“Climb,” he demanded. “Climb.”
Dinah looked up. The pod was suspended hundreds of feet above the earth. A fall from even the middle would surely either kill her or break every bone in her body. She took a deep breath and began making her way up the rope ladder that somehow blew in the breeze but still managed to be strong and unbendable beneath her white-knuckled grip. Hand over hand, she made her way up with the two Yurkei warriors lingering behind her, obviously annoyed by how slowly she was climbing. A strong gust of wind rocked the ladder, and Dinah pressed herself against it, wrapping her arms and legs around the rungs. She heard the roaring laughter of Yurkei children from below as they watched her desperately cling to the ladder for dear life as it lifted off the ground and blew out behind the warriors, lashing like an angry tail.
“Up, up!” shouted the guard behind her. Dinah clutched the ladder, afraid to move, afraid of the long fall that would break her body on the jagged rocks below. The ladder twisted and swayed, and Dinah let out a cry before murmuring nearly forgotten prayers from childhood as she clutched the rung before her. She was frozen, unable to move. The ladder began to twirl in the wind, faster and faster as it cracked and whistled. She could hear the peals of laughter below and the angry roar of the wind that ripped through the valley. I’m so afraid, she thought. Have I ever been this afraid? I’m going to die here. The rung underneath her hand was growing slippery with sweat, and Dinah’s foot was tangled between two others. I can’t. I can’t move, she thought.
Before she could finish her thought, the kinder of the two guards began rapidly climbing up the ladder after her. He reached her in seconds. Once there, he moved slowly, circling around the ladder until he was on the opposite side, his face inches from Dinah’s. He dangled from the rope with one hand as he untangled Dinah’s footing with the other. He switched hands then and wrapped one palm around the wooden rope as it twisted in the breeze and the other tightly around her waist. “I will help,” he murmured. “Step.”
Dinah closed her eyes and reached for the next rung, secured by his hand supporting her waist. Her foot found the rung. Without thinking, she grabbed the next rung and the one after that, even when the wind wrenched the ladder sideways so roughly that Dinah almost lost her grip. The Yurkei warrior held onto her as she slipped and strained her way up. At times it seemed hopeless, but still she climbed. She climbed up past the breasts of the enormous cranes, past the crests of their giant necks and finally, straight up into the vast white pod strung between the two birds, like some saucer that the fowl had dropped from their mouths.
The Yurkei warrior was the first one through the pod, and he rapped his hand twice against a wooden bracket on the outside. A square of fabric was pulled from the bottom, and with a leap, he disappeared up into the hole, reaching back to help Dinah. Her feet dangled in the air lifelessly as he held her arms, and she looked up with fear into his glowing blue eyes, her life completely in his hands. He gave her a shy smile and yanked her up through the opening, setting her down roughly inside the tent. Dinah’s legs and arms were shaking so terribly that she simply rolled over onto her back, her lungs heaving and contracting with each long breath. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, a cold sweat pouring from her skin. It felt good to be on a hard surface, but she couldn’t forget the fact that this fabric tent was suspended hundreds of feet in the air. It was unnatural to be this high, and she longed to feel dirt underneath her fingernails. She was a child of the earth, not the sky. Her heart gave a terrified thud when she realized that she would also have to climb back down the ladder, which would be less physically exhausting but infinitely more dangerous. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing. After a few minutes, a man’s voice broke the silence.