“I think so,” I say, looking up at the rock.
“Follow me,” she says. “I’ll talk you through it.” She puts her fingers in the holds and hoists herself up. In my eagerness to follow, I knock over a small pile of rocks. They scatter, and I hold tight.
“Don’t look down,” Indie says.
It takes much longer to climb than it does to fall.
It strikes me how much of this is holding on and waiting, deciding the next move and then committing to it. My fingers grip tightly into the rock and my toes curl as much as they can. I focus on the task at hand, and somehow that means that, even though I don’t think of Ky, I’m completely immersed in thinking of him. Because I’m being like him.
The canyon walls here are reddish-orange, drizzled with black. I’m not sure where the black came from; it’s almost like an ocean thick with tar lapped against the sides long ago.
“You’re doing fine,” Indie tells me as I come up next to her on a ledge. “Now this will be the hardest part,” she says, pointing. “Let me try it out first.”
I sit on the ledge, lean my back against the rock. My arms ache from holding on so tightly. I wish the rock would hold us, cradle us back as we cling to it, but it doesn’t. “I think I’ve got it,” Indie calls down softly. “When you come up here—”
I hear the sound of falling rocks, of flesh scraping stone. I’m on my feet. The ledge is small and my balance uncertain. “Indie!”
She dangles above me, holding onto the rocks. One of her legs hangs down near me, scraped, bloody. I hear her swear softly.
“Are you all right?” I call up.
“Push,” she says, her voice ragged. “Push me up.”
I put my palms under the tread of her boot, worn from the run across the plain and dusty-soled from the canyon and the rocks.
There is a terrible moment when she rests there on my hands, so heavy, and I know she can’t find anything to grab above. Then she is gone; the weight of her boot leaves my hand; the imprint of it is left on my palm.
“I’m up,” she calls down. “Come around to your left. I can talk you up from here.”
“Is it safe? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“It’s my own fault. These rocks are softer than the ones I’m used to climbing. I put too much weight on that piece and it broke off.”
The scrapes on her leg belie her statement that the rock is soft, but I know what she means. Things here are so different. Poisoned rivers, softened stone. You never know exactly what you’re getting into. What will hold and what will give way.
The second half of the climb goes more smoothly. Indie was right; the sheer part was the hardest to navigate. I clutch thin edges of rock using only the pads of my fingers, willing my knuckles to stay bent and my feet not to slip. I wedge my arms and knees into slots running vertically up the face of the rock, using my clothes and skin the way Indie taught me—as friction to keep my body close to the wall.
“We’re almost there,” she says above me. “Give me a minute and climb on up. It’s not bad.”
I try to catch my breath, pausing for a rest in a crevice. The rock does hold me here, I realize, and I smile, exhilarated by how high we are.
Ky would love this. Maybe he’s climbing, too.
Time for the last push to the top.
I will not look down or back or anywhere but up and forward. My empty pack shifts a little and I waver, my fingernails digging into the stone. Hold on. Wait. Something light and winged flies past me, startling me. To calm myself, I think of the poem Ky gave me for my birthday, the one about the water:
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
Here on this stony shore, I feel like a creature left behind after the water has pulled back to the sea. Trying to climb over into someplace where Ky might be. And even if he’s not there, I’ll find him. I’ll go over again and again until I’ve finally crossed to where he is.
I pause for a moment to get my balance back, and then, in spite of myself, I look over my shoulder.
The view is completely different from what Ky and I saw together at the top of the Hill. No houses, no City Hall, no buildings. It is sand and rock and scrubby tree; but it is still something I have climbed, and once again, it feels like Ky has climbed it with me somehow.
“I’m almost there,” I whisper to him, to Indie.
I pull myself over the edge of the cliff, a smile on my face, and then I look up.
We are not alone.
I know now why they call this a firing. Ash, everywhere. A wind sails across the Carving, blowing the debris into my eyes and making them blur and water.
It’s just the last of a big fire, I try to tell myself. Sticks laid end to end, smoke gone to the sky.
But the look on Indie’s face tells me that she sees the truth and in my mind I know it too. The blackened figures strewn across the ground are not sticks. They are real, these dozens of bodies on the top of the Carving.
Indie bends down and then straightens up, holding something. A charred length of rope, most of it good. “Let’s go,” she says, the ash on the rope blackening her hands. She reaches up to brush back a piece of her red hair floating loose in the breeze and accidentally marks her face.
I glance at the people. They have markings on their skin, too, blue ones, twisting lines. I wonder what they mean.
Why did you come up here? How did you make this rope? What else have you learned out here while the rest of us forgot about you? Or never knew you existed at all?
“How long have they been dead?” I ask.
“Long enough,” Indie says. “A week, maybe more. I’m not sure.” There’s a hard edge to her voice. “Whoever did this might come back. We have to leave.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see movement and turn. Tall red flags set along the ridge whip furiously in the wind. Though staked into the ground instead of tied to trees, they remind me of the red scraps Ky and I left on the Hill.