark hair off her shoulders as she wove through at least a dozen large salt mounds which dotted the landscape. She’d read online salt miners scraped the salt off the ground, piled it into mounds usually three feet high and let it set for four days until all the moisture evaporated from the granules. Then the miners returned to pack it up, refine and sell it. She pulled off one of her gloves, ran her finger over the top of a mound and then licked the delicious salt from her finger.
Ready to head back to the Jeep, Jaye ducked her head to ward off a sudden strong gust of cold air. A muddy puddle of water materialized out of nowhere a few feet away. The dark water swirled in a counter-clockwise motion and picked up speed with every rotation, but the clear rainwater around the muddy swirls appeared unaffected. Thick bands of brown smoke cloaked the water until the liquid vanished. Her legs weakened and she collapsed onto her knees. Jaye gripped the cold, wet earth and her eyes narrowed as the smoke lightened just enough that spots of light flickered through the shadowy depths.
Caves? What the hell? A distinct image of damp caverns flashed in her mind and her grandmother’s warning sent chills down her spine. Jaye shot to her feet, the wind whipped at her back and the swirling vortex churned faster as though to welcome her with open arms. She slipped on the rainwater and a scream lodged in her throat. The earth swallowed her whole and closed above her, darkness surrounded her, and Jaye blacked out as she fell down the deep, dark hole.
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