CAT WAS DEAD.
Although I wanted to stay there and mourn his death, there was work to do. And Hope was out there on her own.
I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Go,” Scylla said—the first time I’d ever heard her speak. I wiped away my tears and hauled myself to my feet.
The lights blinked off and on as I hurried through the hallways. The gunfire was louder now—President Vasquez’s army was drawing close.
I rode the elevator down to the lobby, dashed outside, then hurried to the main elevator. It didn’t work, so I was forced to run down the hundreds of stairs. I raced through the darkened tunnel, my footsteps echoing back at me, and reached the tram stop as the next tram was getting ready to descend. I jumped in just as it began its descent.
I was halfway down the mountain—thinking about Cat, wondering about Hope—when the tram shuddered to a stop. I tumbled forward against the glass.
“What’s going on?” I said aloud.
A glance up the mountain explained it. The fortress was dark. The power was out. The only light was the fading flames from the fire. Which meant I was stuck dangling in the air, a good half mile from the mountain’s base.
The tram began to sway in the wind, rocking this way and that. My breathing grew rapid, and I had a sudden need to get out.
With trembling fingers I slid open the door. An icy wind rushed inside and chilled me to the bone. I dared to stick my head out and peer to the ground below. Pale moonlight bounced off the snowy, rock-strewn landscape far below me. I was way too high to jump. The snow might cushion my fall—the granite boulders wouldn’t.
I slid the door shut and tried to think of a plan. The tram continued to rock in the howling wind. My heart slammed against my chest.
As I was trying to figure out what to do, I felt a strange vibration. Different from the wind. Different from the tram in motion. This vibration rattled the windowpanes and radiated up my feet. My teeth began to chatter, and not from cold.
“What’s going on?” I repeated.
The vibration increased. The tram buzzed with streaking currents of electricity. Except it wasn’t electricity, it was something else. Something from the cable.
The tram lurched, plunging a couple of feet downward. The descent was so quick that I fell to the floor. The tram rocked and swayed. The vibration increased.
That’s when I realized what was happening—someone was trying to cut the cable, chopping it with an ax. And with each whack, the tram lurched downward. It was only a matter of time before the metal ropes would fray and I would go plunging to the rocky mountainside below.
I whipped off my belt and doubled it back on itself, then jammed it between my teeth. If I somehow survived the fall—which seemed unlikely—I didn’t want my jaw to snap open and shut so hard that I’d lose my teeth. I’d read about that somewhere.
The vibration ceased, and I wondered if maybe I was overreacting. Like this was all my imagination.
And then I heard a distant whack and the tram plunged downward.
Wind whistled through the tram as it sailed through air like a missile. Falling, falling, falling. My stomach rose to my throat, and all I could do was bite into the belt and throw out my hands and hope I could somehow cushion the fall.
One moment I was trying to protect myself, and the next the tram slammed into the mountainside. There was the muffled crunch of metal pounding into snow and granite. I went flying, bounced hard against the floor, ricocheted off all four walls. The windows shattered. Glass exploded everywhere, and I felt the jagged edges slice into my skin.
The tram bounced atop the ground, once, twice, and then began to slide. It picked up speed. In no time it was rocketing down the mountain like a runaway sled. It slammed against boulders, the impact jarring my insides, and the air whooshed by with a howl that was a ghostly wail. I folded my body into a tiny ball, waiting for the moment of impact—the screaming meteor slamming into earth.
Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer force of it. It banged into something immovable with such a jarring collision that my body was hurled forward and my head whiplashed back. The side of my face slammed into the metal wall and I felt the blood oozing. My teeth rattled. The sound of the crash bounced off the mountains and seemed to take forever before the echo fully disappeared.
I lay there a moment, assessing injuries. Bleeding, yes. Sore, definitely. But I hadn’t broken bones. My heart was racing faster than it ever had.
I managed to squeeze through an open window and collapsed into the snow. Every bone and muscle screamed. When I finally lifted my head and looked around, I saw that the tram had slid a good quarter of a mile down the mountain before running into an enormous pine, wrapping itself around the tree’s trunk like a flattened tin can. The door was crumpled. It had shrunk to half its size. It was a miracle I was alive.
I ran my sleeve across my cheek, wiped away the blood, and staggered to my feet. I began limping down the mountain, wading through drifts, knowing I had to push myself if I was going to save Hope. Not just from Chancellor Maddox, but from herself.