DISCORDIA

[ 38 ] happy reunions

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       HAPPY REUNIONS

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       BELLAMY'S LIPS MOVED WORDLESSLY as Jinny sunk to her knees, shellshocked. Another life gone in less than four hours. She shouldn't have taken it for granted that the rope would have held, or that Sterling was able to secure a knot properly. They'd all been so damn confident that he would have made it back up with Mel.

       "Oh, God, no, Sterling," Monroe gasped out, throwing her arms over her head as she paced about in dismay. Jinny felt badly for her; she'd always been close to Sterling at their delinquent camp and the pair of them had made a great team.

       Bellamy managed to compose himself and leaned forwards while yelling, "Mel, hold on! Focus on me, you can do this!"

       "I can't!" she screamed back.

       "Yes, you can! You're strong!" he told her insistently.

       "I'm not strong!" she continued to sob. "Stubborn, maybe."

       "So be stubborn a little longer," he said. "We're not gonna let you die, you hear me?"

       She whimpered loudly and nodded her head, the action just barely visible to them. Jinny stood up with trembling legs as Finn confronted Bellamy. "We're out of rope," he said lowly.

       "So we make a new one," Bellamy told him.

       "If anything happens to our friends, when we could have—"

       "We don't even know if we can save our friends!" Bellamy yelled at him and Finn stopped short. "For all we know, they could be dead already. We've all thought it. But what we do know is that we could save this one girl."

       Finn still didn't look convinced. "I am not leaving her for dead," Jinny hissed vehemently.

       "Sterling was one of us," Monroe said. "She was his friend. I'm in."

       "So how do we do it?" Murphy asked right away.

       "We make new rope from the wreckage," Bellamy told them. "Go find wires, seatbelts, anything."

       Murphy nodded, turning around and placing a hand on Monroe's arm to urge her forwards. "Come on," he said, and they headed towards the wreckage trail behind them.

       "I hope you're right about this," Finn said before darting away to scavenge as well.

       Bellamy looked to Jinny. "So do I."

       She gave him a nod before separating to join the hunt for materials. Jinny scrounged around some of the larger debris, scanning the ground for brightly coloured seatbelts and wires. She rounded the edge of a chunk of wall and almost retched when she found a corpse that had been cut in half at the waist, blackened innards spilling out onto the grass. She stumbled away, clasping a hand against her mouth and bent over, heaving dryly. That was the worst thing she had ever laid eyes on and the smell of rot was worse. Quickly picking herself up, she ran away from the scene towards Bellamy. It didn't take them very long to gather enough seatbelts and wires to hook them together into a rope that was long enough.

       Jinny volunteered to go down, but Bellamy refused to let her despite him weighing twice as much as she did, taking one end of the belt chain and tying it around his waist. She sighed and tied the other end to the base of the tree stump that Sterling had used earlier, making sure that it was definitely secured with a triple knot. Learning from his mistake, they decided to err on the side of caution and carefully lowered Bellamy down the cliff side together. Jinny was in front of the line and she inched forwards to the edge once they had ran out of rope allowance.