Nada's Escape: Fighters' lies

1.2 Clinging

"Change of plan," I hiss, "Give me the hammer. I'm going up first." I check my pocket. The last three nails are still there. The hammer appears in my other hand and I take a deep breath to calm myself.

"But..." one of the girls whispers, I can't tell who in the dark.

"No arguments," I interrupt. My heart pounds hard, begging me not to go up, but I force my hands to seize the wood. It feels brittle beneath my fingertips, barely visible before my face. I launch my foot onto the first rung, starting to count under my breath.

As my toes hit rung number eight my knees start to quiver, the back of the hammer head scraping my hip from my waistband. Please don't fall. I force myself on, ignoring the warnings of my traitorous brain.

The rhythmic counting of my steps keeps me going until the ends of my shoes begin to brush against the sandstone wall. I carefully start to rock forward onto my toes, balancing my weight on the tiny sliver of wood where the ladder presses against the wall. A thousand iterations of this plan and I'd never imagined how tiny the space left on the rungs would be once the ladder was flush to the wall. Just a sliver between rock and free fall.

I really have to hold on now, with my fingertips and my clenched-up core. I count fourteen, praying that I don't overbalance and end up a stain on the earth below. But they must be holding the base to the wall because I make it to rung fifteen, a thicker, safer rung. I scamper up the next ten rungs in a matter of heartbeats, wanting it over with.

I am paused on rung twenty-four, huffing like a racehorse when the rung beneath my hands slips. I test it gingerly and it seems to hold beneath my hands. So I continue, squeezing my fingers into the wood so hard that I feel my knuckles cracking. I'm counting twenty-seven when that deadly rung slips again. It dissipates right under my feet and my heart falls away with it.

A whoosh of air and darkness fills my mind, an image of shattering bones forcing my muscles into spasm. I clutch and scramble. Don't let me fall! I panic.

My feet catch on the rung below and I press my face into the wall, relieved but tasting blood. My arms cry at their stretch to the rung above and I scold myself for resting, even for a second.

I didn't fall. I'm okay. I have to keep going. I scramble up to the next safe rungs, begging that the ones I'm holding are strong enough because there are no more back-ups.

"Nada!" hisses one of the girls waiting below.

"Twenty-seven gone," I reply, my arms now shaking. "I'm okay,"

Now every rung is more terrifying than the last. The more rungs that hold under my weight, the more I believe that the next will break. But they don't. I scold myself every step to make myself go on. I am not a coward. This wall will not defeat me.

By the time I reach the crooked piece I must have reached a new plateau of fear. I swing the top piece of the ladder until its straight and start tapping away at my nail. I'm no longer worrying about whether the ladder will hold under this new strain. I just do it, ignoring everything else. Three nails, bang bang bang; the ladder shuddering beneath my weight.

But then its done and I keep going, too scared to call back.

My breath hitches, hands scraping the raw stone in disbelief. The ladder doesn't reach the top of the wall. I'd forgotten to check the height after I'd fixed it. I angle my head up as far as I can and the top seems impossibly far away. But I've just climbed fourteen metres of impossible ladder. I have to make this last leap.

Luckily it isn't a leap. From the penultimate rung the top of the wall is just a centimetre over my head. Now I know I can do this. Its no higher than the garden wall at home when I climbed it as a child.

Still my body fears, especially when the dim light of the moon meets my eyes as my head crests the wall. My body hangs on my palms, one gust of wind away from toppling back to the ground. But I haul myself over the lip of the wall.

I smile in triumph as I press my face into the gritty stone top. Finally I've conquered this wall. The top is wide, easy to lay along without fear of falling. I call down to the bottom.

"I'm at the top. Next one. Go." While I wait I survey our next step; perhaps harder than the last. We will have to haul the ladder over to the other side, find a steady spot to place the base and then crawl down the moonlit side.

Directly below is a clear ribbon of ground and bordering that as far as I can see a scraggly garden. The trees hunch under their drooping leaves and the shrubs just look like spiky balls but my heart is still lifted. Nothing grows within the walls of Camp Seven.

Beyond the reach of the garden the buildings start. Pathways run between them, lit occasionally by a lamppost. The closest paths are maze-like and winding, the buildings small and single story. In the distance I can see a few streets lined up into a grid, the large buildings in-between like a line of tanks. That's okay, I remind myself, we knew there were Huntsmen living outside the walls. But we'd never known exactly how many...

I stretch my gaze beyond the Huntsmen town to the horizon. I frown and turn to get a view from every side. There is nothing beyond the Huntsmen. No city lights, no mountainous horizons, not a single light in any direction. Darkness eats at the edges of the town and stretches to the sky. The sight shocks me, making me wonder if we aren't anywhere on earth at all, but on a different planet or realm altogether.

The stars are the same though, glittering mysteriously from space. Orion's belt and the Southern Cross are there as always, and the immensity of the Milky Way. Old friends in an unfamiliar world.