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was the thin, pale, serious one, and he blinked a lot. He wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses on his large, bean-shaped nose, and he always looked as if he cut his own hair while watching himself in the bathroom mirror. Mickey had always wanted to be a zoologist, but his father’s pet store had gone bankrupt in 2001, and he had never been able to raise enough money to go to college.
    Charlie was chubby, with a wild mess of chestnut brown curls and cheeks that flamed crimson whenever he drank too much beer. Charlie was always joking and playing the fool, but he had lost both of his parents in a horrific car crash on I-580 when he was six years old. His grandparents had brought him up in a house that was airless with inconsolable grief, and so he had a whole childhood of silence to make up for. Charlie suffered from chronic asthma, and he always wore swirly psychedelic shirts, size XXL, but his friends toleratedhis constant wheezing and his lurid wardrobe because he was always the first to pitch in whenever they got themselves into a fight, which was frequently.
    Remo was half Italian, with blue eyes and black stubble and very hairy wrists. He came from a noisy family of five brothers and two sisters and countless aunts and uncles, and every time they met for birthdays or family reunions it was like the Battle of Anzio. Remo liked to think that he was a younger and more handsome version of Nicolas Cage, and that he could have made a career in movies. Just like Mickey and Charlie, however, he had ended up as a telemarketer for Tiger Electronics in Palo Alto, marketing software and laptops and replacement ink cartridges.
    The Emperors of IT, they called themselves. They had all joined Tiger on the same day, after a company recruitment drive two summers ago, and they had become inseparable—drinking too much beer together, going to ballgames together, playing stupid practical jokes together.
    They would all meet the same fate together, too. From the moment they arrived at the Pit River Recreation Area, the Emperors of IT would have less than seven hours before they would be struck by tragedy.
    Just after three in the afternoon, the clouds began to fragment and the sun started to shine. They climbed out of the Winnebago and walked to the river’s edge. Remo picked up pebbles and skipped them across the water. Charlie tried to copy him, but all his pebbles dropped into the river with a single plop.
    Only a half mile to the west, the ground rose to a high volcanic precipice dotted with conifers, and the Pit River was forced to rush through a narrow ravine. By the recreation area, however, it was shallow and quiet, with sparkling rock pools, and ripples, and swampy banks where bulrushes nodded.
    The air was clean and sharp and aromatic with pine, and the marsh wrens were rattling and buzzing and trilling to celebrate the passing of the storm. Even Cayley, as she camebalancing across the boulders like a tightrope walker, said, “This is so beautiful that I can’t believe it. It’s better even than Bambi. “
    Charlie plopped another pebble into the water. “I thought you hated nature. I thought it ‘majorly sucked.’”
    “Not all the time. I don’t mind it when it’s like this. You know, when it’s behaving itself.”
    “That’s the whole point about nature,” said Mickey. He was hunkered down beside his fishing bag, sorting through his reels and his lures. “Nature never behaves itself. That’s why it’s called, like, ‘nature.’”
    Charlie leaned over his shoulder and picked up a fly. “What do you reckon for this stretch of the river? Stonefly nymphs? Or coppertails?”
    “I guess either. Or black midge pupae, maybe. You have to be careful which pools you choose, that’s all, or you wind up with nothing but squawfish. Did you know that a squawfish can digest another fish as fast as it can swallow it?”
    “Sounds like Charlie and submarine sandwiches,” said Remo, and twisted open another bottle of Michelob