ribbon of lake, her body forming an upright X between the cliffs, toes and fingers splayed like a tree frog’s.
Immediately, the desert heat began taking the feel of death from her skin. Given enough time it would warm her blood from reptilian levels to that of a mammal. “See? Out and warm. Nothing to it. Now you try.”
“Have you ever done this before?” Anna asked.
“I’ve seen it done,” Jenny said, trying to make it sound as if Anna were in good hands.
“In a cartoon?” Anna asked.
“In a video,” Jenny admitted.
“My sister and I used to do it. We’d climb up the door frame between the kitchen and the living room.”
“Then you’re going to be an ace,” Jenny said.
“I was four,” Anna said. “My technique is bound to be rusty.”
The water had gone black with evening. Anna’s face and arms showed a fish-belly gray. Jenny doubted the latter was a trick of the light. Anna’s blood was probably withdrawing from her extremities to keep the all-important internal organs alive and functioning. “We don’t have to get way up,” Jenny said encouragingly, “just out of the water.”
A gentle plinking, the sound gravel makes when falling into water, caught Jenny’s ear. “Shh!” she hissed at Anna. Beneath her the smaller woman ceased to splash, seeming to understand implicitly when shushed not to say “What?” at the top of her voice. Jenny listened with such hope she could picture every pore in her skin opening, every ganglion gangling after the illusive spatter. When the silence grew so deep she could hear the rocks aging, she gave it up. “Thought I heard something,” she told Anna. “Aural hallucination.”
Anna put a hand on each of the walls. Slender long fingers, small palms, and delicate wrists: Anna was too fragile for this. Jenny wished she could reach down and pluck her bodily up, but there was no way she could help without falling back into the water.
“That’s my girl,” she said encouragingly. “Are your feet wedged out?”
“Yes,” Anna said.
“Okay, scooch up.” It was almost physically painful watching the woman she adored inching up the stone, left arm not extended as far as the right and left shoulder lower as she tried to protect the ball joint. This soon after the injury there was a danger of the shoulder dislocating again. Jenny would not think about that.
In the time it took Anna to clear the water, Jenny cursed herself for ever having brought Anna to the slot, ever having gotten into the water to show off, ever having lured Anna to follow with the enticement of genuine corpses.
“Atta girl!” she said when Anna made it.
Both of them spraddled out, face-to-face, dripping, in a crack, would have made Jenny laugh at another time. Now the only positive emotion in her breast was gratitude that Anna was clear of the heat-sapping water. The pants she wore were heavy with water, and her long braid dripped a steady stream back into the lake.
“You’d be warmer with your clothes off,” Jenny blurted out, her recent ulterior motives making her awkward.
“I’ll take off my pants if you’ll unbutton them for me,” Anna said.
Jenny did laugh then. “Point taken.”
“Behind me, the walls get too close together to make this work,” Jenny said. “The slot has to be narrow enough we can brace our backs against one side and our feet against the other. Any narrower than this and we’d lose our leverage. Watch me. Most of my weight is on my hands and right foot. Now, I bring my left over to where my right foot is. A twist and a prayer and bingo, I’ve made myself into a flesh-and-bone bridge between the walls. See, wedged in with the muscles of my thighs, feet pushing that side, my back pushing this side. Hands free.” Shaking blood and feeling back into her arms and hands, she said, “Think you can do that?”
Anna made no reply but began her contortions. She was forcing herself to use her left shoulder. Barely aware she was doing so, Jenny strained her arms toward Anna trying to help. Then Anna was within her reach. Braced tightly in the crack by the soles of her feet and the small of her back, Jenny was secure enough to catch hold of Anna’s right bicep. “Let me take the weight. You’re almost there. Back to the wall. I got you. Both feet on the other side.” It surprised Jenny how supple Anna was. What she lacked in strength she made up for in agility. With less of a struggle than it had caused Jenny, Anna unkinked the leg beneath her and moved her right foot to the opposite wall alongside her left.
Both hands on one wall, both feet on the other, Anna twisted until she could slam her back flat against the wall. There was a wet sucking sound. Anna shrieked and started to slide. Grabbing the collar of her shirt, Jenny held her in place. “Straighten your legs,” she said with a degree of calmness she would congratulate herself on should they survive. “Push out. I’ve got you. Shoulders back. Steady.”
Anna got herself wedged tight again, soles of her feet on one cliff, shoulders and back on the other. Her legs were not as long as Jenny’s. It would be harder for her to keep up the tension. Jenny wished she’d pushed farther, gotten Anna to a place where the walls were a little closer. That was water under the knees now, crying over spilt blood.
Anna’s face was sheened with sweat and her lips a thin gray line.
“Shoulder went out? Did your shoulder pop out?” Jenny demanded.
“No. I think it started to,” Anna managed. “I could feel the bone slide, but I’m pretty sure it went back.” Gingerly, she raised her left arm. Her face was bleak with remembered pain. The arm rotated. There was no new onslaught of trauma to her already pale cheeks. “Yeah. It went back,” she said. “I feel like a puppet that wasn’t put together very well.”
Jenny managed a nod and looked away to hide the panic in her eyes.
For a minute there was no sound but the dripping of Anna’s trousers into the lake.
“What next?” Anna asked finally.
“I’m thinking,” Jenny said. “Are you getting warm?”
“Are you kidding? I’m sweating.”
Jenny turned her head to look down the ever-narrowing slot. Night was drawing on, and, this far from the sky, it was already difficult to tell rock from water. A few yards from where they sat in thin air, the cliffs came so close together a person would have to turn sideways to squeeze in, the water beneath so pinched a slip could get one’s foot jammed in too tight to pull free. Debris, naked limbs, sharp, dry, and honed to needle points, would be stuck in places; various bits of desert skewered on branches, maybe a long-dead rabbit, rat nests of spiny plants, things washed down in flash floods.
For a few minutes Jenny considered trying to make it out that way. There was no way she could do it before dark. With luck, maybe she could scale the chimney by feel. It was a crevice. It wasn’t like she could wander off- trail. Without boots, helmet, or any other protective gear, she’d be skinned alive, but in four or five or six hours, she could be on the plateau. Maybe. She could light a fire. That would bring the rangers quicker than anything.
A memory of sitting with her sisters in a circle in their grandparents’ backyard, all five of them diligently rubbing two sticks together because their granddad said that was how men made fire before matches were invented, quenched the signal fire idea. None of the sisters’ sticks got warm, let alone burst into flame. By the time Jenny got help—if she didn’t die of exposure after crippling herself on spiny pointy things—Anna would be drowned.
“Damn,” Jenny said to no one in particular.
Anna broke into her thoughts. “The dead person you gave me? I might know who it is—was. The back of his—its—head looked familiar. Or maybe it’s the T-shirt. I don’t know, but it could be the guy who had his back to me and was undoing his pants. If he doesn’t sink we can check his back. He had a tattoo. A turtle, I think.”
“Do you think the other guy was one of the other attackers? The one who held Kay or the one who watched?”
“Could be.”
A beat passed.
“Do you figure there’s a third dead person floating around that we missed?” Anna asked.
“The joint seems full of corpses tonight,” Jenny said. “It’s a regular dead zone.”
“Do you think they got caught in here like us? Then drowned?” Anna asked.
That was exactly what Jenny thought, that they became too exhausted to maintain the muscle tension that was keeping her and Anna high and dry, they fell into the lake, became too hypothermic to stay afloat, and death flowed into their lungs.
