The moulin is dark and very steep, a pitch-black bobsled course. I hear P.J. screaming as we pick up speed, and I get one arm around her and pull her close. Eko taught me on the Outer Banks how to avoid unseen obstacles in darkness, and I use that training now to visualize the tunnel ahead and guide us around bumps and ridges. But if this chute drains to the bottom of the ice sheet, we’re about to fall thousands of feet and land on solid rock.
I claw and kick to find a handhold or foothold that will at least slow us down, but the walls are too slippery. Suddenly the echoing thunder of what sounds like Niagara Falls roars up ahead. Our moulin is about to join a larger drainage chute, filled with surging, freezing water!
I have to find a way to stop us. I reach my free hand into my coat pocket and take out the handle of my scimitar. It’s made of a futuristic metallic alloy, and tapers to a point. The laser blade won’t do me any good in this ice tunnel, but I grasp the metallic handle and jab the pointed end as deep as I can into the icy wall of the moulin.
The sharp end of the scimitar handle bites in, and P.J. and I jerk to a stop. The torque almost pulls my arm out of its socket, but I don’t let go.
“HOLD ME!” I shout to P.J. above the roar of the nearby torrent, and as she clings to me, I take my left hand and feel around for the slightest ridges or cracks that we can use to try to climb higher. The ice walls around us are as smooth as glass. All we can do is hang here and wait until my strength gives out, or until the ice melts from our body heat and my scimitar handle slips free.
“We can’t last here much longer,” P.J. gasps.
“There’s no place to go,” I tell her. “The walls are impossible to climb.”
Beneath us in the darkness, the waterfall roars like a hungry beast demanding its dinner.
“I’m sorry,” P.J. whispers.
“For what?”
“Falling into that hole.”
“It was pretty well concealed,” I tell her, and my lips graze her ear. “Anyway, they aren’t holes. They’re called moulins.”
“You never could pronounce French,” she whispers back, and I hear her voice tremble.
I kiss her on the neck. “I love you,” I say softly.
“I love you, too, Jack,” she whispers. “I always did and I always will. I guess this is goodbye.”
Why do you humans persist in being so damn heroic in moments of extreme peril? a familiar canine telepathic voice inquires. Find an escape. Pray to your gods. Play a long shot. But don’t just exchange noble, poignant sentiments and wait for the grim reaper.
I look around the moulin. Gisco? Are you coming to save us, or are you just going to insult us at long range?
Dogs can’t climb, and I suffer from a touch of claustrophobia. It’s a family malady. My great-grandfather was once trapped in a chicken coop for three days and he nearly went mad. Well, it was his own fault. He was hungry and there is a family weakness for poultry . . .
Gisco, we’re about to fall to our deaths!
Hold on and fear not. Help is on the way.
I can feel the scimitar handle loosening. Gisco, help better get here very soon or we’re finished.
Just a few more seconds, Jack, my father advises me telepathically. Don’t give up.
P.J. sobs, and I can feel her grip slipping. “Hold on,” I tell her. “They’re sending someone to rescue us.”
“How do you know?” she asks.
“Gisco told me telepathically. And my dad.”
“Tell them to hurry.”
“I did.”
“Jack, let me go. My weight is pulling us down. You’re the one they need.”
“No,” I say.
“I can’t hold on any longer.” She loses her grip and starts to fall, but as she slides away I grab for her with my left hand and snag her parka hood.
“Let go,” she pleads. “Save yourself.”
“They’re coming. We can make it.”
“They’ll never reach us in time.”
“They already have,” I tell her.
A faint blue light illuminates the ice tunnel from above. A shadow descends toward us, sliding swiftly and gracefully down an ethereal blue rope. It’s Eko! She appears to be at the end of the rope, but as she continues to descend, the rope lengthens. As she nears us, she calls out: “Jack, are you okay?”
“Yes,” I answer, “but we can’t hold on much longer.”
Eko sees the precarious way we’re dangling, and she realizes how dire our situation is. She quickly rappels down to us and says, “Grab my rope.”
P.J. grabs it and I do, too. Just as my fingers close around it, my scimitar handle slips free from the ice wall. I catch it and tuck it back into my pocket.
Now the three of us are hanging from the same thin blue rope. “I can’t climb up,” P.J. tells her. “I don’t have the strength.”
“We’re not going to climb up,” Eko replies. “There’s a much faster and easier way.”
She clings to the rope with one hand and uses the other to take a small blue disc out of her coat pocket. It’s the size of a CD, and reminds me of the red disc my dad stretched into a flying sled to get us away from the lion cyborgs. Eko fastens it to the end of the rope, just beneath us, and moves her fingers outward. The disc begins to widen out. It increases to the size of a dinner plate, then a car tire, and soon it has the same diameter as the ice tunnel. “Sit on it,” she instructs us. “Keep your balance centered in the middle.”
We sit there, on top of the stretched-out blue disc, waiting for something to happen. “How are we going to get out of here, if we’re not going to climb?” P.J. asks.
“Propulsion,” Eko answers.
“Who or what is going to push us up?” I ask.
Eko smiles, and then I hear a roaring sound. The torrent beneath us suddenly sounds much closer. I can hear waves slapping against ice walls. Water is being drawn up the moulin, toward us!
“KEEP YOUR WEIGHT IN THE MIDDLE!” Eko shouts above the roar. A second later, I feel a gentle nudge as the first waves graze the bottom of our blue saucer. The water pressure builds steadily beneath us, and we start rising, faster and faster. Soon we’re flying upward through the chute. I feel like a champagne cork flying out of the bottleneck.
A circle of sunlight shines down from far above like a halo. We speed toward it, and burst out onto the ice. Water geysers above us for a few seconds, and then recedes back into the hole as Kidah slices his arm through the air in what looks like a karate chop. The thin blue rope vanishes back into the Star of Dann.
“Are you guys okay?” Kidah asks.
“Never better,” I tell him. “Thanks for getting us out of that tight spot.”
“I just put some water to good use,” he says. “You should thank the gal who climbed down to you.”
I turn to Eko, but P.J. has beaten me to it. “That’s the second time you saved me,” she says, her hand on Eko’s arm. “I’m sorry I made you risk your life.”
“It might turn out to be a good thing after all,” Eko tells her.
P.J. looks back at her. “How could it be a good thing?”
“Because we’re very close to the ice fortress where the Dark Lord and the Omega Box have holed up,” my father explains. “Our best chance against them is a surprise attack.”
And you and Jack just showed us a very original way to go in through the back door, Gisco adds telepathically.
I look at his face, and then I turn to my father and the wizard. “You’re not going to try to slide into their ice fortress through moulins? It’s too dangerous. Believe me, I’ve been in one.”
Kidah gives me a grin. “Oh, I believe you. That’s exactly why we think it might work.”