“There’s Asia and Barry,” Mark whispered, nodding in their direction. Barry was looking up, mesmerized by the pteranodons above his head, but Asia was crouched in full combat mode, her eyes constantly scanning her surroundings.
Mark caught her eye, and Asia nudged Barry. I held my breath as they dashed across the open ground into the boulder field where we were hidden.
“Dang!” Barry gushed as they joined us. “Look at that.”
Mark shot him a look that he usually reserves for his most clueless freshmen. “I’m more concerned that they appear to be looking at us.”
We moved deeper into the rockfall at the mouth of the canyon. Mark led the way, tapping the rocks before we stepped over to alert anything that might be slithering there that we were passing by. About ten yards in, we came to the foot of the cliff. All we could do now was move parallel to it and try to make our way up to Penelope’s position without getting noticed – or eaten.
We edged along the base of the cliff for about a quarter-mile, picking our way among the boulders. The footing was treacherous in the moonlight. We hugged the foot of the cliff and tried not to make any noise.
The canyon narrowed as we went deeper. We were walking beside a 10-foot-wide dry stream bed studded with cottonwoods. We stopped to catch our breath at a gap that gave us a clear view of the cliff behind us.
Mark pointed about a quarter of the way up. There was an indentation in the cliff face up there. Cracks had formed in the rock and then been split away by ice expansion over countless winters, leaving a shallow amphitheater in the sheer cliff face. It was deep in shadow, and it was hard to tell how far back it went, but at least we would be able to see across the canyon. We would know when they were coming for us.
“But how the heck are we going to get up there?” Barry asked.
Mark turned and studied the cliff face. “We use the stairs,” he said.
He used his staff to move the bushes away from the cliff. He turned to us and grinned. “Just like a ladder!” he whispered in triumph. We watched as he placed his left hand on a shallow depression in the rock at shoulder height. He threaded his right arm through the leather loop on the grip of his staff, then placed his right hand in another depression slightly above his head.
“Be careful that you do this exactly as I do,” Mark said. “Put your feet where I put my feet – put your hands where I put my hands.” He pointed up at the amphitheater. “These were security stairs for the people who lived up on that ledge before Columbus. If you start with the wrong hand or foot, you run out of grips halfway up the cliff and you fall off.” He started to climb.
I came next. I went slowly, paying close attention as Mark hefted his huge frame up the rock face above me. He kept his elbows bent and tight to his body, his knees bent to take short climbs. I realized that the ancient people who created this route were much closer to my size then Mark’s. We inched our way up.
Mark reached the ledge of the arch and tossed his staff inside. He carefully hauled himself up the last few handholds and let his torso fall forward onto the cave floor. He rolled a few feet across the platform, making way for me to come up behind him.
My arms and thighs were burning as I flopped onto the high platform. I took a moment to catch my breath. Mark lay flat on his back, gasping.
Asia was right behind me. When she got to the top, she was barely breathing hard. Barry scrambled up behind her, followed cautiously by Alex.
The opening of the arch was only about seven feet high, but as soon as we were on the platform, we could see that the cave opened out and up to form a chamber fifteen feet tall. It went at least twenty feet back into the canyon wall. At the far end, I could see piles of flat stones that had been dry stacked to make a wall almost to the ceiling. We’d found an Anasazi ruin. There was soot on the roof back there, probably from cooking fires that were extinguished a thousand years ago. I’m fascinated by local archaeology – but at that moment, I was mostly just relieved to have a place to hide.
“They’re making their run!” Barry shouted back to us as Mark and I moved deeper into the ruins. He came running to catch up with us. Behind him, something huge blocked out the moonlight as it crossed the opening of our hiding place.
“They’re checking us out,” Mark said. “They’re wary now because we’re something new, and they’re not sure whether we are a threat – or lunch.” He dropped his voice. “It won’t take them long to decide. We need to get under cover.”
We ran for the ruins.
♦
John had never actually lived in Arizona; he had awakened here after his death, totally disoriented and confined to Maggie’s condo. To him, the desert was an alien landscape, full of unfamiliar dangers. He’d been going through cycles of anger, fear, and helplessness ever since Edgar had brought him the news that Maggie had been taken.
John paced the condo patio, phone in hand. Why hadn’t Mark texted him? He was tempted to pitch the phone off the balcony.
Edgar hunched on his manzanita perch. The raven was exhausted. He was still healing from his injury, and this day had taken him well past his endurance level. And then, there were the dirty looks from that yellow tabby cat. He could’ve done without that. Edgar tucked his head beneath his wing and tried to sleep.
Frank needed someone to talk to. What would become of him if Maggie never came back?
He sat behind the French doors and watched through slitted eyes as John paced.
Chapter Seventeen
“We’re dead,” Barry said. It was a simple statement of fact.
“No, we’re not,” Asia said, sounding exasperated. “Not as long as we keep our heads.”
Inside this cave, away from the heat still radiating off the desert floor, it was getting cold. I looked around for firewood, but anything combustible in this cave had been burned centuries ago.
I might not be able to get us out of here, but I could make it more comfortable.
I stepped away from my friends into the shelter of a tumbled-down stone wall. I placed my fingers and palms together similar to an attitude of prayer, closed my thumbs in tight and brought them back to my breastbone. I took a deep breath and concentrated all my energy to my heart.
I felt warmth flow from my body into the heels of my hands and up into my fingertips. My hands glowed as if I had a candle inside. I took regular, deep breaths as I slowly moved my hands apart, allowing a ball of energy to form between them.
My friends had grown quiet, watching. Alex looked grateful. Asia was smiling, and Barry stared in awe. I was pretty sure the expression on Mark’s face was brotherly pride.
I walked as softly as I could back to where my friends sat shivering and placed the ball of energy in the fire pit. Without me saying a word, they understood. They extended their hands, palms forward, and began the chant we use in our circle in the mountain preserve. The bright ball caught their energy and radiated it back to them. We were warm.
Asia was the one who broke the silence. “We still have a few hours before the sun comes over the mountain,” she said. She was taking command. “What’s the plan?”
♦
Half an hour before sunrise, we reluctantly left the warmth of the fire pit to peer cautiously out of the opening of our refuge. The canyon was brightly lit by moonlight now, and we saw the dinosaurs soaring and swooping, riding the updrafts. They seemed almost joyful, like kids just out of school for the summer. That was right, in a way: there hadn’t been pteranodons in these skies for 65 million years.
The yellow one was bigger and bolder. The orange one was more cautious but more agile. I began to notice a pattern. Every time they would perch against the cliff wall, another blue-violet plasma ball would rise from the top of the formation, the canyon would reverberate with a sonic boom, and they would take wing again.
“It looks like Penelope is directing them from up above,” Mark said, stating the obvious.
I pointed at the pteranodons perched again on their high aerie, at least for t
he moment. “I figured that part out all by myself. So, what can we do about it?”
“Nothing,” Alex said. “Not unless we can figure out how to get up on that plateau.”
“Are there more handholds going up to the top?” Barry asked, hopefully.
Mark shook his head. “I doubt it. That wall above us juts out at least ten feet – you’d be hanging upside down on a concave surface. Handholds would just curve back and drop you down into the valley. It’s a great defense strategy, but it leaves us with only one way out. Eventually, we have to go back down.”
“Maybe not,” Asia said. I’d noticed her still standing at the mouth of the amphitheater when the rest of us made our run for the ruins. She’d been scrunched down on her thighs, looking at something off to her right. “There’s a cleft. Want to see?”
She was holding binoculars– no: night vision goggles.
“You always carry these around?” I asked, amazed.
“Doesn’t everybody?” she said with a grin. She pointed at a rock formation. “Take a look.”
She was right. About ten feet away, the action of water and ice had peeled away a section of rock, creating an open fissure behind the cliff face. It would be sort of like stepping behind a partition.
More rock climbing, I thought. Oh, goody. I didn’t say it out loud, but I could tell that Alex was thinking the same thing.
“I noticed it while we were climbing up,” Asia said. “That cleft wasn’t visible from Penelope’s position above us or from the valley below,” she said. If we climb up the cleft, we’ll have the element of surprise.
You betcha.
That woman was something else. I’d been so scared coming up that I couldn’t think about anything except where to put my hand or foot next so that I wouldn’t die. Now she wanted us to walk across the sheer cliff face?
♦
That’s exactly what she had in mind.
But how were we going to get over there? Asia was ridiculously fit, and Barry had been an athlete all his life. The rest of us, not so much. I pictured Mark trying to scramble across a sheer cliff like a spider.
Asia wasn’t going to give us time to be afraid. “Give me your belts,” she said.
What?
“We don’t have any rigging,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’ll have to improvise. Give me your belts.” She wiggled her fingers, beckoning us to hand them over.
Oh my gosh. I understood what she wanted to do. I watched in horror as she latched the belts together, buckle to tip, to form a makeshift rope.
“It’s a good thing I have such a generous circumference,” Mark cracked nervously. “You wouldn’t have had enough rope.” I could tell by his voice that he was as scared as I was.
“I’ll go first,” she said, stating the obvious. “Once I get across, I’ll be the anchor inside the cleft for the rest of you. Mark, you anchor this side. Once the rest of us are across, we’ll need all our combined strength to help you over.”
Asia could tell by the looks on our faces that we weren’t buying in. She rolled her eyes. “Come on, you guys. You’re all wearing running shoes, so just face the rock with the rope behind you as a safety line and walk across the cliff on the balls of your feet.”
Barry was right, I thought. We’re dead.
But Asia didn’t give us time to think about it. Before anyone could talk her out of it, she scampered across the rock face. She had one end of the belt rope tucked inside the beltline of her jeans. When she reached the cleft, she turned around and grinned at us. Who’s next? She mimed.
It was Barry, of course. The little cowboy’s machismo would never permit his girlfriend to show him up. Mark threaded his end of the belt rope through his pants and gripped it tightly on the opposite side. Barry got between the belts and the wall, put his arms behind his back and locked his elbows around the belts. He started to yell “Geronimo!” but caught himself just before the shout escaped him. He looked at us sheepishly. “Geronimo,” he whispered, and skittered across the gap to Asia.
She caught Barry and hugged him tight. He braced himself behind the rockfall and anchored her end of the belt rope. Asia moved to the edge of the gap, beckoning to Alex.
The color drained from Alex’s face, but he stepped into the makeshift rope. His first step was tentative. Then some emotion I didn’t recognize passed his face and his back straightened. Alex dug in his toes, and a few steps later, Asia pulled him to safety.
“ You’re next,” Mark said, his voice hoarse.
I turned to Mark in despair. How could I leave my best friend alone on this ledge?
Mark grabbed me in a giant bear hug. “You have to do this,” he whispered in my ear. “You have to do this for all of us.”
He was right. Mark placed the belt rope behind my back, and I stepped out into space.
♦
We were all safe. Getting Mark across the gap was a real adventure, but we made it. With nobody to stabilize the belt rope, Mark’s only choice was to jump for it. He secured the belt rope around his waist, took a running start, and ran out into thin air.
It’s a basic tenet of science: the law of gravity is enforced 100 percent of the time. Mark dropped like a rock.
He slammed against the slope on our side of the cleft at full speed, and it took the combined strength of all of us to keep him from joining Asia at the bottom of the cliff. Some combination of us tugging and him scrambling brought Mark up to join us.
While Mark lay panting on the ledge, I took a deep breath and looked around– or, tried to. It was pitch black in the cleft. I summoned up a nifty little spell that Daisy had taught me as a child when I was afraid to sleep in the dark: the right words, said in the right order with an open heart, produced a lovely glow around my body like a cocoon. Daisy called it my glowworm, and when I was a child, I’d used the little spell to read under the blankets. Now it lit my way as I started to explore the cleft.
The space was narrow, barely six feet wide, but the gap went several hundred feet up to the top of the plateau. Far in the back was a steep rockfall that formed a sort of staircase. Climbing up to the top of the plateau would be difficult but doable. We might just survive this.
I heard a gasp behind me. One second, Asia was standing next to Mark. The next, she was in midair, her arms flailing. Mark grabbed Barry as he made a lunge for her.
She never made a sound as she fell to the bottom of the canyon.
Barry dropped to his belly and peered over the edge. “She’s moving!” he whispered. “She’s alive!”
I extinguished the glowworm as I crawled to the edge of the precipice. He was right; Asia had pulled herself up to a sitting position, her back against the cliff. The night vision goggles had fallen a dozen feet from her, just out of reach. Even from here, I could see that her left leg was bent at an impossible angle.
“We have to go get her,” Barry was saying. “We have to go back.”
But that wasn’t the message I was getting from Asia. She was pointing at the top of the cliff, gesturing for us to go on.
How were we going to do this without Asia? She was our general, our strategist, our tactician. How could we take on Penelope without her?
Barry was holding the makeshift rope. “I think I can get back across,” he said, his voice quavering. Mark grabbed Barry’s arm.
“Think about it,” Mark said softly. “Even if we can manage to get down there without falling ourselves – which I very much doubt – we’ll be pinned down. The sun is coming up, and Penelope’s little science projects will pick us off one by one.” He pointed up the staircase at the back of the cleft. “If you want to live long enough to save Asia, that’s the way.”
Below us, Asia was getting on with it. I watched as she drew the karambit knife from her belt and cut strips from her ruined jeans. She grasped a long stick that was barely within reach and laid it next to her ruined leg. My stomach flipped over – Asia was going to field splint her leg, by herself.
I couldn’t imagine how mu
ch that must hurt, but Asia didn’t flinch. When she was done, she brought her head up, searching for us in the cleft.
Barry stood off to the side, beside himself with fear and grief. Mark and Alex were in deep discussion further back in the cleft. But Asia’s eyes went straight to me.
I reluctantly accepted what she was wordlessly saying to me. Asia was right, just as Mark had been right. With Asia out of action at the bottom of the cliff, I was the leader now. These people I loved had come here to save me, and they were my responsibility. This was my fight – it had been my fight all along.
I waved to Asia that I understood, and she waved back before she turned her head, watching down the canyon for whatever fate may come her way.
I squared my shoulders and walked to the back of the cleft. The others followed me without question. I crafted glowworms for each of them and lit them up. We started climbing.
Chapter Eighteen
We hadn’t seen the pteranodons since we entered the cleft. Dinosaurs were cold-blooded, or at least modern science assumed so. Maybe Penelope’s dragons were grounded until the sun came up.
I was banking on reaching the top of the cleft before that happened. Barry and I were much stronger climbers than Mark and Alex, who urged us to go on ahead of them. It worried me to let them lag behind; our safety was in numbers. On the other hand, we had only minutes before the sun came up over the ridge and we lost any advantage the darkness gave us when we emerged at the top of the cleft. I reluctantly agreed.
Barry and I climbed for the next ten minutes in silence, being careful not to dislodge pebbles that might give away our position. I was in the lead when we reached the top. I looked down into the cleft, checking on everybody one last time. Barry’s glowworm-encased head was next to my feet. A hundred feet below us, the dim glow that was Mark and Alex slowly pulled themselves up the staircase of broken boulders.
It was now or never.
I extinguished my glowworm and lifted myself up to the final step. I carefully brought my eyes up to ground level.
Pentacle Pawn Boxed Set Page 43
