Page 56 of Sawyer’s Mistake

Thank God for patriotic farmers.

He had twenty or thirty pounds on Prado, but the sudden weight was tremendous. The rope slipped through his hands, burning his palms as it went. Sawyer clenched his teeth and concentrated on stopping it. He looped one end of the rope around his arm for safety. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the roar of his own ears. Every second without hearing Prado’s voice was agony.

If she’s dead, I’ll want to die too.

Suddenly, the weight on the rope increased.

“I’ve got her!” Prado shouted, sounding pained. Sawyer felt his heart start beating again.

He groaned at the pressure on his arm. He thanked God for the flagpole, which he knew was doing a lot more work than he was. He took a couple deep breaths, steadying himself. He needed to wrap the rope around the pole and get a couple more loops around it. Then he could let go, walk to the edge to pull them both up.

His plans shattered when the Remur ship came back, flying low.

It was one of the smaller gliders. Inside, a single Remur soldier aimed a laser weapon at him. Sawyer curled up, looking to make himself a smaller target, but there was nowhere he could hide, and letting go of Prado and Saoirse simply wasn’t an option.

The laser gun went off in a flash and the ship flew away.

They missed!

He thanked his lucky stars. Suddenly, he heard creaking behind him and knew he was fucked. The pole broke, and the rope started sliding. He looked around desperately for something to hold, but there was nothing between him and the edge of the cliff. Sawyer slid inexorably towards the edge of the cliff, unable to stop his momentum. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

Making a superhuman effort, he dug his boots in and managed to stop. His thigh and arm muscles trembled with the effort, the strain reverberating all the way up his body. He was a few feet from the edge of the cliff. Close enough that he could see the top of Prado’s dark head and Saoirse’s reddish curls, glinting in the early morning light. They were both holding very still.

He breathed in and out, hyperventilating. Lactic acid was building in his muscles, and he knew he needed some kind of a miracle.

“Ahhh,” he groaned.

#

Saoirse

Saoirse held on to the rope for dear life. She’d been lucky, when she first went off the cliff, to find a small root to hold on to. It had held on for a minute, long enough for Prado to rig a special set of loops on the rope that she could loop her hands and feet through. She’d only just transferred her weight to the rope when the root fell.

Oh God.

The rope wriggled in space. Her stomach climbed up to her throat. She promised herself she wouldn’t look down, no matter what. She knew enough about climbing to know this could end very badly if she did.

“We’re going to die,” she muttered, unable to help herself.

Prado hung from loops on the opposite side of the rope, helping them balance.

“Relax, Saoirse. Stay as still as you can. Sawyer’s got us. He’s not going to let go.” She wasn’t fooled by his casual tone. His Spanish accent was thicker than usual.

She nodded. “He won’t let us go. He won’t let us go.”

“Make sure your feet fit properly through the loops. Your weight should be on your legs, not on your arms.”

She nodded. She tried to dreg up every ounce of muscle memory from her time at the gym, but the kind of climbing she’d done was too different. “I can’t reach the wall,” she said.

“It’s okay. We’re too far away. Listen, Sawyer isn’t going to be able to hold on to both of us for long. We’ve probably dislocated his shoulder already as it is.”

“Oh God, what are we going to do?” she cried out.

He shook his head. “No matter what happens, you hold on to this rope. Sawyer will pull you up, if it’s the last thing he does.”

“What do you mean, he will pull me up? What are you going to do?” she cried out, her tone of voice rising.

Their eyes met across the short distance, and she saw in his dark gaze that he was planning on letting go of the rope.