I looked over at him, my eyes widening in horror when I saw he was pointing his rifle at me.
“What are you doing?”
He lifted his face from the scope of the gun. “I’m going to shoot the rope off your hands.”
“What?” I squeaked. “No!”
“We need to get your hands free. Don’t move, Blaire. Corpse pose.”
Corpse pose. Now that’s ironic, isn’t it?
Oh god.
I focused forward and then I took twenty steady breaths. The shot was deafening, and then my hands were free. Which meant I no longer was tied to the chair. I grabbed the sides of that slippery chair, feeling like I was on a carnival ride gone wrong.
I looked over at him. “Now what?”
“Now I need you to stand on that chair and start swinging it. Swing it toward me. We need momentum.”
“For what?” I clutched the armrests of the chairs so tightly that the bones in my fingers ached.
“So you can jump toward me.”
“God, no! Viktor!” More tears leaked down my face.
“Come on, Blaire. You can do this for me.”
“I can’t,” I told him honestly.
“I want you to lift up your left hand and grab the rope that’s above your head.”
“No.”
“Blaire, you want me to come out there with you?”
Yes. “No, he’ll shoot you.”
“Try it my way first. You can do this.”
I slowly lifted my hand and dragged it up the rope above my head. The thick fibrous cord felt rough and prickly against my skin. I lifted my other hand along the other rope.
“Now I want you to hang on with all your being and get your feet beneath you, okay?”
I don’t know how I did it. I think I mostly blanked out, but suddenly I was standing on the chair, wavering. I felt like I was standing on a tightrope. If I hadn’t been so unsure of my balance, I would have sat back down again, but I was now simply too afraid to move.
He held my eyes and gave me an easy smile. “This is no different than when you were on a swing as a kid, Blaire. Remember when you used to stand on the seat and pump your legs to make the swing go higher?”
“My nanny never let me play on the swings. Not even to sit on them.”
He looked momentarily baffled. “Are you serious?”
“She said it was dangerous. Now I understand her side of things.” My voice was trembling.
I heard a whooshing sound, and then droplets of flame showered around me. I screamed and looked above my head. One of the ropes was on fire.
I screamed again as another flaming arrow flew over my head and another rope caught on fire. But this time, gunfire echoed around me. Viktor was against the wall of the tunnel, and he was shooting upwards.
“Now I know where the fucker is,” he said. “Things have turned in our favor.”
Ashes and burning threads of rope rained down around me, falling below my feet, before disappearing into the darkness.
“I’m not sure how this is an improvement,” I gasped.
“Okay. We have a time limit, Blaire. Time for you to start pumping those cute legs in earnest.”
This was my way of saving Viktor from risking his life. I moved to hold different ropes so that I was facing Viktor, and then I tentatively started to shift my weight back and forth, moving the chair a bit more with each shove of my legs.
“That’s it, darling,” he encouraged me, as he looked above at the ropes. “Just a bit harder, okay? You have to work a bit faster.”
Another flame arrow whooshed above me, and the light increased overhead as another rope ignited. More gunfire as a fourth flame arrow was shot. Now all the ropes above me were crackling in earnest, setting off an ugly smoky orange glow above my head.
I started to pump my legs harder. I could hear the ropes ominously creaking above my head. “Is this going to hold?”
“Yes, it’s going to hold. Keep going.”
“How do you know that?” I gasped from my exertion.
“I just know.”
But my luck ran out.
I screamed as one of the ropes snapped. The chair suddenly tilted to one side, throwing my balance off. I clung to the ropes above me as my feet scrambled on the slanted chair. The chair careened toward Viktor, but he was backing up. As I started swinging toward the other side, he came flying through the air toward me. The force of his weight against the ropes nearly sent me flying, but he grabbed me hard as we swung toward the other side of the abyss.
“Hang on, Blaire,” he grunted, pulling me to him.
I wrapped my arms around his neck as we swung backwards, once again a target in the sniper’s line of fire.
I felt the moment the bullet hit him. His body jerked hard. But somehow he managed to hang on. There was a responding fire from his gun, and then he roared in my ear as we swung wildly toward the other side with even more force.
And then, against my will, we were flying through the dark, through the air.
I could feel him throw me, and then I slid forward on the ledge on my side as gravel chewed into my shoulder, my hand and my legs. Dust kicked up into my mouth and eyes. I lay, collapsed, for a second. I was on the ledge on the other side of the tunnel. Beside my face, the flare burned an eerie orange.
Where is Viktor?
I sat up and spun around.
“Oh god,” I cried out as I saw Viktor half clinging to the edge. The lower half of his body was off the ledge. I scrambled toward him. Using a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I somehow managed to help him drag himself onto the ledge.
He was barely conscious as he rolled onto his back. “We made it.”
I looked around. We were on a ledge that was completely blocked off by rocks. I couldn’t see the upper ledge from this angle, which meant the sniper couldn’t see us either. All my energy went into not panicking.
“I need you to help me put pressure on my wound.”
“What?”
He tried to roll off his shoulders. “There are pressure bandages in my bag. Help me get my bag off.”
I yanked his bag off his shoulders, and then dumped everything out. I ripped and pressed bandages onto the wound in his abdomen. It reminded me of that night with my grandfather. But unlike my grandfather’s wound, which had been practically spurting, this one seemed to stop bleeding when I put pressure on it.
I looked around the ledge. There was no way out. We were basically buried in a coffin with a view. “Do you think he’s going to come to the other tunnel and shoot us?”
He pressed his hands over mine on the bandage. His eyes held mine captive. “I’m pretty sure I hit him.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a sob. “Well, that’s one good thing.”
“The plan was for us to climb out the air shaft.”
“What air shaft?”
He pointed up to a small black air vent, about chest high, that I had completely missed the first three times I’d looked around. “Blaire, I am not going to be able to crawl out.”
I was crying so hard I could barely speak. “We’re stuck here.”
“No, just me.”
He wanted me to crawl into that tiny black hole and disappear into the rock face.
Never going to happen.
“Is your wound bad?”
He lifted his head. “Gut shot, slow bleed, high risk of infection. I have maybe an hour, two max, before I will need surgery.”