“Hmm,” said Del, like she didn’t believe her.
Lucy itched to hit her.
“By herself,” Aidan added, putting his arm around Lucy.
Del’s face took on a sour expression. She pulled her hair back out of her face and secured it tightly with an elastic.
“Pretty windy tonight. It’s going to rock and roll.” She touched the thin ropes. They vibrated with the force of the wind.
It looked flimsier than before, Lucy thought, this slender device made of old, braided hemp and recycled planks, which hardly seemed capable of supporting a cat.
Del adjusted her bow and quiver across her back. Then, casting one of her arched-eyebrow, curved-lip smiles at Lucy, she walked out onto the bridge.
Walked wasn’t really the correct word. She danced her way across before Lucy had even begun to summon up the courage to move forward. Quick, sure-footed, and agile.
Lucy told her feet to move. They ignored her.
In the end, it was Del who provided the impetus. She stood on the other side with her arms folded across her chest, the hood of Lucy’s sweatshirt pushed back so that her triumphant face was visible. In another minute she would start prancing back across, just to show how easy it was. Lucy longed to strike Del across her smug mouth.
Lucy tightened her grip on the spear, shrugged her shoulders to center her backpack, and stepped out onto the first wooden slat. After she’d successfully negotiated the jagged hole that had almost killed her the first time, it was just a matter of moving forward. The darkness actually made it a little easier since she couldn’t see the sharp rocks thirty feet below her, and Aidan’s presence was comforting. Her breathing calmed, and the panic released her from its grip. She began to relax.
Halfway across, Lucy tripped over a protruding nail and would have fallen if not for Aidan’s hand, which shot out and caught the collar of her leather jacket. He pulled her backward with a force that rattled her teeth and squashed her throat. She cracked her hip against a wooden support, bruising the bone against the hard metal knob of her knife as she clutched at the rope. The rough hemp burned her palm and she felt the old wound burst open again. The bridge swayed back and forth, shimmying. Twenty feet away on solid ground, Del watched, her mouth hanging open.
“Lucy!” Aidan yelled, transferring his grip to her arm.
She raised tear-filled eyes. “I’m okay. I just tripped. Bashed my hip. Stupid,” she said.
“Didn’t drop your spear, though,” he said.
“There is that,” she agreed. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on her feet for the rest of the way. Aidan’s hand remained on her arm.
“Way to jack up the excitement, Lucy-loo,” said Del with a sneer.
“It’s an adventure, right?” said Lucy, feeling so much better for the hard earth beneath her boots. “It wouldn’t be worth much without the terror-fraught moments.”
Del laughed.
As soon as Lucy had caught her breath and unzipped her collar from the tender skin of her neck, she removed her knife and scabbard and slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket. She pressed her fingers against her bruised hip and sucked in a breath. Ouch!
“Okay to go on?” Aidan asked her, passing around the water. He winced. Lucy noticed he held his left arm against his body. He must have hurt it when he stopped her from falling.
“Don’t be a moron,” she said sharply, trying to conceal her concern. His smile lit up his eyes, and the crooked smirk was back, curling his lips. She wondered what it would be like to kiss it off his mouth. Snap out of it, Lucy! she told herself. Stupid notions like this are why you almost took a header off a bridge a moment ago.
“Is your arm okay?” she asked as they crossed the plateau, moving faster now that the going was relatively easy.
“A little sore,” he admitted. “You could come over and make it better.”
Del frowned.
Lucy turned away from his grin and checked out the terrain ahead of them.
She walked to the edge of the plateau, using the end of her spear to test how crumbly the ground was. The rain and the unusual heat of the last few weeks seemed to have solidified it into hard clay. It would get rockier and looser the farther down they climbed. She tried to remember how many gorges she’d crossed on the way here. It had seemed like dozens.
Aidan pointed a few degrees to the right. “That’s the easiest way. The way I go.” She considered. Easiest but it would take them pretty far out of their way. She could see the thin grove of trees at the crown of the hill where she had first rested beyond the reach of the giant wave. Just out of sight was the meandering rough path the deer used to go down to the water. Before that, though, were several miles of treacherous ground split by crevasses. Slabs of gray granite glimmered in the starlight among deep pockets of shadow where the earth had sunk or cracked. Lucy took a long breath. It would be better once they were in it. The vertigo that seized her at the top of a tree or on a swaying bridge didn’t affect her when she was climbing, using her fingers to pull herself up a sharp slope or to steady herself down a hill.
“We going to move, then?” said Del impatiently. She toyed with her slingshot. The pouch of Lucy’s sweatshirt gaped with the weight of the pebbles that filled it. Del’s face looked even paler in the dim light, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“Just figuring out the fastest way down,” Lucy said easily, wondering why Del looked so sick and nervous now, when she’d been almost giddy just a few minutes before.
Aidan peered down the slope and whistled softly. “Faster. Definitely.”
Del pushed her hair back and looked over her right shoulder, away from what was left of the city, away from the scree-covered slopes, and Roosevelt Island. North. Lucy wondered if the sky was bigger there. It looked bigger, and the stars clustered more thickly, bleaching a wide ribbon of sky that wreathed above the mountaintops.
“Don’t you ever just feel like saying ‘forget it’?” Del said. “There’s just too much… responsibility,” she said finally. Her mouth clenched around the word. She looked at Lucy, then at Aidan. Her eyes gleamed. “I mean, we’re teenagers, right? Aren’t we supposed to be getting ourselves into trouble? Having a good time? Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll! Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be like?” Her voice lowered and softened until she sounded like a little girl. Wistful and sad.
Del stared across the Wilds with such an expression of rage on her face that it stopped Lucy’s breath in her throat. She yelled—it was more of a howl, really—throwing her head back. A clatter of stones rolled beneath her feet and bounced over the rim.
Aidan reached out his hand. “You’re standing too close to the edge.”
She looked at him. “Isn’t that my MO?” Del kicked at the ground viciously with her blunt-toed boots and sent another torrent of rock over. “Let’s go. This way, right?” she asked, throwing a backward glance at Lucy.
For the next few hours, no one could spare the energy for conversation. Lucy went first, followed by Del, and then Aidan. She used her spear for added balance and to prod the earth on the steeper slopes. It seemed that every step caused a mini avalanche. Sometimes Del crowded her, her forward momentum throwing her against Lucy’s heels, and Lucy angrily gestured the girl back. Slowly, they made it past the upheaval of old highways and the chunks of tarmac. There was no sound but the crunch of rock, the patter of crumbling soil, and their breathing. Del was oddly quiet except for the occasional cry as she slipped or stumbled. Lucy couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t as agile on the uneven ground as she’d been on the bridge. Rocks rolled under her boots; chunks of dirt slid away, shooting past Lucy; and her balance was off. She was stiff and didn’t seem to know what to do with her arms.