“ARE THERE SNAKES?”
Jana needed to know. She also worried about putting her hand on a spider in the dark, or having one shimmy up her leg as she walked by.
“Snakes only come out at night if you build a fire,” Wyatt told her. “The things to watch out for are nighthawks and owls. Owls are bigger than you think.”
Jumping off a cliff was one way to test her resolve and her devotion to Michael, Jana thought. Getting there at night was another. And on top of that, she now had to worry about getting an owl in her hair.
“Do they land on your shoulders or what?”
“Nah,” Wyatt drawled. “They just fly by and peck your eyes out. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about panthers. They say they’re extinct in this mountain range, but people who live up this way say they still hear a panther scream now and then at night.”
The trails along the top ridge and highest slopes of the mountain followed old, overgrown logging roads. Pieces of the trails were washed away by weather. Fallen trees crossed the rutted paths here and there no matter which way you chose.
“Turn on your flashlight, Webster,” Mars said. He touched Jana on the shoulder. “It’s just a path. There aren’t any panthers.”
Jana switched on her light and moved the beam across the face of the woods they were about to enter. It looked dangerous.
“I’ll go first,” Mars said. “Webster, grab my belt loop with one hand and come behind me. Wyatt will bring up the rear. Just hold on to my belt. When we have to climb over a log or something, I’ll stop and help you.”
It was pitch black under the trees. Jana kept her flashlight on her feet. She only let go of Mars’s belt once, when she slipped clambering over a fallen tree.
“Hoot,” Wyatt said behind her. “Hoot, hoot.”
“Not funny,” Jana said.
The long, curving expanse of Lookaway Rock seemed to glow in the darkness as they neared. The giant slice of granite caught what light there was from the stars and the waning moon. Shadows moved across the rock as swirls of mountain fog opened holes to the night sky, then quickly closed them.
“From the bottom, they say you can see pictures on the cliff when moonlight comes through the fog,” Mars told her. “It’s supposed to be like watching a movie.”
Jana directed the beam of her flashlight into the sky beyond the cliff’s edge. The light dead-ended in darkness.
“I wonder if they can see you fall,” she said.
“Sure they can,” Wyatt said. “Hey, Webster, I’m going to be a movie star instead of you tonight. How’s my makeup?” He pointed his flashlight at his face, rolling his one eye to make it look straight up. “Is my hair all right?”
The three of them stood at the outer edge of the rock, a few yards back from the sheer drop into the bare darkness of night. The rock was edged with a carpet of juniper moss.
Light gusts of air rode the rise of warmth from the floor of the gorge. Updrafts moved over the rock like water, cutting the legs out from under the fog. Swirls of mist danced over the rock. Jana stood close to Mars. There was enough light in the open air that she could see the breeze move the tips of his dark hair. It shimmered.
Wyatt turned off his flashlight. He handed it to Jana.
“If we’re all set, I’m out of here,” he said.
Mars tensed as Wyatt moved away from them, listing forward until he was standing on the rock, in the center of the curve of sloping granite that only a few yards out disappeared into the black sky. Wyatt leaned into the mist, into the night.
“Hey, Webster,” he called back in a whisper full of ragged breath. “Aren’t you going to tell me to break a leg?”
He lurched into an odd-looking run that reminded Jana of the backside of a camel. Wyatt swung his injured leg wildly forward and hurried his good leg to catch up so he could do it again. She watched him disappear.
The distant, falling scream sounded like someone riding a roller coaster. A roller coaster that didn’t come back. The scream grew faint, but it never seemed to stop.
Jana began to tremble. She was afraid. It came over her like a wave. She dropped her flashlight. It pointed nowhere.
“Don’t leave,” she said. Wrapping her arm around Mars’s waist, she leaned against him. As she held him, the night breeze moved across her face. She closed her eyes. Every part of her body was real. “Don’t leave me here.”
“I won’t,” Mars said. “I’m here.”
Jana dropped Wyatt’s flashlight and placed her other arm around Mars and squeezed. She was so tired of being alone, of being dead alone.
She pressed her face against his chest. His arms were around her. Mars was touching her low in the middle of her back. He was holding her. His flashlight dropped to the carpet of moss at their feet. Its beam of light crossed the dimmer glow from Jana’s flashlight that lay nearby.
Jana told herself she wasn’t going to cry. She felt fully human, fully comfortable and comforted for the first time since she’d died. She wanted to go to sleep like this, and sleep for a very long time.
“It’s okay,” Mars said quietly.
But it wasn’t okay, Jana thought. It wasn’t okay at all. She wanted to feel this way with Michael, not with Mars.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked. “Are you afraid of me?”
Mars had asked her what she was afraid of before. “I’m afraid of being dead,” Jana said. This time she added, “And I’m afraid of being alive.”
“I know.” His words were spoken so quietly they sounded like breathing and nothing else. “It’s okay,” Mars said again. “I know.”
Jana didn’t say a word.
“I’ll go back with you if you want to go back.”
Mars was so warm, too warm. Her thoughts wouldn’t hold while she was wrapped in the tremors of heat that came from the outside in and then, oddly, rose from inside her own living body. Mars was giving her earthly, physical life when he held her.
She forced herself to push away. She was going to jump. It was the only way she could become a Slider in time to do something about getting Michael back.
“Look,” she said. “I’m going through with it. I’ve thought about it. If you hold me, I can jump.”
Mars cleared his throat. His hand touched his hair.
“I want to tell you something first,” he said. “There’s something I know and I should have told you sooner. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t know if you would believe me.”
Jana waited. Then she remembered. “It’s that murder stuff,” she said, surprised that she had thought of it. “You were trying to tell me I was murdered since first period, first day. And showing me the lubricant spray on my bowling shoe, is that what you meant? Do you think Sherry murdered me?”
“No,” Mars said. “Michael is the one who sprayed your shoe. It wasn’t Sherry. It wasn’t Nathan. I watched it happen. He would have sprayed the other one if you had looked away a little longer.”
Jana considered it. It came down to intent, just like the difference between jumping and suicide. Michael hadn’t meant to hurt her. He certainly had no intention of killing her.
What Michael did was a stupid joke, she thought, but nothing more than that. She had made them go bowling. So he was getting even. It was supposed to be funny. Michael just thought she would slide around and look goofy . . . and everyone would laugh. Including Jana.
“He didn’t mean to kill me, Mars,” she said. “He didn’t want me dead. He just . . . he was just being a boy.”
Mars listened carefully. Her response was what he had feared it would be. Her love for Michael was that strong, that big. When someone loves someone else that much, you don’t try to kick holes in it. It wouldn’t do Jana any good not to love Michael. It was all she had. It was everything.
“He killed me,” she said more brightly, “so I’ll kill him.”
Mars didn’t think it was funny.
“To do that, I have to jump,” she added.
Her plan was in place. She was in the seventh maze. The one that Mr. Skinner hadn’t drawn yet. You didn’t turn left. You didn’t turn right. You turned an entirely new way. One you had never tried before.
“I know it’s not written down in that antique book word for word like this,” Jana said. “I know it’s not certain, but it’s pretty clear to everyone—to you, me, and Jameson. If I jump, I’ll come out of it a Slider.”
“Do you really want that?” Mars asked. “To be a Slider?”
“Of course I do. I want Michael. And I want me. It’s why I’m here tonight, Mars. You keep saying we’re here to learn something. That we have to find out things for ourselves. Well, for me, being a Slider is the way I’m going to learn. I know that sounds backwards to you, and that Wyatt thinks I’m a total ass clown. But being a Slider is my chance. It’s my chance to be me again.”
Mars couldn’t argue with that. Jana was always smarter than he thought she was going to be.
“I can’t do it without you,” she added. “If I jump alone, it will only be my spirit. If you jump holding me, I’ll have my body back. You make me real, Mars.”
“You have to ask me,” he said quietly. “You have to ask me to hold you when you jump, or I’ll be interfering in your fate.”
“Will you please hold me, Mars? All the way down?”
Jana took his hand in hers.
“Run with me,” she said. “And when we’re off the edge, put your arms around me.”
As they ran, Jana grabbed as much bodily life from Mars as he had to give her. But falling was not flying, no matter what they say. It was much faster than that. Her body locked against Mars, Jana forced herself to breathe to keep from passing out.
The two Sliders who made up the retrieval and recovery team loaded Jana’s broken body into the bed of the pickup, next to Mars’s.
Wyatt didn’t feel like talking yet. He stood next to the truck and leaned over them. Mars was still unconscious, but moving his hands.
Jana was dead still. Wyatt realized that she had managed a legitimate jump. She’d felt the slam.
Mars had to have been holding her for her body to be such a bloody mess. A Riser couldn’t be damaged like that falling alone. They could barely touch the earth at all.
She’d felt every wisp of the fall, from start to finish. It seemed impossible what they had done.
The moon had risen above the roving layer of clouds and mist along the mountaintop. Wyatt watched Jana’s left hand, crossed over her chest at the end of a broken wrist and a shattered elbow. As pools of fresh blood were sucked back inside her body, beads of blood rolled from the surface of the large class ring she wore, leaving the metal of the ring glinting in moonlight. Because the ring and the clothes she wore, the cell phone in her pocket, were items she had died with, they would all be good as new soon.
Clothes taken in trade by Sliders from the Planet stayed damaged, stained and torn, when you wore them on the Planet. Wyatt changed into a fresh shirt from clothes stored in the cab of the pickup. He selected one for Mars, who had rolled onto one side already and had drawn his legs up.
Mars would be sitting soon. Jana would take longer to recover. First-time physical recovery was always slow. They wouldn’t know whether or not she was a Slider until then.
Jumping, for a Riser, was an act well beyond those that merely earned demerits, Jameson had said. He’d told Mars and Wyatt that the chances were good that Jana would shift status if they could figure out a way she could jump physically, torturously in touch with earth, and not as the lighter spirit body that a Riser usually occupied on the Planet.
If a Slider jumped holding her, there was a good chance Jana would change status at the end of the fall. But they wouldn’t know for certain until it was over. No Riser had ever jumped before.
Mars sat up. Wyatt reached across the tailgate to give him a hand. Soon, Mars had changed shirts and was able to stand. He and Wyatt leaned on their elbows on the side of the truck bed and watched Jana.
“Did you tell her?” Wyatt asked.
“Part of it,” Mars confessed. “She knows her boyfriend did it. It didn’t change her mind about anything.”
“Her heart, you mean. It didn’t change her heart.”
“I didn’t think she really wanted to kill her boyfriend.”
“Now you know.”
“I thought she was going to turn back at any point,” Mars said. “Even while we fell, I thought she was going to let go.”
“Juliet never let go,” Wyatt said. He shrugged. “It’s love, man, what can I tell you?”
Jana moaned.
Wyatt and Mars shot glances at each other. Still unconscious, Jana’s body felt the pains of recovery, the residual internal bruising and incomplete mending from the jump.
Then she moved. Her arms first. One leg. The other.
Like Mars, she rolled onto her side and curled up as blood rushed through her body, feeding oxygen to her muscles, her brain. She coughed. Jana rolled onto her back and stretched her legs. Her knees worked, her ankles, her toes. “Ow,” she said, opening her eyes. She looked at the two faces looming over her in the moonlight. The pain in her head was rapidly speeding away.
“Why is it so warm?” she asked.