He let go. Slipping and sliding, I half fell, half crawled my way down behind both of them, until I reached a level part of the ground.
“Sophie!” I called again. “I can’t see where you are! Say something and I’ll move toward the sound of your voice!”
“Uuunnnhhh…” The voice came again out the dark, pleading, desperate. I struggled toward it, pushing past the thick scrub and hanging branches, steadying myself carefully along moss-covered rocks. But Aiden and Jimmy had already found her. Through the dark, I could make out the shadow of two shapes hovering over a third.
“Sophie!” I was next to her all at once, clutching her around the shoulders, pressing my face to her cheek. She was shivering violently, but her face was burning hot. Her braids, damp with mud, clung to the sides of her neck, and her bandanna was missing. “Sophie, what happened? What are you doing down here?”
She pointed toward her foot, which was lodged in between two rocks. Jimmy and Aiden were already examining it. “I came down…” Her voice, which was barely a whisper, slipped out between her chattering teeth. “Just to sit. And think.” She pointed to her foot again with a shaking hand. “I tripped and fell. My cell phone fell out of my pocket, and my foot…got stuck. I think it’s broken.” She tried to balance herself up on her elbows, but winced from the movement and sank back down again.
“Hold on,” I said, looking up at Jimmy and Aiden. “They’re going to get you out, Sophie.”
“We need a flashlight,” Aiden said. “I can’t see anything.”
Jimmy nodded urgently. “And a blanket. In the trunk.”
Aiden disappeared into the blackness, his shoes making heavy scraping sounds as he crawled back up the side of the gorge.
I leaned over to get a better look at the rocks trapping Sophie’s foot. The one on the left was as large and wide as a mattress, but the other was only about half that size. Both of them, however, were half submerged in water. The space in between, where Sophie’s foot was caught, was frighteningly narrow. I moved directly into the water, gasping as the frigidness swirled around my knees. It could not have been over twenty degrees. My body had already started shivering. Sophie had been down here, her left leg submerged to the knee, for God knows how long. How was she still conscious? And talking?
I stared down at my sister. For a split second, I wondered how much more of her I didn’t—and might not ever—know. And in the next second, I realized it didn’t matter. What mattered was how much I loved her. Right now.
Wrapping my arms around her again, I leaned in and cradled her head in my arms. “Hold on, Sophie, okay? We’re going to get you out of here. I promise. Just hold on.”
She reached up and grabbed my elbow and she did not let go.
chapter
51
Once we had the flashlight, it took Jimmy less than ten seconds to assess the situation Sophie was in, grab Aiden’s cell phone, and call the fire department for help. They arrived minutes later, springing into action as Jimmy, Aiden, and I stood by. One of them added another blanket to the growing pile on top of Sophie, but her lips still trembled violently. A wide, glaring beam of light had been directed down from the top of the truck positioned at the edge of the bridge. Under this light, two firemen were busy tethering a rope to the smaller of the two boulders, while the other two attended to Sophie. An ambulance screamed its arrival, sidling in next to the fire truck with a screech of brakes. Two attendants jumped out and joined the firemen in the gorge. One of them began taking Sophie’s vital signs while the other covered her with heated blankets. Above us, the red siren lights flashed back and forth, in and out, in a dizzying display of urgency.
I listened with one ear as an attendant began barking out Sophie’s statistics. “Heart rate is forty! BP is eighty over sixty and we got a temp of ninety-one! Any chance you guys can hurry up with that rock? This girl is in serious hypothermic shock.”
I turned to Jimmy, my eyes wide with panic.
“Let them work,” he said steadily.
I turned back, straining to see Sophie behind the swirl of moving bodies. My whole body began to shiver again, weakened from the strain of the last few weeks, terrified at the thought of losing Sophie. Jimmy took off his jacket and draped it around my shoulders while Aiden patted me gently on the back. The three of us stood very close to one another for the next thirty-seven minutes, until at last, with a roar from the firemen, the earth released its hold and, with one enormous, groaning, sucking movement, set the rock free.