Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  Peter got the second ascender locked in place. He looked up. Did he see Riot Grrrl’s pale freckled face looking down at him?

  He should have the ascenders’ safety lines clipped to his climbing harness, in case one of them slipped. They would have let him rest, too, on the way back up. But he’d left them behind. He was afraid they’d jingle on his harness.

  He started climbing, slowly. The ascenders made a faint sound as the rope slipped through the mechanism. Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. Making his way back up, a foot at a time. His arms were already tired. Suck it up, Marine.

  “C’mon, take my picture.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You want photographic evidence that you were here?”

  “Shut up,” said a fourth voice. “All of you, shut up.”

  Peter stopped. He hung by his hands, maybe ninety feet off the ground. Not quite hidden in the fog.

  It would have been nice to be able to hang from his harness, and rest.

  Falling would be bad.

  The men had gone silent. He looked down. They were scanning the tangled underbrush, guns at the ready position. The fourth man with the odd, thick-barreled weapon stood motionless. Then, as if he could somehow feel Peter’s eyes on him, he slowly tilted his head, peering up into the dim green light.

  “Look up,” he called. “Look up.”

  Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. Peter climbed the rope as fast as his arms would carry him. Distance and motion meant a more difficult target, and the farther up he went, the harder it would be to see him in that filtered twilight.

  “Hey, you up there. Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  They’d shoot eventually whether he stopped or not, thought Peter as he did his best to move faster yet. His arms burned. Zizz zizz zizz zizz, zizz zizz zizz zizz.

  Then they fired. The shots came, as he knew they would, in those same disciplined three-round bursts, takatak, takatak. But they didn’t hit him or even seem to come close. These would be warning shots. They didn’t know who he was, or what he was doing there. Or even whether he had any relationship with the woman they were hunting.

  Peter didn’t have any breath left to respond. His arms were slowing down already. Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. How far had he come? How far left to go until he disappeared into the fog?

  “Get back down here. Or we’ll drop you hard.”

  His arms, fuck. The muscles on fire. Keep going, no safety lines, no choice. Think of it as motivation.

  His sphincter clenched tight as he waited for the searching rounds to find him.

  Then he felt himself rising through the air. The rope trembled slightly. He looked up and saw that big branch, getting closer. Even though he was just hanging by his hands.

  “Hold on, you fucking idiot.” Her voice came down from above, thin but clear.

  He held on, and kept rising. She was pulling him up.

  He heard the rifles again. Takatak. Takatak. They had a crisp, Germanic sound, a muscular purr that reminded him of a big BMW starting up. Not like the cheap metallic rattle of an AK-47, or the cheerful round pop of his old M4. The high-velocity NATO rounds parted the air around him with staccato whispers. He waited for the punch of hot pain, but it didn’t come.

  Rising, he was getting harder to see from the ground.

  Then a feeling of impact in the sole of his right boot, but not hard, and no pain, not yet. He looked down. No hole in his boot, no spreading red bloom. He looked up, saw the big branch closer still, and a long spool of rope coming down the other side.

  As he neared the branch he saw her sitting on a burl twenty feet away, feet braced, hauling away on the rope. She’d rigged a pulley block to the top of his rope and used the ratio to lift him. He could hear the faint tick of the cam lock as the rope spooled through the mechanism.

  Then he was up, holding the webbing with both hands and stepping onto the thick rough bark with his left foot, careful of the right, still unsure if he’d been hit. She was red-faced and sweating as she reversed the cam and started pulling up the unspooled rope and coaxing it into a coil. The ratio was four to one, making his two hundred pounds into fifty. Which she’d hauled up at least a hundred feet.

  Way to go, Riot Grrrl. “Thank you,” he said.

  Then her red face turned white. “Don’t move.” She pointed at his foot.

  He looked down. A thin tube with a puffy red tail stuck out of the bottom of his boot. He reached down and pulled it out of the dense sole. Held it up.

  It was a dart. A tranquilizer dart? They’d tried to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart? What was he, a rhino?

  Peter looked at her. “Who the hell are these people?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Well, they seem to want you alive,” he said, displaying the dart. “Me, they don’t seem to care about one way or the other.”

  He thought about the four deadly men waiting at the bottom of the tree. About the device the man had held, turning in a slow circle. Some kind of locator.

  He said, “Did you have that backpack when those men tried to grab you?”

  “No,” she said. “I had my messenger bag.”

  “Did they have access to the bag? Could they have put anything into it?”

  She shook her head. “They just dropped it on the floor.”

  “Did anything from that bag go into this backpack?”

  “A few things,” she said. “My wallet, interview notes for three stories, my notebook, chargers, my phone.”

  Her phone.

  She’d said she got great reception up there.

  She saw it in his face. “What?” she asked.

  He watched as realization dawned. It only took a second. She was plenty smart.

  She shucked her pack and dug into the top pouch. The phone was in a Ziploc bag.

  “It’s turned off,” she said. “Can they still—”

  “Someone can,” he said. “Unless you take out the battery. They had some kind of locator down there. Your phone’s the most likely source of the signal.”

  She turned the phone in her hands. “I can’t take the back off this thing.” She raised her arm to hurl it into the air.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t throw it.”

  “Why not?” Her voice was a little louder than it needed to be. “I just want to get it as far away as possible. And get the fuck out of here in the complete opposite direction.”

  “We could do that,” Peter said calmly. “But they would know that we know. And it would be harder for us to predict their actions.”

  “I don’t want to predict their actions,” she said, as if talking to a profoundly stupid person. “I want to get away from them.”

  “We will,” said Peter. “But right now we’re on the defensive. This knowledge gives us a tactical advantage. Do you want to run forever?”

  She gave him a look, and he felt it again, the heat of her focused attention. “You better know what the fuck you’re doing, mister.”

  “This is my first time on the lam in a redwood,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure you should leave your phone here.”

  She made a face, and tucked the smooth aluminum rectangle into a crevice in the bark. “Good-bye, phone. You served me well until you got hacked.” Then she went back to coiling rope.

  “Is there a way to move laterally?” asked Peter. “From one tree to the next?”

  “Way ahead of you,” she said, stuffing the rope and pulleys into her pack. “My ex-boyfriend studied the biology of tall tree crowns. This was his lab.”

  “Ex-boyfriend?” asked Peter.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Anyway, we used to have lines out to neighboring trees, for a larger sampling area. You and I are going to find out if any of those are still in place.”

  “Your ex sounds like a cool guy.”

  She strapped the bo
w along her pack again, put her arms through the shoulder straps, then looked up into the branches, searching for something. “His other girlfriend thought so, too. But I helped set this place up, so I gave myself visitation rights.” She pointed. “There. You see it?”

  Peter looked. “The yellow rope?”

  “Yep. We marked our paths with colored rope. My idea, by the way. You came up the red path.”

  The red ropes, thought Peter. “So the yellow path takes us to the next tree?”

  “That’s the idea. If it’s still there.” She set off along a wide horizontal branch.

  “The tree or the rope?”

  “The tree’s been there since the Roman Empire,” she said over her shoulder. “But these ropes can rot pretty quickly in this damp environment. I used to replace them every year. They’re not cheap. But then, I used to write his grant proposals, too.” She flashed a grin. “I’m not sure how much funding he’s got these days.”

  Peter wondered if the ex-boyfriend knew what he’d lost. Peter was pretty sure the guy had no clue. If he did, he wouldn’t have lost her to begin with.

  Riot Grrrl led, Peter followed.

  It was more technical than the scramble up along the red path. They had to use the ascenders again and again. The path was not direct. Down to go over, then up again, ropes strung where the climbing was difficult, always following the trail marked by bright yellow ropes. It was hard work, but they were cooled by the damp breeze filled with the astringent tang of evergreen needles and the pungency of bark, while the infinitely blue California sky peeked through the fog.

  This time, Peter clipped the safety lines to his harness, and spent most of his attention watching Riot Grrrl. Climbing with anyone was an exercise in trust. Any fall, even on a ten-foot rock face, might mean a significant injury or death. Three hundred feet up in a giant redwood, she could have killed him a dozen times. But she hadn’t.

  Every climber had their own style, and it didn’t take long for Peter to get a pretty good idea who he was climbing with. Riot Grrrl wasn’t flashy, she didn’t take unnecessary risks. She knew her gear and how to use it. But she didn’t rope off for every step, either, and seemed perfectly comfortable free-climbing through the branches as if it were a fifteen-foot apple tree in her backyard.

  She stayed ahead of him without any trouble. Peter knew how she’d gotten those serious arms.

  After less than half an hour, they stood on a wide limb looking out at the wrinkled tree-covered mountains spread out ahead of them. Thick nylon webbing around the limb held a beefy locking carabiner attached to a gleaming cable, impossibly thin, stretched high above their little pocket valley, barely clearing an impossibly steep rocky ridge and slanting down to the next drainage, where it disappeared into the canopy of another redwood.

  Climbing around inside this enormous tree, it was hard to judge or even imagine the whole architecture of it. But from a distance, Peter could see clearly the shape of the next tree, a gnarled asymmetrical giant that certainly looked as if it had lasted two thousand years, and might last a thousand more. He could see other ancient behemoths, standing like sentinels in the rugged rain-collecting pocket valleys and drainages inaccessible to the first loggers who had cut down almost all the old growth on the West Coast. Around these sentinel trees grew their much-younger cousins, the smaller second- and third-growth trees sprouting up since the days of clear-cutting, hundred-foot trees considered tall by any measure but their ancestors.

  It was a long way across a very thin cable.

  Peter peered into the depths of the valley below. It was a long way down, too.

  He kept his voice quiet, thinking about the men below. “How far is it?”

  “About nine hundred feet,” she said. “That’s aircraft cable, stainless steel. It would hold ten of us.”

  He thought about the logistics of getting the cable in place. The bow and arrow to get the high-test fishing line across. Then the feeder rope, and after that the cable. Hours of dangerous work, high in these giant trees.

  “This is your idea of fun?”

  She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I like to keep busy.”

  “I bet you’re a hell of a journalist,” he said. “So what happens next? We clip on our harnesses and pull ourselves across?”

  “You can do it that way if you want,” Riot Grrrl said, rooting through her pack. She extracted a small metal contraption and held it up for Peter to see. Her eyes gleamed with fun, the hunters below forgotten for a moment. “But it’s a lot faster to ride.”

  Peter saw the harness clip, and the handles, and the wheels.

  It was a trolley for a zip line. He raised his eyebrows.

  “I liked you better when I thought you were worried about aliens.”

  “Oh, the aliens are real, too,” she said, putting the trolley in his hand and taking another from her pack and mounting it to the line. “Their mind-control beams are totally gnarly. If we ever get out of this, I’ll make you a tinfoil hat.” Her smile was brilliant. “You want to go first, or me?”

  “What’s the landing like?”

  “You can see from here that the cable isn’t strung tight. If it was, the movement of the trees in big storms would snap it like twine. So there’s a dip on the far end, and the rise should slow you some. The attachment point on the far end is twenty or thirty feet inside the outermost branches. When you get close you’ll see a small landing stage like our work platform, with rope railings to keep you from overshooting. But be ready, ’cause you’ll be moving fast.”

  He was heavier than she was, thought Peter. If the cable attachment broke under his weight, better that she was already on the other side of that ridge, away from the men below.

  “You go,” said Peter. “Show me how it’s done.”

  She clipped her harness into the trolley and checked the locks. “Usually I scream my head off when I do this,” she said, then pointed toward the men on the ground. “But I’ll try to stay quiet so they don’t hear.”

  Flashing him a last toothy grin, she gripped the trolley handle with both hands and took a running jump off the limb of the tree. The harness caught her hips, and she leaned back and stretched her legs out in front of her like a human projectile. Gravity pulled her faster and faster, down, down and away with a high bubbling laugh that echoed over the trees and rocks and ridges like the call of a wild animal.

  Peter saw her disappear into the outer fringe of the next tree. Then he saw the rope go slightly slack, which would be the Riot Grrrl setting her feet on the platform and unclipping her harness from the trolley. Then the cable rose in a series of small waves that traveled up toward him. She’d bumped the cable to signal that she was clear. It was Peter’s turn.

  He set the trolley on the rope and locked the wheels into place. He clipped the carabiner on his harness to the eye on the trolley body and checked that lock. Nine hundred feet across. Three hundred feet up. He tasted copper in his mouth and felt the smile spreading across his face as the wild exhilaration rose within him.

  Alive, alive, I am alive.

  He backed to the end of his tether, gripped the trolley hard, took two long strides and jumped off the branch and into the air.

  The harness caught him snug and solid. He raised his legs and leaned back as she had done, and he wasn’t falling but flying like an arrow over thickly crowded treetops with the ground only an idea below. The valley wall with its rocky ridge rose to meet him, higher and higher, finally so close below that he could see every crevice and stone and spot of lichen before it was gone behind him. The tree ahead grew larger with each moment, the massive canopy becoming a wall of branches that resolved into individual limbs with a narrow slot threaded through by the cable. It began to rise again and Peter felt himself decelerate as he entered the dark notch in the crown of the tree. He went blind for a half second as his eyes adjusted to the dim arboreal light, but h
is vision returned and he saw the netting platform and ropes strung and he dropped his legs to step lightly down on the mesh and bring himself to a stop, his head ringing like a gong and the wind blowing clear through him like he was transparent to the world.

  That was a cure for the static if there ever was one.

  Riot Grrrl stood on a large limb just off the landing platform. She watched him closely as he turned to her, grinning like an idiot after a rush of emotion so outsized that it felt like a religious experience.

  “Let’s do it again,” he said.

  She looked him full in the face, and he felt like he’d passed some test.

  “Another time,” she said. “Right now we’re running away from the bad people, remember?”

  “Tell me one thing,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “June,” she said. “June Cassidy. Now can we go?”

  6

  Another path marked by red ropes led them down through the new tree in a spiral.

  The path ended at a branch six feet across, the lowest substantial branch on the tree. Below was green-tinted air and mist and a few little twigs that looked like they wouldn’t hold a sparrow.

  Riot Grrrl—June, Peter reminded himself, her name was June, although Riot Grrrl fit her like a glove—opened her pack and pulled out a long coil of rope and another shorter loop of thick webbing. She swung the webbing around the base of a protruding branch hard enough for it to come around the other side, where she caught it, clipped the open ends together with a locking carabiner, and screwed down the lock.

  “How far down?” asked Peter.

  “About a hundred fifty feet.” Fifteen stories. “We don’t have enough rope for you to belay me. Or me you.” She sat on the wide limb and made one end of the rope fast to the locking carabiner, then checked the lock again.

  “No problem,” he said. It would be better to have a second line for backup, but they hadn’t had one the last time, either. It wasn’t the safest way to climb, but when there were men with automatic weapons after you, escape was more important. Nobody had belayed Peter in his fifty-foot helicopter drops, either. It was you and your figure 8, friction, and the strength of your hands. Basic physics.