With my bird’s eye view, I could see over the treetops.
About 300 feet away from the cliff, a dozen large, white shapes were moving through the trees.
Skiris.
NO!
Weaver must have picked up on the women’s tracks, not just mine!
I squinted frantically, trying to see if the bastard was with them.
I couldn’t see anything – but that meant nothing. There were dozens and dozens of trees in the way.
The only consolation I had was that there weren’t 30 of the fuckers. Weaver had apparently split his platoon of monsters up and sent half after the women – which meant the other half was coming after me. Hopefully Weaver was with them.
I looked down frantically over the edge of the cliff.
Lelia and Fieria had made it up into the cliff and were extending their hands to others crawling up the tree.
“LELIA!” I screamed. “Skiris are coming! They’re in the woods!”
“How far?!” she cried out.
“Three hundred feet, maybe! They’ll be here in three minutes!”
“Jack, the others are too weak!”
I looked down.
She was right.
The tree was already pretty precarious as it was, the way it was leaning against the cliff. We weren’t talking about a solid oak tree, after all – this was a 40-foot-tall fir, which got weaker and more unstable the farther up you went.
And as more women climbed the tree, that meant fewer hands to hold it stable down at the base.
And the fewer hands at the base, the more the tree moved and the harder it was to climb it.
Because of the angle they’d laid the tree out, that meant the last five or six feet up to the cave had to be climbed by hand on bare rock –
And the three women who had been Weaver’s captives weren’t going to be able to do it.
The first one up was already on the tree, and she could barely hold on as it was.
In fact, 15 feet up, she fell off the tree and into the deep snow on the ground, exhausted.
Shit.
“I have to help them, Jack!” Lelia cried out.
“LELIA, NO – ”
But she was already dangling down from the cave opening. When she hit the tree, it bent beneath her weight, and she slid down it to the ground.
Shit, shit, shit –
The skiris would be there in no time.
And there was no way that Lelia was going to be able to help her friends get up into the cave –
Unless she had a little help.
Fuck.
There was a line I loved from Avengers, the first one, where Captain America tells Tony Stark that he’s not the kind of guy who would lie on the barbed-wire fence so his fellow soldiers could crawl over him to safety.
And then, of course, he does that very thing at the end of the movie, taking the nuclear bomb and effectively choosing to go on a suicide mission to save Earth.
I was faced with the same conundrum right now.
Earth didn’t need any help from me…
…but the woman I loved did. And she wasn’t going to make it without me crawling over the wire in her place.
I rapidly untied the knotted rope from the end of the regular rope.
I knew I was signing my death warrant, but… fuck it.
If Lelia wasn’t going to survive, I didn’t care to hang around this world anymore.
I’d lost one love of my life. I couldn’t take losing another.
“LELIA, USE THE ROPE!” I yelled as I threw it down, still attached to the stone, a good distance away from the tree.
Lelia saw it sailing down. The stone sank deep into the snow, but the rope flailed out after it, falling across the top of the snowdrift.
She understood what I’d done as soon as she saw it.
I didn’t have 130 feet of rope anymore.
I only had 100.
Ten feet too short to reach safety in the cave.
“JACK, NO!” she screamed in panic.
“HURRY!” I yelled. “THROW THE ROPE TO FIERIA AND HAVE THEM CLIMB IT!”
“BUT – ”
“DO IT!” I bellowed.
She scrambled over the snow, grabbed the rope, and whirled the rock through the air.
We had both practiced enough that she got it on the first try.
The rock sailed up into the air and into the cave.
Fieria scrambled, but then she threw down the end of the rope and braced herself.
It was only 30 feet – which meant the tail end of it was 10 feet above the ground – but they could climb the first 10 feet of the tree and then use the rope the rest of the way.
But they didn’t have much time.
The skiris were getting closer.
“HURRY!” I screamed.
Oona and Hala and Lelia helped the weaker ones up the tree, and from there they were able to grab onto the rope.
One by one they disappeared into the cave.
The weakest girl had to hold on to the rope as they physically hauled her up. As soon as she was good, someone threw the rope back out. Hala and Oona went next.
The skiris were almost at the end of the timberline.
Lelia was the last one on the ground.
The skiris emerged from the trees, roaring and snarling as they plowed through the snow.
“LELIA, GO!” I screamed at her.
She scrambled up the tree, grabbed the rope, and began to climb.
A skiris was right behind her –
She wasn’t going to make it.
“FIERIA, OONA – PULL UP THE ROPE!” I screamed.
They must have heard me, because suddenly the rope retracted into the cave, with Lelia scrambling up it hand over hand at the same time.
Her feet just barely kicked over the skiris’s claws as it swiped at the air beneath her.
I held my breath as she climbed up and disappeared into the cave.
I finally exhaled.
She was safe.
It didn’t matter what happened after this, as long as she was safe.
“I made it, Jack!” she cried out.
I couldn’t see her because she was in the cave, but I could hear her just fine.
“Good job, baby!” I yelled.
Then she started sobbing.
“Jack –
