when a vein of weaker stone broke from the rest of the rock face.
“It’s good to see the sky,” Anna said, tilting her head back to admire the patch of blue the wider section allowed.
“You wanna eat lunch down here or up there?” Bethy asked.
“Up there,” Anna said immediately. Much as she had enjoyed the journey through the center of the earth, she was looking forward to having room to fill her lungs completely and focus her eyes more than a foot or two from the tip of her nose.
“This chimney is super high, like, one of the longest ones here,” Bethy told her, “but it’s pretty easy. It’s easier than the first one we did. That one was just shorter. Once you get going there’ll be lots of good places for your feet and hands to be at.” She pointed nearly straight up. “See that poke-outance there at the top where the chimney becomes like a weensy crack?”
Anna followed where Bethy pointed and saw a thin blue line on the rock. From where they stood it looked no more substantial than a thread.
“That rope is tied on the top and falls into where the chimney ends there. See? That’s how we go the last ten feet. Last one up is a sore loser,” Bethy said and, stepping into the bottom of the chimney like Clark Kent into a phone booth, began to ascend rapidly.
For several minutes Anna just watched. To watch anyone perform with such confidence and grace was a pleasure. In these narrow stone canyons Bethy was at her best. A vision of hippopotamuses, lumbering on land, rotund ballerinas beneath the water, made Anna smile.
When Bethy was about halfway up, Anna stepped in the chute and began to climb, albeit more slowly. As Bethy had promised, there were lots of good foot- and handholds and the regularity of the chimney’s size and shape lent a sense of security, which, climbing sixty feet with no belay, Anna deeply appreciated.
As she ascended, the view of the slot canyon changed. By the time she neared the top of the chimney she was looking down on the torturous route they’d just traversed: A dark crack in the pale stone that snaked, curling almost back on itself in one place, slithered out, then ended abruptly in hard blue sky. That would be the top of the rectangular pool, Anna guessed, where the true skinny slot began. Beyond, hidden from view, would be the block of stone that dammed the canyon and nearly damned Anna and Jenny.
From above, the distances appeared paltry, Panther Canyon, with its beautiful grotto, so close it was hard to imagine how two people had died and two more had almost died, so near civilization.
“I’m going to eat your half of the potato chips if you don’t hurry up,” Bethy called.
Anna looked up. Bethy had vanished from sight over the rim of the plateau. The rope was still twitching like a cat’s tail. As Anna watched, it began to snake upward, the end of it flipping as it was hauled up. “Very funny,” Anna shouted. A shiver welled up from the depths of the jar that still existed within her. It wasn’t funny, not at all. Anna climbed, fear giving her tired muscles added power.
“Just kidding,” Bethy laughed. The rope dropped again. Within seconds Anna had grabbed it, relief palpable in the tremor that took her when her fist closed around it.
Some kindly soul had knotted it every foot or so to make climbing it less hazardous. Deciding that looking down would be foolhardy, Anna turned her back on the void and grasped the first knot.
From above she heard the unmistakable rattle of a bag of potato chips being torn open; then came Bethy’s voice. “I’m eating ’em!”
Bethy sounded like a little kid. “Don’t you dare,” Anna called back. Hands moving from knot to knot, feet scrabbling on the last of the chimney, she began the short ascent. Once she’d cleared the rectangular chimney she used feet and thighs on the rope as well. The distance wasn’t great, no more than a few yards. Within minutes she’d reached the rim.
“That was quick,” Bethy said and smiled. “You got to kind of kick and crawl over the edge on your elbows. Here, lemme help.” She dropped to her knees and took a firm grip on Anna’s wrist.
Before Anna could say, “Thank you,” Bethy’s free hand flipped a clink of glittering silver metal from the backpack at her side. Handcuffs. In less time than it took Anna to realize what they were, Bethy had snapped them on her wrists.
“What are you doing?” Anna asked, dumbfounded. Fear followed on the heels of shock, and Anna pulled hard on the rope, dragging one elbow over the sharp lip of stone topping the cliff. Bethy, face intent, movements sure, snatched the rope with the carabiners tied to either end from beside her, threaded it between Anna’s cuffed wrists, and clicked the carabiners together, making a loop. That done, she removed herself from Anna’s limited field of vision.
Saving her breath for the work, Anna pushed on a knot with her feet and got her other elbow over the top. With a strength that surprised her, she closed her manacled hands around the next knot and yanked hard enough that she landed herself like a fish, belly-down on the plateau.
“God damn it, Bethy,” she grunted as she pushed herself to her knees.
She looked up in time to see Bethy’s foot coming at her face. Her nose exploded in pain and blood and she toppled backward.
Her hands slipped on the knots and she couldn’t close them tightly enough to stop the rope from paying out through her hands.
Then the rope was gone and she was falling.
FORTY-EIGHT
Anna shouted what she believed was her last soliloquy on earth: “Shiiiit!” Not even fit to carve on a tombstone. Scarcely had the word passed her lips than her fall was stopped with bone-snapping abruptness. Again Anna screamed, wordlessly this time, as pain seared from her broken nose and shoulder sockets through every cellular matrix in her body.
She thought she’d surely die of it, but, like a whack to the crazy bone or a little toe jammed into a table leg, intense as it was, the agony passed through her and was gone. More or less gone. Her nose still throbbed, blood dripped salty onto her lips, and her wrists ached furiously where the handcuffs cut into them.
Deadweight, her body bumped gently against the sandstone, breasts, belly, and knees, as gravity settled her. Tilting her head back, she tried to make sense of the last few seconds. Her wrists were cuffed, a rope looped through them that ran in two lines toward the lip of the canyon, no more than five feet from the tips of her fingers. Bethy had made a loop of the rope with the carabiners and thrown it over a rock to anchor it before she kicked Anna back into the void.
Hung out to dry, Anna thought idiotically.
Bethy’s face popped over the horizon of Anna’s world, round and peering down, giving Anna the view babies in bassinet have of their mothers.
“You’re stupid,” Bethy said cheerfully. “You think you’re so smart, but you’re stupid. Stupider than stupid.”
Anna looked down past her toes, dangling fifty feet above a litter of shattered wood and stone. “I can’t disagree with you there,” she said.
The worst of the shock passed. The worst of the pain, Anna suspected, yet to come, fear and fury and confusion had space to explode through her with such force she jerked on the line like a landed fish. Bethy giggled.
She breathed in through her nose slowly and out through her mouth more slowly still, trying to quiet the shrieking in her skull. A pathetic semblance of calm regained, she tried to think of her options.
“Are you passed out or something?” Bethy asked from above. She sounded annoyed and, maybe, a little concerned.
Anna ignored her and began her list. She could beg. Begging never worked in the movies, but in real life it was occasionally efficacious.
“Hey!” Bethy snapped. “Talk to me. No naps! No naps!”
