But all at once, without warning, she vanishes.
A scream pierces the air, clearly Alexa’s. I look high into the tree canopy—maybe she’s been caught up in some sort of trap? I remember one from Emma’s favorite Kiera Holloway movie, a net that scooped its unsuspecting prisoners into a precarious, dangling bundle. There’s nothing like that here, though. Nothing but treetops as far as I can see.
Hope cautiously steps toward the spot where Alexa disappeared. I follow, stopping suddenly when we hear Alexa again, calling out for us.
“Look down,” she cries.
Hope and I exchange a glance. Look down? There’s nothing but mud and foliage at our feet.
“Try not to fall, though,” Alexa says.
Gingerly, I inch forward, lean in toward her voice—and then I understand. It’s an illusion, like how we could see the island only from certain places on our sailboat. I understand the what of this, anyway, but not the how. Not the why.
I pull Hope up so she can see it, too. “Whoa,” she breathes.
The land drops off a mere few feet in front of us. Across the chasm, which is narrow and quite deep, the jungle looks every bit as dense as it has for hours. It would have been very, very easy to step straight off the cliff’s edge without meaning to, especially if we’d been running as fast as Alexa.
I peer over the edge, finally see her. She’s standing on a wide, smooth ledge about twelve feet down—the cliff wall is a jagged mess of rock ledges, better than a sheer drop, but only slightly. Way down at the bottom, a stream trips on itself for as far as I can see in both directions. No wonder we’ve been hearing water all this time. A troubling notion strikes me: what if there are more of these illusions? What if Finnley is still back near the beach somewhere and we just couldn’t see her?
I keep this thought to myself for now. I can only imagine how perhaps this terrible day has been for nothing would take the wind out of everyone’s sails.
“Are you all right?” Hope calls down. “Did you break anything?”
I don’t see any blood on the ledge, and she’s okay enough to stand. Those seem like promising signs.
“Landed a little hard, might have sprained my ankle a bit? Hopefully not?” she says. “Nothing feels too excruciating. I can stand—and walk—ungh. Legs are still burning like crazy, though. It’s going to be hell getting down to the water.”
I can relate. It’s as if needles and pins cover every inch of flesh, sharp and shifting with each slight movement. My nerves are on fire. Clambering down the side of a cliff wall would be tough enough on a normal day, thanks to my rather severe distaste for heights—add in the burning on the back of my thighs, and I’d almost rather jump and pray for wings on the free fall.
Otherwise, it looks like the hardest part will be getting down to the first ledge, where Alexa is—from there, the rocky shelves are closer together. Not all of them are this wide, and some look more prone to crumbling, but for the most part we should be able to use them like stairs.
We come up with a plan: I’m taller than Hope, so the jump to that first ledge won’t be as drastic for me. She and I clasp wrists while she lowers herself down to Alexa, who spots her. We’ll do something similar on the way back up, we decide, pile on top of one another until we reach the highest ledge. If necessary, whoever’s at the top can make a rope out of vines to help the others climb back up.
Hope makes it down just fine, and I land without too much trouble. My ankles sting from the impact, but everything else is on fire, so the pain blends right in. We take careful steps down the cliff’s rocky face, cling for our lives. Our shoes scrape loose pebbles and send them flying. It’s a long, steep downward climb.
I spend most of our descent looking straight up—at the clouds, at the trees, at everything towering high above us that makes me feel closer to the ground than I actually am—so I won’t be staring at how far we’ll plummet if the ledges give out.
But the ledges don’t give out, and neither do we, and just as the sky turns to dusk we dip ourselves into the stream. It’s cold and clear, deeper than it looks. The others stay close to the bank, but I’m tall enough to go to its deepest point, where it comes all the way up to my shoulders. The water dulls the pain in my legs almost immediately. After this long and discouraging day, I’m savoring our hard-won victory.
“This”—Alexa dips her head under, and when she resurfaces, her black hair falls like freshly ironed silk around her face—“was worth it.”
“Feeling better, then?” Hope is the only one of us actively trying to get clean: she sits on the pebbly bank, scrubbing and scratching at the layers of dirt that cake her feet.
“You have no idea,” Alexa says.
The breeze in the leaves, the cool water—it is almost peaceful.
“Um . . . guys?” Hope examines the crook of her elbow, rubs vigorously at it. “Does this look weird to you?”
I swim closer to where she sits on the bank, and she slips into the water to meet me. “Looks like all of your other mosquito bites,” I say, when I’ve seen it up close. “Does it itch? Don’t scratch them, they’ll get infected more easily.”
She shrugs, twisting her arm to compare the spot with the constellation of bites on the other side. “It almost looks like . . . a needle mark?”
“I think you would have noticed someone stabbing you in the arm with a sharp object,” Alexa says. She dips under the water again, shakes out her hair.
“It really does look like all your other bites,” I say. “Or maybe you were stung by something else?”
Hope digs her fingertips into her temples, shakes her head. “Ugh! I am so freaking paranoid!” Her broken voice echoes from the walls of the ravine. “I was sleeping two feet away from her.” A pair of tears make twin ripples in her reflection.
“What happened with Finnley is not your fault, Hope.”
I am the preacher, I am the choir.
Hope is not the one who heard things in the night.
We stay in the water until stars fill the thin strip of sky directly above us. It’s like stepping into a freezer when we finally emerge—the ravine could be a certifiable wind tunnel, and on top of that, we have nothing to dry off with. And we don’t have a fire. Or our box of matches, or blankets, or clean socks. Or anything that might pass as warmth.
All we have is one another.
So, like it or not, we huddle up, as close to the ravine wall as we can get. We should probably be afraid of everything we don’t know—and everything we do know—and the risk of sleeping in a riverbed that could be so easily flooded if a storm were to pop up in the night—but we’re too cold, too exhausted.
“I miss blankets.” Hope’s voice is quiet, barely more than a whisper. “I miss my cat.”