Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,10

relief that flashed across her face when Kelsa said that she'd be gone for the rest of the day was annoying.

Her mother and Joby had departed by the time Kelsa topped off her hiking pack: a sandwich, an apple, a handful of energy bars, and several bottles of water, since it would be hot in the canyon. She always took her com pod on long hikes, in case she needed to call her mother and tell her she'd be later than expected, or in case of emergencies. But her mother would have been surprised when Kelsa snapped it onto a lanyard and hung it around her neck. People who wanted to have their hands free often wore their pods that way, but when she hiked Kelsa usually kept it in her pack or her pocket.

Not today. Her crazy stalker had probably given up, but if he hadn't, she'd be ready for him.

She took the city shuttle out to the canyon trailhead, and even on a hot Sunday morning both the shuttle and the first mile of trail were crowded. Most of the nature lovers were couples or parents with young children. Once she and her father had been part of that group, and Kelsa felt her throat tighten.

But most of the young kids dropped out after the first mile, where the trail steepened and the real canyon began. Her father had said it was debatable whether this was a "real" canyon.

It had been created seventy years ago, when a series of droughts convinced the Provo planners that both their growing city and the nearby farms needed more water than could be sucked from Utah Lake. They'd built Paradise Dam, which soon created Paradise Reservoir. And to bring the water down to the city, instead of laying eighty miles of expensive pipe, they'd chosen to run it through a series of mountain valleys. With a river roaring down them, the valleys were slowly eroding into canyons filled with tumbling rapids and a series of spectacular waterfalls - if you viewed them in the spring, when the farmers most needed water. In winter only an icy trickle flowed through the boulder-dotted streambed, and even now, at the end of May, the flow wasn't the roaring cataract it had been the last time her father had enough energy to hike this trail.

He'd been feeling the effects of both the cancer and the treatment drugs by then, his steps slowed, his face and body sweaty with effort - forgetting, sometimes, to smile for his daughter's sake and pretend that nothing was wrong. Would that memory fade someday, and the memories of her father striding up the trail as if it was his natural habitat come to the fore again?

It wouldn't have worked!

"You have to believe in faith healing for it to have any effect," her father had said. "I don't."

And Kelsa had agreed with him.

Now she transformed her grief, her anger, into energy to climb. By the time she reached the next milepost she was drenched in sweat, her muscles moving as if they'd been oiled.

It was nearly noon; the intense sunlight cast stark shadows and flashed on the rushing water. For most of its length, the trail ran roughly ten feet higher than the river it followed. Air scented with hot dust and pine filled her lungs as Kelsa climbed carefully down the steep rocky bank. After looking around to be sure no one was in sight, she stripped off her stretchie and soaked it in the river. It ran deeper than she'd thought, maybe three feet deep, and cold. Even after she wrung out her shirt the fabric clung clammily to her skin, but as she hiked up the trail, she now wore a tempcontrol shirt that cooled her more efficiently than the high-tech ones worn by several of the red-faced hikers coming down the trail.

Her shirt was nearly dry, and she was looking for a shady place to stop for lunch, when she saw Raven. He sat on a rock at the edge of the steep bank, wearing the same clothes as before. They were beginning to look grubby. Didn't whatever hotel he was staying at have a laundry?

She set her com pod to "record," twisting the focus to the widest possible scan. The edge of the images would be distorted, but anything that happened in front of her would be preserved. That knowledge alone should have sent him running - he had watched her adjust the pod - but he