Margaret was panting heavily now, and her back was drenched with cold sweat. Every muscle in her body seemed to have been doused in fuel and set alight, burning with the persistence of dayglo orange coals in a barbecue pit.
‘Almosht up,’ she gasped, her chest rising and falling with heaving breaths of exertion. ‘Almosht. One lasht push Margaret, one lasht push!’
She reached up to grip the curved handrail – and then her heart almost stopped when her sweaty palms slipped on the slick steel, causing her to lurch backwards. She slammed her other hand onto the other handrail the moment her feet slid off the rungs beneath her, and for one absolutely terrifying second she was dangling over the abyss, holding on only by the strength of her fingers. Hyperventilating with panic, she kicked her feet madly to regain her footing, and when she finally felt a rung under her foot she pressed hard onto it and scrambled up onto the platform, wrapping her arms around one of the handrails and hugging it with all her might.
‘Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God,’ she repeated mechanically as wave after wave of terror flushed liquid nitrogen paralysis through every atom of her being. Shivering uncontrollably, she kept seeing flashing, pulsating stars behind her eyes; she was on the verge of passing out from the fright of the slip, and knew that she needed to take control of the situation at once. Fainting up here on this flimsy platform would mean falling to her death.
Come on, stand up, stand up damn it! Breathe in deeply, hold the breath in, breathe out nice and slow, and calm the heck down. You’re almost there! That’s it, that’s better. Now, are you ready? Yeah, you’re ready! Come on! Move! Stand up you weak, fat, pathetic shit-bag!
Cursing at herself through her terror-chattering teeth, she struggled to her feet – still holding onto the handrail with a death-grip for support – and she found herself staring at an utterly petrifying view. She felt, for all intents and purposes, as if she was standing on top of the world itself. Stretched out behind her were the gentle rainbow-spectrum lights of T’Kalanjathu, the colours like glowing jellyfish suspended in a midnight ocean as they shone amidst the blackness of the grouped-together trees and shrubs.
As if competing with this sprawl of colour and light, or perhaps sneering at it with haughty disdain, the sky was awash with a jewel-spread of stars; a great silver backlight piercing in a million places through this tattered, moth-eaten rag of deep velvet that stretched taut above her.
Despite this awe-inspiring vista, all Margaret could think about was the ground, yawning with such voracious hunger for her fragile body, so impossibly far below her. Vertigo screamed like a great, jeering crowd on the ground, the roaring mob firing tens of millions of barbed harpoons into her skin and using their steel-cabled hooks to pull at her with a merciless force.
Oh my God, don’t look down, don’t look down, whatever you do, do not look down!
A narrow path made of planks led around the roof, following the curve of the cylindrical tower until it ended at the front, overlooking the river where it emerged from beneath the city wall. That was where the teenagers jumped from, and that was where she needed to be.
It was only a few metres, but there was no guardrail and nothing at all to grip onto. There was only one way she would be able to get there.
Margaret lowered herself onto her hands and knees, and, doing her best to focus her gaze on the planks beneath her, she began to crawl on all fours along the rickety path, inching her way forward, step by near-delirious step.
‘Come on, come on, come on!’ she hissed through painfully gritted teeth, spitting and drooling and shivering as she pushed through the membrane of both physical exhaustion and debilitating terror.
After what seemed like an hour of exhausting crawling, she finally reached the end of the path. There was nothing there; it just ended, like a flimsy diving board, jutting out off the roof and looking out over the impossibly black river below, studded here and there with the blurred reflection of the stars above, their light smudged by the lazy drift of the current.
This was it. There was no backing out now.
‘If a couple of kids can do it, you can do it,’ she said to herself, willing herself on with every ounce of determination she possessed. ‘You have to. You’ve gotten this far, and this is how you escape this place. Come on. Come on, damn it, come on!’
Drawing on the deepest reserves of willpower in her body, she heaved herself up from her hands and knees until she was finally upright. She was shivering madly, and was weak-kneed with terror, but she was standing nonetheless.
The longer you stand here the more impossible this is going to seem, Margaret. You’re almost free. You just. Have. TO. JUMP!
She breathed in deeply and whispered a silent prayer … and then she did it.
With her heart in her mouth she launched herself off the edge, and gravity sucked her instantly downwards with its jet-engine acceleration. It felt as if her internal organs were being pushed upward, trying to vacate her body in this terrifying, drawn-out moment of impossibly hurtling speed … and then she hit the water.
She had managed to keep her limbs straight, so she plunged in smoothly, and, it seemed, kept on accelerating into the blind darkness of the river’s chilly depths. Eventually she began to decelerate, but the combined shock of hitting the water and the sheer unexpectedness of how cold it was drove the air out of her lungs with alarming rapidity. She tried to push upward, to stop this deadly, sucking sinking, and it
