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“We’re only on the second floor,” I shouted to him. “Why are we so high off the ground?”
“This is Blackthorn Academy. Do you really expect everything to make sense around here?” he called back.
Damn. That was a good point, but it didn’t change the facts. “I can’t do this, Elliot. I have zero upper body strength.”
“Mikaela, take a breath. Hold it.”
I did what he said.
“Good. Now exhale. Take another breath. And exhale.”
I sat there on theledge, breathing while Elliot just hung mid-air as if he had all the time in the world to talk me through breathing.
“Now reach for your leopard and ask her to help you grab the rope.”
Rope!
Without giving me a chance to respond, Miki somehow rolled our body off the ledge and managed to catch the rope as we swung down.
She moved us with such force, we slammed into the building, but we managed to hang onto the rope.
“Wow.” Elliot stared at me wide-eyed.
I shook my head. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t even get a chance to ask, she just took over.” I glanced down. “And this is really far up.”
“Okay, don’t look down. Just keep looking at me and do what I do.”
For the next several minutes, Elliot talked me down the side of the building, hand over hand. He initially tried to teach me how to lean back and somehow just slide down the rope, but I kept panicking, so the slow way it was.
Eventually, we reached the ground and all I wanted to do was collapse, but Elliot took my hand and led me to a freaking wall that we were supposed to climb.
“We just climbeddowna damn wall! What kind of sadistic obstacle course is this?”
He just chuckled and led the way up the wall. He gave me a hand at the top, then spotted me on the way down the other side.
I can honestly say that without Elliot there to talk me throughmy moments of panic, I never would have even made it off that ledge, but without Miki-Leopard lending me her strength, I would have been a dark smear on the ground the first time I had to hang from a rope using just my upper body strength.
And without her agility, I never would have been able to climb that second wall, which involved leaping from one handhold to the next.
Unfortunately, the obstacle course just got worse from there.
After the wall, we had to crawl through a bunch of tunnels and swing across a pool of lava. There was a cave—an actual freaking cave—at some point and the deeper we went, the tinier the space until we were belly crawling our way through.
When it finally opened up to a largerspace, we were attacked by a bunch of bats.
I’m proud to report thatIwasn’t the one screaming like a girl as we escaped that part of the course.
Somewhere in the middle of the course, when we kept getting zapped by sparks of electricity every step we took, I lost my temper.
“This is bullshit,” I snapped, glaring at the cavernous room we found ourselves in. I was standing on a block of stone, Elliott was one stone slightly to the left and ahead of me and we were surrounded by quicksand. We had no choice but to use the stones to move through this room, but every time we did, we got shocked.
It was a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t kindof situation and it was pissing me off.
“Let’s try to make it to that boulder over there.” I pointed to the left of where we were, a trip that would require using four more stones for Elliot and five more for me.
“You realize the boulder will probably shock us even worse than these steps have,” Elliot said.
“Who cares? My plan is to climb on top of that boulder and not move again until class is over.”
