“How are you doing over there?” Sabrina called to Charity as they neared the top platform.
“It’s high,” Charity said, but Sabrina guessed it wasn’t the height giving Charity’s voice a fatigued quaver. Her body should be going into shock, trying to shut down, to rest, to protect her from further damage to herself. Sabrina hoped it wouldn’t happen until they were far away from here.
“Almost there,” Linda said, and they performed their climbing dance.
When Sabrina’s knees pressed against the hard, stable surface, she let out a sigh of desperate relief. As they pulled Linda onto the platform, Sabrina searched Charity’s face; she was pale and trembling. Sabrina examined the rest of the course: a zip line stretched from their platform to the next, followed by a hanging bridge. Sabrina peered down. The forest floor was a mass of roots, slithering like snakes in all directions.
“She can’t zip-line by herself,” Sabrina said. The next challenge. It was just like the hospital. She needed to take it one step at a time. “One of us will have to wear her as a backpack.”
“I’ve never zip-lined before.” Linda swallowed, her throat bobbing. “You have to take her.”
Even losing herself to shock or blood-loss or both, Charity’s face fell. But it was no time for hurt feelings.
“Good call.” Sabrina hacked a second harness from the line and shoved it into Linda’s hands, then knelt in front of Charity. “Help me lift her up here, tie her onto me, and get us both into this remaining harness.”
As Linda lifted a woozy Charity and strapped her to Sabrina, Sabrina noted with a sharp pain to her chest that the zip line was intended for use by a couple: Tristan and his chosen contestant. It should have been her here, in another timeline. A harsh wind blew the thought away, forcing her hair into her face. The air stunk like mold and puss.
She dared to glance back.
Behind, the branches were waking. They stretched and rattled infinitely forward, like the arms of giants.
“You better go,” Linda cried out.
No time to hesitate. Sabrina let her and Charity fall into the zip-line’s embrace. As she zoomed across the line, she felt a conflict of feelings: relieved she and her patient were safe, but also happy that her rival was still stuck behind them.
As her feet touched down on the platform, she stared at the zip line harness in her hand. She glanced across the expanse at Linda’s waiting stance, and as the boughs bent in an unearthly way, a storm surging to sweep Linda into its turmoil, Sabrina pushed the harness back.
Chapter Forty-Two
Linda
First Came the scent of wounds and rot. Then it was the stench of her father’s last drink, the one she fixed for him: alcohol, sugar syrup, mint, and that secret ingredient.
Linda’s hand shone with blood—Charity’s. She wiped it away and strapped herself into the harness, and as she let herself drop forward, a hand held her back.
Screaming, she reached back and clawed at the appendage. Her fingers gripped at wood. She pried at the hardened hand until it broke, then jumped. Her stomach dropped as she flew along the line, kicking her feet to speed her through. As she landed on the platform, she chucked the hand at Sabrina’s feet. It had stopped moving, splintered at the wrist.
“What the hell?” Sabrina kicked it over the side, eyes widening.
She’d once read that trees, when attacked by insects, sent pheromones on the wind to warn the rest of the forest.
“Let’s finish this,” Linda said, imagining a whole woodland awakening.
Charity groaned. Sabrina had set her to rest against the platform. Her mangled leg stuck out at a wrong angle, and the rest quivered as she struggled to hold onto consciousness.
“How are you feeling?” Sabrina crouched, checking her forehead. “We’re almost there. Almost there.”
“I can make it,” Charity croaked, but an image flashed behind Linda’s eyes: her father’s face. Not in death—not this time—but pushing away her mother as he climbed the trail to the mountain’s top. Telling her he could make it. She had wished her father dead. She couldn’t lose Charity, not yet, not when she hoped she never would.
Linda pulled Charity up, forcing her to sit without support. Charity had bit her lip in pain until it bled down her chin. The dried blood gave her the appearance of some bloodsucker caught in the act. Sometimes, controlling a pain made the uncontrolled hurting lessen. Linda understood that.
“We have to cross this bridge now,” Linda said. “I’m going to carry you.” Linda looped her arms around Charity’s legs. “Hold onto me for a few more minutes. Don’t you dare let go.”
Charity’s drunken smile might have been endearing in some other circumstance—the kind of party they might never see together. She wrapped her arms around Linda’s neck. Linda barely breathed. Fear that gripped her as she stood with Charity clinging to her back. She was responsible for Charity now. She had never been responsible for life before. Sabrina tied them together with the harness, then gestured them forward as a shadow stirred, covering their bodies with the amber dark of the night-blooming woods.
“Get,” she said.
Linda did, stepping one foot onto the first rickety pipe that made up the bridge.
Her foot slipped.
She caught herself, grabbing the rope bridge. Charity squeezed her legs around Linda’s waist, but the grip lost strength with each passing second. Linda moved to the next step, then the next, until she felt at ease with the balancing act. She didn’t look down into the roots, only forward, toward that final platform. If she slipped, she would save Charity before herself. She would pay that price. There was no question, when she had once given so much more for those she loved.
And she did love Charity. It seemed too soon to say it, or so she had been told by romantic comedies, but though they had only loved one another’s secret places once, they had shared more than she had ever shared with her ex, with any other. The woman pushed her, and she hoped to be the kind of person who could one day push back.
Besides, she wondered, as they navigated the pipe bridge, why are we so scared of love that we forbid it in romance’s earliest stages? Maybe if we allowed love, if her family had allowed love, if she had permitted love, then she would have sprung open and taken root like a resistant bulb. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to do what she did all those years ago. And maybe, in her adulthood, she wouldn’t have moved through life like a zombie.
“Linda!” Sabrina yelled as Linda’s thoughts fled like frightened roaches. Two branches swept down like salad tongs. She stood at the edge of the final platform, one step from the next victory. She bowed forward, sending Charity flying onto it as the branch yanked her into the air.
The tree suspended Linda, dangling her like a panther dangles its fresh rat-kill. Twisting in the air, she searched frantically for a way down, but Sabrina screeched across the bridge. Linda turned her head. The tree had lifted a third limb, sharpened to a point and poised above like a snake ready to strike.
“Get back!” Linda screamed to Charity on the platform, but Charity leaned over, staring up at Linda and her captor.
Sabrina jumped across the bridge’s final threshold. She pulled Charity into her lap and pushed something into her hand: the harness-end of a free-fall pulley. Sabrina positioned Charity’s grip on the pulley and pushed her to the edge. “Hold tight,” she yelled as she shoved her down into the sinking light outside.
The limb bent at odd, animal angles, as though bones and joints moved within its bark façade. It thrust toward Linda. She twisted away, and as her body untangled, she fell to the ground.
With a thud, she landed on her back, the breath leaving her body in a WHOOMPH. Something cracked as she gasped, struggling to inhale. Once her breath returned, there was no time to process pain. She sprung to her feet and darted further into the safety of the sunset-lit yard, where Sabrina tended to a crumpled Charity in the grass.
