It was a specialized climbing rope. She'd seen them described on that TV sports show about competitive rock-climbing. Frigging synthetic climbing rope designed to absorb the impact load of falls. The bastard had conjured it out of thin air.
Great. Now that she had it, what the hell was she going to do with it? Throw? What she needed now was a nice thick pole across the sinkhole, a fallen spruce or something like it. Then she could loop the rope over it and climb out, hand over hand.
Thirty feet of pull-ups, she reminded herself. She was the girl with no biceps.
Besides, there wasn't any pole, and she couldn't see anything else to hook a rope on. If that slimeball had just tied the damn thing off before throwing it down . . . .
The right side of the waterfall seemed to carry more of that eerie glow than the left. A sign from David? She slung the rope across her body and clambered over to that side.
She reminded herself to test each hold before she trusted her life to it, to lodge her feet behind the boulders so she couldn't slip off the greasy tops. One thing she'd learned from the last few days: keep her weight over her feet. If she leaned forward, the angle would force them to slide. Up, up, five feet, ten feet, past the easy stuff, she stepped gently and gripped the rounded cold knobby slimy handholds.
She tried to split the difference between dry bare rock and the pounding shower of the stream, climbing in the cold mist but not getting soaked and blinded. Looking up and squinting through the spray, she saw something she'd never noticed before. The stream had carved a notch in the rim, cut the overhang back into the rump-busting slide that had first caught her. The water actually curved, spiraling down into the sinkhole, and the notch was hidden from the floor.
{. . . left . . .} came crackling through the static. Left moved her further into the wet, into ice-water splattering on her head and sluicing down her neck.
The water had carved buckets in the limestone, leaving fluted honeycomb shapes like ice melted out from under a dripping downspout. Her feet felt sure, her hands strong and deft, her balance serene and relaxed. She'd found a rhythm to her climb.
"Where the hell were you when I was climbing before?"
{. . . lost . . . found anger . . . focused . . .}
So the slime was alive enough for David to whisper through its life. She paused in a secure stance and scouted her route. She guessed she had about ten feet to go, closer to the rim than she'd ever climbed before. A rounded lip crowned her view, a smooth humped sheet of water with an undercut below it and then a ledge that must have been harder stone.
She couldn't see beyond the lip. Jo shrugged; whatever was up there couldn't be any worse. "Famous last words," she muttered under her breath.
Shut up and climb. She quit worrying about a fall. From this height, she'd either hit the pool like the first time, or smash her head. Each of her moves found a hold, each gentle probe with fingers or toes. She felt like she was floating up the wet rock, even making love to it, instead of fighting it.
Her right hand reached the ledge, then her left. She had to hoist a knee up on it because there were no higher handholds below the rim. Slowly, delicately, in perfect balance, she brought her final boot up and moved her weight to it and stood up. Her head rose above the rim.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!
The rim came just below her breasts. The rim was the bottom of a funnel. Now she knew what an ant lion saw, lying in wait at the bottom of his cone of sand. A trap. Jo stared up a wet sheet of rock, smooth and sloped and coated green with algae and slick as a TV game-show host.
She tried pressing her palms down on the slope, and they slipped right back to her sides. Her boots had perfect footing. She could stand here all day, she could even lie down and take a frigging nap using the frigging rope as a frigging pillow, but there wasn't another hold within ten feet of her.
The edge of the stream flowed across her belly and trickled down her legs, cold and indifferent. It had a way out. She scooted carefully sideways, away from the water, and her right toe found empty space. End of the ledge, end of the road. She shuffled back again. If she went in the other direction, the stream would wash her right off the ledge. No thanks.
Twenty feet away, trees crept up to the edge of the slick green limestone. It might as well have been a mile. Lumps of rock poked through the dirt and tangled roots, ranging from beautiful hand and foot holds up to boulders big enough to moor the Queen Mary. Beyond them, dirt and forest stretched away to level ground and safety. Jo felt tears running down her cheeks.
"Damn you, David! This is even worse than sitting on the bottom and waiting to starve!"
Her fingers brushed coiled rope and then gripped it so hard her knuckles cracked. What did she think it was, a goddamn fashion statement?
Jo whacked herself on the forehead. Sometimes she was just fucking stupid. Time to play cowgirl. She made sure of her footing and then shrugged the rope off her shoulder. Three tries at a slipknot for a noose persuaded her that
