The sky was widening above her. Rocks were falling. Ice was falling. The earth was surrendering and she was going to be buried.
Are they trying to dig me out?
“Riley! Is that you?” She screamed, and her blood was pounding in her arm. “Lower a rope, I think I could hold on.”
More rock flew away. She watched stones the size of her body hurling across the sky through the narrow gap.
I don’t think Anvil could move that boulder.
Lissie let go of the chaos and fell back into her heart. Slow.
The wall vanished. The opening widened.
She stared in horror at the scale and scope of the digging. It was like watching the mountain be undone. Every moment another crash, more sky. More dirt and rock to fall on her.
Her face was covered in snow, ice and dirt. She brushed it away and refused to close her eyes.
What found me?
Thirty feet above her, then twenty. The rock face was tearing like paper, and she saw something blue. Flashes at first, and then clearly bare arms. Blue. Not lit from within but blue tinged skin in the fading morning light.
A flash of a face, too far to make out the details. It’s him. She knew in her heart it was the man who waved at her from the bones. From the tea leaves. From my dreams?
The sky continued to widen. The distance had shrunk to where she could see him in full. He was standing in the wound he had scarred into the earth. She watched as he plunged his fists into the rock beneath his feet, then bent and threw the shattered stone above him like it was a pile of leaves.
He looked at her from above, and she reached out her hand, but he did not take it.
“Thank you,” she said.
He did not reply. He slipped down now directly above her, and she watched the muscles on his bare back bulge as he braced his legs against the crevasse wall. The mountain moved, and her arm came free.
Freed, she stretched her good arm out to him.
He shook his head.
Well. She thought, and pulled herself up with her right arm. She braced with her legs, and climbed up the slope he had created for her. She could see her left arm now.
It could have been worse.
The fragment of white that peeked through her flesh was small. It was caked with blood, but she told her blood to stay. She raised the injury above her head, and began up the slope after the blue man.
“Can you carry me? Or let me lean on you, I’m injured.” She called up after him.
He was well past the edge. “It’s not far.” He called back. His voice was soft, like the sound of snow falling from a tree.
She forced one foot in front of the other. Her legs were stiff, but they seemed willing to cooperate and happy to be able to move again. Step, step, step. How far is not far to a man like this?