Albatraoz

Bzzzz.

Bzzzz.

"Mmf."

The phone continues its assault against her jaw, half-buried in the pillow. An eye peels open on the alarm clock. It's 8:47pm. Not the most vivacious of bed times.

Bzzzz.

"Fuck sake."

The phone screen is too bright to read; the number swims, an international blur she doesn't bother to parse. With a quick moistening of the lips, she answers anyway.

"Hello?"

"Thank g- yeah - hi, I can't read your damn writing."

She blinks at the ceiling, rubbing a flake of mascara from the corner of an eye.

"…What?"

The voice is pitched low. American? Coming out urgent, and sort of hushed down by what sounds like gritted teeth.

Two and a half thousand kilometres away, on a terrace that overlooks the harbour at Gibraltar, Sam stands at a balustrade with a glass of very expensive wine and a crushed up napkin going warm in his hand.

The terrace belongs to one Eduardo Tavares - sixties, aviator-donning, charisma of a silver fox who has spent his life getting everything he wants.

The terrace is beautiful. The terrace also comes with discreetly placed armed men, of whom Sam has counted two inside the patio doors behind him and three more dotted along the lawn that slopes down toward the harbour wall, each doing a creditable impression of garden statuary while wearing the kind of jacket that, in his experience, is tailored to disguise a shoulder holster.

Sam is wearing a rented navy dinner jacket. Sam hates dinner jackets.

The napkin in his other hand bears a phone number written in Genevieve's handwriting - Genevieve being a Mancunian antiques trader who'd lived above a chip shop in Hulme for three decades before money and an inadvisable second husband had relocated her to a tasteful little apartment north of the Gibraltan Marina Bay, and who is, by some margin, the most reliable person Sam Drake knows on the subject of pre-twentieth-century European wine. Her phone manner is brisk. Her research, impeccable. Her handwriting is a hate crime against legibility.

The number on the napkin contains, among others, two digits that Sam cannot, with any confidence, identify.

"Your writing," Sam says, into the phone. "Is this a five or a six? Ah, hell - doesn't matter - I need -"

"I - sorry, who is this?"

A pause. He looks at the napkin. He looks at the phone.

"…Who's this?"

Five or six? Seven or one? He's tried the six; that was a Brighton B&B. He's now on the five, which sounds sleepy and - as he focuses - not at all like Genevieve, which means one of two things: either he's been conned, or Gen's writing is simply dogshit. Both are possibilities. Neither helps him.

God, British cell numbers are stupid.

"You called me!"

"Yeah, but - hang on, is this not -" And there it is, the dawning realisation: this is not Genevieve. The woman who'd promised to be on the other end of this number - ready with a laptop and expert knowledge and the answer that might just keep Sam from being shot, drowned or castrated - does not exist on this line.

"- ah, shit." He hangs up, leaning against the balcony.

She holds the phone away from her face and squints.

Call Ended - 00:14.

She rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm and pulls a small screwed-up face at the ceiling - eyebrows drawn, mouth pursed sideways, the universal half-conscious the fuck was that - before rolling toward the wall with a tut, already letting the call dissolve back into the soup of half-dreams it interrupted.

Sam stands on the terrace looking at the dead screen of a burner phone, trying to sum up his remaining options.

The calculations are bleak.

Two minutes ago, before the bodyguard had interrupted them, Eduardo had been sitting across the dinner table from Sam smiling his soft pleasant smile and saying, with one hand resting beside the velvet-lined wooden case containing thirty thousand Gibraltar Pounds' worth of seventeenth-century Madeira:

"Now then, Mr. Richards."

The name sits like a slightly itchy collar. Mr. Christopher Richards is the alias on the passport Sam has currently tucked into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, on the business cards Genevieve had run up at a print shop, on the booking for the hotel he is, hopefully, going to be sleeping in tonight. Mr. Richards is a sommelier of mid-Atlantic provenance and apparently considerable means who specialises in pre-Napoleonic European wines and works for ultra-high net worth clients in the States.

Mr. Richards, by the strictest definition of the word, does not exist.

Sam smiles at Eduardo the smile Mr. Richards would smile, which is broadly the same as Sam's smile, only slightly more wealthy.

"Before we shake on this - and I do hope we will shake on this - humour me with one last thing."

The 'one last thing' had been a name. The name of the smuggler who had brought the rebottled high-end supermarket Rioja, worth perhaps two hundred Gibraltar Pounds into Gibraltar.

Sam had forgotten the name they'd settled on. The name that linked to the fake label and engravings on the bottle.

Sam had not known the name despite Genevieve having quizzed him on the brief twice over the phone in the last forty-eight hours, because Sam had, with careless confidence, assured her he had it locked down.

He had opened his mouth, spoonfed himself another mouthful of the pistachio glop that had been served for dessert - chewing slowly, stalling, attempting to swallow around a tongue that had become inexplicably useless - and his brain had produced José and Joaquín and Manuel and Pedro in rapid undifferentiated succession, and he had been milliseconds from saying José Manuel with the kind of conviction that, on this terrace, with these armed men, would have got him politely walked off the harbour wall with his hands tied behind his back.

And then, in a stroke of miraculous luck, the bodyguard had stepped in. Some private call. Five minutes, Mr. Richards. Five minutes.Eduardo had risen, sighed, and followed his man inside.

The patio doors had slid shut.

And Sam, alone with a glass of wine and a ticking clock in his head, had walked to the lawn-side balustrade - the corner of the terrace furthest from the patio doors and the perimeter men, where the breeze off the harbour was loudest and the sound of his voice would carry to no one - and had dialled the six. The six was Brighton. He had dialled the five. The five was the disgruntled Brit.

That has now been hung up on.

Eduardo will be back in - Sam glances at the dim shape of him through the smoked glass of the patio doors, still on the phone, still gesticulating - Four minutes. Maybe.

The bottle is, currently, sitting on the dining table behind him, beside the dupe Sam has been bamboozling him into trading it for. The Madeira, in its velvet-lined wooden case, glints at Sam in the candlelight beside the dupe he’s brought with him that’s worth a mere fraction of the thirty-seven thousand smackeroonies that the legit bottle will fetch the moment he can deposit it into the hands of the man who sent him here.

The man who arranged the meeting, who fronted the cover story, who is expecting Sam to walk off a flight in twenty-four hours' time with a thirty-seven-thousand-pound bottle of fortified Portuguese wine and a clean exit - the man Sam took a job from is not the kind of man you turn up to empty-handed. Not if you want to remain un-scalped.

He looks at the burner.

He looks at the napkin.

And with a quick prayer up to whatever may or may not be looking down at him, he redials.

A hop, skip and a flight away, her phone buzzes again, and she groans into the pillow - "Oh, you're joking" - and lets it ring, two times, three, on principle. She answers on the fourth, eyes closed.

"After calling the wrong number," she says, "it's quite normal not to do it again."

"Yeah, no, listen -"

"It's the etiquette. You're meant to apologise via text, if anything, not double down with -"

"Okay, okay, hold on a sec -"

"- a second attempt, like the issue was my answering technique -"

"Hear me out. Jesus."

And against his every instinct, against the men and the napkin and the very real possibility of dying in a fancy house over a bottle of wine, Sam huffs out a tense breath; the noise of a man who would, on any other Tuesday, be enjoying this exchange enormously, and who is currently registering the loss of that pleasure as one more grievance to add to his evening.

She hears the almost-laugh. She doesn't mean to smile into the pillow.

"Hear you out about what?” she says.

He glances sideways. The terrace is still empty behind him. The perimeter men are still doing their statuary impressions in the middle distance. The patio doors are still shut.

"I appreciate this is… unconventional -"

"Just a tad, mate."

"- but have you got, by any chance, access to the, uh, the internet?"

That wakes a small patch of her brain. She opens one eye. "You're cold-calling random people for Google access? Strange man."

"Hey, that’s not nice-"

"Just use your phone!"

"Look, this is - I'm in a slightly time-sensitive situation, and the girl whose number this is meant to be is the girl who'd normally do the googly thing, and I can't read her writing, so - here you are."

"Here I am."

"Yep - and by the time I figure out which digit I screwed up, I might be… let's say, somewhere I'd rather not be, so -"

She sits up and narrows her eyes at the dark, suddenly and irritatingly awake, suddenly and irritatingly interested.

"I suppose I can squeeze in one more good deed for the day. What do you need, good sir? Are - are you good?" she says, half hard-done-by, half something else.

"Thank you, Lord. Uh - jury's out." Relief moves through Sam so cleanly it gives him butterflies.

She snickers.

"M'kay. You know your, uh - your Gibraltar history?" He says, expecting an instant 'no'.

A beat. "My what?"

"Gibraltar - as in, the R-"

"Like the Rock of. Yes, I know a little." She snorts, eyeing up her laptop sat at the end of her bed where she'd left it before her power nap. "Are you having me on?"

Sam frowns. "Having you - what? On what? What does that mean?"

"Don't worry - carry on."

Sam glances over his shoulder at the patio doors. Scary Eduardo, still gesticulating through smoked glass. Still on the phone. Sam pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a small breath, because the carry on and the snort have just cost him about six valuable seconds of his finite couple of minutes.

"Uh… Eighteenth century, specifically the lead-up to the Great Siege. There's a Portuguese name I need, of a - of a guy, who -"

"You want me to Google something about Gibraltar?" Her fingers are already moving on the laptop keyboard - thunk-thunk-thunk on her password, the electronic huff of a screen waking up, and of course the document open on it is the third draft of an essay on Iberian-peninsula trade routes in the long eighteenth century, and the cosmic improbability of this - of a stranger ringing her in need of the one thing she happens to be writing fifteen thousand words about - is so absurd she doesn't even have the wherewithal to find it suspicious.

"Yes."

"A Portuguese guy…" She drags her essay tab to the side of the screen with the heel of her thumb and opens a new one, the Google homepage loading beside it.

"Correct."

"In a hurry."

He swirls the wine in his glass with a wrist that has gone slightly impatient on him, the candlelight catching the meniscus.

From the other end of the line he can hear the faint clatter of distant typing, fast and assured.

"A Portuguese guy who smuggled wine into the island. Yep. I think my life as a man with all his original limbs depends on it."

The laugh that punches out of her is involuntary and faintly unhinged.

"Crikey. I hope I'm not becoming an accomplice in something illegal."

The joke saws slightly too close to the bone for comfort.

"Mm," he says. "Yeah. Ha."

"Hang on," she says, fortunately distracted. "Just so we're clear - when you say lead-up, you mean the British garrison period, not the Spanish reconquest attempts, yeah?"

Sam stops his nervous fidgeting, one hand braced on the cool stone, wine glass momentarily forgotten - because the woman on the phone has just produced a sentence he did not have the imagination to expect.

"…I'm sorry, what?"

"It matters which side of the supply blockade your guy was on," she says, briskly, scrolling. "If he was running goods into Gibraltar he's a smuggler-merchant working with the British. If he was running them to the Spanish lines, he's the other thing entirely. Different categories of person. The records sit in different places. It'll help me narrow it down."

And here is the thing that Sam hasn't budgeted for: that he would be standing in a borrowed dinner jacket with armed men breathing behind him - and that he would find himself charmed. Genuinely, inconveniently charmed, by a voice.

He's the literate one, the competent one, the guy in any given operation who can read a room and a document and a man's face, and he has just been comprehensively out-classed on a subject by a sleepy undergraduate in another country, and the experience is - he is appalled to discover - delightful.

He realises he is smiling. In mortal peril. Like a man on a date, and for one full second the perimeter men and the thirty thousand and the entire structure of the immediate threat of being rumbled recede to a pleasant background hum behind the considerably more pressing question of who is this person and how soon can he find an excuse to talk to her again -

"…Did I - did I call a historian?" he asks, and it comes out softer than he means it to.

"You rang a History undergrad," she says, primly. "Whose current module's on trade routes on the Iberian peninsula. Lucky you."

"Lucky me," he repeats, and he'd fistbump the air in relief if the sudden movement wouldn't get him shot on sight. "Right. Into Gibraltar. He was running stuff into. Smuggler. Wine."

She types. A list spills onto the screen after a few clicks - several dozens of names, the odd tagged painting or old photograph, the kind of Wikipedia rabbit-hole that would normally claim an entire Sunday afternoon.

"Ooh, long list of wine smugglers here. Can you narrow it down at all?"

He frowns into the harbour breeze, foot tapping nervously against the base of the balustrade. "This guy was in the salt trade too. Somethin' about Persian… somethin'?"

She types, taking in the accent as her lower lip snags between her teeth. He listens - the fast clack of her keyboard threading down the line, weirdly intimate at this distance, the sound of someone working on his behalf.

"Okay. Smaller list. Got any inkling as to a name?"

"Shit, uh… João something. Maybe Joaquim. Definitely a J."

"Cool. Cool cool cool. Anything else?"

"I'm working off a bar napkin here, sweetheart. Just… toss a name my way. I'll know it when I hear it."

The word slides in sideways and parks itself somewhere behind her ribs.

Sweetheart. Her brain - her treacherous, sleep-deprived, suddenly-very-awake brain - does a rapid double-take around the word, turns it over, examines it from several angles, and arrives at no conclusion except that she would, on balance, not mind hearing it again.

The cursor blinks. The search loads. She tells herself it was nothing, a tacky Americanism, a verbal tic, the kind of thing men like him probably say to the entire female population of whatever country they happen to be doing something nefarious in. She tells herself this firmly, though she doesn't entirely believe it.

"Miguel… Rodrig-"

"Nope."

”Ricardo Mag-“

”nah, no it’s… it’s definitely a j. Keep goin’.”

"Uhhh… João Pereira de Sousa," she reads off the screen. "Wine and Persian Blue salt. Big in the run-up to the Siege. There's a portrait - huge moustache."

A beat of silence on his end. Then a soft, disbelieving exhale. "Yes. Yes. Pereira. Moustache. That's - that's him, holy shit."

"Glad I could -"

The patio doors slide open behind him.

Sam clocks the sound before he sees it, and by the time Eduardo's voice reaches him - terribly sorry, Mr. Richards, terribly sorry, that was my daughter, you know how it is - Sam has already turned, glass in hand, the burner palmed and dropping smoothly into the inner pocket of his dinner jacket, his thumb finding the off button by touch alone in the half-second it takes to face Eduardo with a polite smile.

"Beautiful view." Sam says.

"Isn't it." Eduardo crosses the terrace, gesturing for Sam to return to the table. "I always think the harbour at night is the most honest part of this place. Everything else is theatrics.”

Theatrics. Sam’s collar tightens.

“Come - let's not keep you any longer than I already have. Where were we?"

"Your last question, I believe."

"Ah. Yes." Eduardo settles into his chair. Lifts his glass. Smiles. "The smuggler of this bottle of yours."

Sam swirls his wine. Sips it. Lets the pause sit - not too long, not too short, the considered pause of a man producing a name from comfortable memory rather than from a phone call concluded five seconds ago - and meets Eduardo's eyes across the table.

"João Pereira de Sousa," he says. "Wine, including this fine bottle here, and Persian Blue salt. Big moustache, by all accounts."

Eduardo's smile broadens. He raises his glass.

"Well. To Mr. de Sousa," he murmurs. "And… to a very pleasant evening, Mr. Richards."

Two and a half thousand kilometres away, in a darkened bedroom in South East England, the woman whose name Sam is yet to know holds her phone away from her face and watches the screen go dark - Call Ended - 04:01 - with a small, slightly bewildered smile.

Well.

That was -

That was something.

She sets the phone, face-down, on the bedside table. She closes the laptop. She lies on her back in the dark for what feels like a long time, looking at the ceiling.

She does not, for some time, go back to sleep. She lies there and replays it - the I can't read your damn writing, the supply-blockade beat, the laugh he'd huffed when she'd corrected him - vanished, mid-sentence - and she finds, to her considerable irritation, that the word her brain keeps drifting back to, is sweetheart.

She pulls the duvet up over her mouth and squeezes her eyes shut.

She falls asleep, eventually, still faintly smiling, with no idea that two and a half thousand kilometres away a man she will not meet in person for two more years is currently being shaken warmly by the hand of a man named Eduardo Tavares, who has just handed him a velvet-lined wooden case containing almost forty grands' worth of seventeenth-century fortified Portuguese wine, and who is telling him, with great sincerity, what a pleasure it has been to do business with such a knowledgeable gentleman.

In the morning there will be a text from an unknown American number, sent at what must have been three a.m. her time.

Made it. All limbs accounted for. I owe you a drink. Sam.

She will read it three times. She'll smile. She'll not reply for two days because she's got an interview at a pub and until that's over, she can't focus on anything else.

She will then reply which limb were you most worried about losing? - and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

  //

  You come to with a wrench.

Lungs first - a single violent inhale that sends you coughing on spit - and then hard, teeth-rattling impact, shoulder-first into rock, head jolted hard enough to white out everything else for a half-second.

The wet gurgle that comes out of your throat isn't a sound you've made before, doubling and tripling off a tough surface you can't see, and your eyes are open but your brain hasn't caught up and the dark is -

The dark hares violently from side to side.

The headtorch beam careens wildly, and you arc back the way you came, fast, and hit stone again on the same shoulder and this time you scream, ragged and pained, because you don't know where you are, you don't know what's happening, your body is in agony in seven places at once and-

You're swinging.

What.

What, what, what -

You slow. The beam slows with you, dragging in long strokes that show you everything in the same fractured stutter - rock face, void, rock face, void.

You're surrounded by quiet.

Just your breathing and the slow creak of rope somewhere above you.

You blink. Slow. Thoroughly disoriented. The beam steadies on a patch of pale rockface two arms' length from your nose.

There's a pulsing in your cheeks. Heavy, throbbing, behind your eyes, in your gums, in the bridge of your nose where there's a crust of dried blood flaking when you grimace. The very specific swelling, thudding sort of feeling that occurs when you're upside down for too long-

Oh.

Oh, no.

You're upside down.

You crane your neck - try to, at least, every muscle in it protesting.

Boot.

Rope.

Harness.

"What the fuck?"

A single thigh loop of the harness - the bit that should be wrapped snug around the top of your leg - was, wrapped snug, as you recall your exchange with Rob - has slid the entire length of your leg and caught, just barely, on the lip of your boot. That's it. That is what's holding you.

"What the f- no - no no nonononono-"

One frayed strip of canvas webbing hooked over the cuff of a hiking boot, and beyond that, tight rope feeding up into the dark.

No carabiner at your hip. No chest piece across your sternum. No clip, no buckle, no substantial anchor of any kind.

You whimper, too afraid to care about how pathetic you sound.

What the fuck happened?

You twist your free hand up to your waist and find the bare, slightly sweat-dampened cotton where the rig should be, and the understanding begins to slot into place.

You took the harness off.

You - she - it, whatever - undid every buckle and the thigh loop had slipped and caught itself on your boot on the way down by sheer luck.

Your stomach lurches.

"No - no - no, no, no -" you repeat, head frantically turning to the best of its ability to find an escape route.

The walkie-talkie. Get the walkie-talkie. Tell them. Tell them - they can pull you up, they can -

Your free hand fumbles at your hip - the webbing loop where the walkie-talkie should be clipped - and finds nothing. Empty. Empty webbing. Empty everything.

A sob rips out of you before you can catch it.

“Shit!”

You can’t -

You can’t tell them. They don’t know. They’ll be standing around the well right now, Scott staring at his watch, calling in every few minutes to see if you're conscious, waiting for you to radio back like a good girl and tell them what you’ve found, and you can’t - you can’t - and how long has it been already, how long were you out?

The other realisation arrives in tandem: you'd been holding something. Are still holding something. That's why you're… you again.

Hard, metal, the bite of an edge against the meat of your palm. Your fist is locked around it so tight it's gone numb.

You open it.

Slowly. Every joint pulsates in overexertion.

The headtorch beam catches the gleam first - a wink of tarnished gold against your blood-streaked palm - and then the shape resolves, and your stomach goes cold all over again.

A cufflink. The cufflink. The accompaniment to the one behind the glass casing in the British Museum that you've spent the last three weeks looking for.

Set into metal gone the colour of old tea, engraved with something dark and curling that you can't make out from this angle and don't have the strength to.

Of course.

Of course.

The thing he sent you down here for. The thing Emaan moved before he died, the thing Campbell could never find, the thing your body stripped a harness off in the dark to claw out of a recess in a rock-face and seemingly took a fucking nosedive for, bringing you back into yourself in the split second your fist clenched tight around it.

The edges have left impressions in your skin.

Hold onto it. Hold onto it. Don't drop it.

Your fingers won't unclench properly. They've been locked around this thing for god knows how long and the joints have set; you have to coax them open with your other hand, finger by stiff, sore finger, and the cufflink lifts free of your palm with sticky reluctance where dried blood has glued it to your skin.

This stupid fucking thing is all that's keeping you conscious.

The pocket. Your shorts. The thigh pocket. Get it in the pocket.

Your other hand fumbles down - no- up - across your hip, past where the harness should be, to the seam of your shorts, and you cannot find the zip- you can't find it, your fingers are too clumsy and trembly and the fabric is bunched and there is a single hot, sobbing second where you are absolutely certain you are going to drop it, you are going to drop it and watch it fall and listen for the splash or the thunk and then you pass out again and turn into little more than offal on the ground beneath you-

There.

Zip. You catch it. You pinch it between two unsteady fingertips and you draw it back along the pocket seam and you hold the lip open with your thumb and you slot the cufflink in, edge first, and it slides down into the cargo pocket with a dead weight that you feel against your thigh, and you zip it closed - slow, slow, do not pull it off the track - and then you press your palm flat over the outside of the pocket and feel the lump of it through the fabric, and you press, and you press, and you press, like if you press hard enough it might actually transport you to wherever you fell from -

You’re crying again.

Your body jolts.

A muscle spasm, somewhere in your dangling leg, the thigh, the one not tangled in rope - and your whole weight shifts, one bare inch, and the rope above your tangled calf gives a creak that you feel in your teeth.

You go very still.

The chamber goes very still.

The headtorch beam stops swinging.

Oh.

A hot wash of panic floods up through you and your eyes blur with tears that blind you, keep your eyes full and dribble down- up - into your eyebrows because you are upside down, and you let out a wet laugh that turns into a sob halfway through, and your face is pulsing now, throbbing, every heartbeat hammering against the backs of your eyes, and you can taste copper at the back of your throat, and you can’t -

You can’t stay like this.

You can’t stay like this. And now, there's a clock running because the next jolt of your body weight against this rope will undo whatever tangle is holding you up.

You have to -

“Checking in, darl’. You back in the room?”

You go rigid.

It’s faint. Distant. Crackly. It’s up. Somewhere above you in the dark, threading down through stone, a thin compressed approximation of Scott’s drawl carried by the geometry of the cave from wherever the walkie-talkie is - wherever you-she-it dropped it, wherever you came over the edge from, the lip of rock circling above you.

You sob once more, hard, and then choke it down - choke it, physically, jaw clenching so hard it hurts - because crying is making the rope move and the rope can't move any more.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

No one is going to save you this time.

Right. Fine. Get on with it, then. Flip right-way-up. Climb two metres. Get to the harness. Get clipped. Then think about everything else.

You shift your weight, infinitesimally. Test the harness loop. It creaks… but holds around your ankle.

A person who does pull-ups for fun could perhaps navigate their way out of this situation. An acrobat with incredible core strength, maybe, with hands that aren't half-bandaged and missing nails. You picture, briefly, Scott doing it, in all his lithe athleticism. Sam, who once pulled himself up onto a rotten plank twenty feet above a river with you under his chest, his teeth bared and his -

No Sam down here, though. Haha! No Sam to put his life on the line for you this time.

The reminder of his existence settles like silt, and another laugh punches out of you - a high, nigh-on hysterical laugh, because you are dangling upside down by one leg in the dark in a cave under a desert with blood crusted on your face and you are still - still - thinking about Samuel fucking Drake -

"FUCK -"

It rips out of you. The chamber takes it and ricochets it back to you in pieces, and the rope creaks, and you freeze, every muscle locking, the laugh dying in your throat as the swing rocks you gently to and from the wall again.

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Stop it.

You tip your head back - forward, up - and look at the carabiner two metres above you, at the harness hanging from it like the world's most sadistic piñata, and you start, with shaking hands, to think about how a woman who is not built for this has no choice but to give it a go.

Okay. Okay.

Abolish the imagination and focus on the facts. Science. Mathematics. The maths is mercifully simple: you move, or you die. You don't move, you pass out from lightheadedness. You pass out, your body relaxes. Your body relaxes, your boot un-flexes. Your boot un-flexes, the loop slips. The loop slips, you fall. You fall, you die.

No variables.

No clever way out. No help coming. No secret third option. There is, in fact, nothing to lose.

You try the easy thing first.

You bring both hands up and try to curl - a slow, careful crunch, drawing your torso up toward your snagged leg, reaching for your ankle, for the strap, for anything you might be able to grab onto and pull yourself up by - and your abdominal muscles, or lack thereof, quiver, and your bruised ribs pulsate, and you make it perhaps thirty degrees off vertical before your core gives out completely and you flop back down into the dead-hang with a small, defeated oof and the rope creaks at you reproachfully.

You squeeze your eyes shut, ignoring the tears and the snot and will yourself to get a grip.

You try again.

You make it less far.

You try a third time and your stomach muscles actually cramp, a hot knotting seize that makes you gasp and clutch at your own torso and the swing shifts and the rope creaks and you go very, very still.

Right.

That's not happening.

You hang there. Dead weight. Arms drifting limp toward the bottom of the chamber far below, blood pulsing in your skull, breath ragged, and for a long stretched second you are just - done. You could stop trying.

You could just hang here. You could… let the boot un-flex. Close your eyes and let the loop slip and let gravity do the rest, and it would be over, and there would be no more caves, no more of your body being used against you, no more Scott, no more anything -

Look at you. The delirium fuelled by the blood in your head has you talking to yourself.

Look at you. Melodramatic little bitch. Drugged and kidnapped and bundled across an ocean and tied into a harness by an Australian bellend, and you're going to lie down for it. You're going to hang here and die for it. Not even bother to find out what's happening to you so you can at least TRY to argue your way in court.

You scoff.

And Sam - Sam was right, wasn't he? Wasn't he, sweetheart? People like him don't fit alongside people like you, because people like you can't survive a hike without his hand on your back. People like you should be pulling pints and reading Reddit forums, whose adventures should be deciding what Tesco meal deal combination they're going to try next. People like you should never have pushed and pushed and pushed to get on a plane in the first place -

"FUUUUUCK!" you snarl and crunch again.

You crunch hard - full-body, jaw clenched, a noise tearing out of your throat as pain sears through you- and you don't make it to your ankle, you don't even come close, but the motion swings you, and you ride it, panting as your eyes catch the wall that's assaulted you multiple times already.

You keep moving. The rockface comes into reach. Deep orange stone with a scatter of cracks, of small ledges, of the kind of vague handholds a real climber would dismiss as nothing -

- and at the apex of the next swing your hands hit it.

The impact is agony. Your bandaged fingers slap stone and your nails - what's left of them - drag across rough surface and you scrabble, like a frantic squirrel, fingertips scraping for any kind of bite, and for a split second you think you have it, you think your fingers have caught a ridge -

- and then you don't, and the swing reverses, and you spin away from the wall, dangling, sobbing, your hands now actively bleeding through the bandages where the gauze has torn open, and the swing carries you back into the void.

"No, no, no, no -"

The rope jolts. An inch. Less than an inch. The loop shifts on your boot, slides down a fraction of a centimetre toward the heel, and the cuff catches it again - just - just barely -

You crunch on the next forward swing with a noise that doesn't sound like you, throwing your whole body weight into the arc, and you hit the wall again and this time you are ready - this time your hands are clawed before they touch, this time you find a crack with your right fingertips and a tiny rough ledge with your left thumb and you cling, you cling with everything you have, your destroyed hands screaming, your shoulder screaming, your face dripping, and you bring your free leg up - the one that isn't trapped in the loop - and you scrape your boot toe against the rock until it catches on something, anything, a tiny lip of stone, a crack, you don't know and you don't care, and you wedge it in and you press.

You're holding to a wall by three damaged fingers, a thumb, and the toe of one boot, and it is, for now, holding back.

You re-assess. The loop keeping you alive is on your ankle, and to get a hand on it you are going to have to fold yourself in half, head toward foot, with only your grip on stone for ballast.

You walk your fingers up the cracks and scrape your boot higher bit by bit. Hauling your torso up the rockface in tiny inverted crunches, your spine curling toward your snagged leg, folding yourself into a strange crescent shape, in the most graceless humiliating insect-on-a-windshield manner imaginable, but you are moving, and your ankle is closer, and the loop is closer, and -

A handhold gives.

A flake of rock comes away under your right hand with a small dry crack and you gasp, slipping - six inches, eight, your boot scrabbling for the lip it had just left - and the thigh loop slithers down toward the heel, and you can feel it, the canvas dragging along the leather, and you know - you know - it is about to come off entirely -

You lunge. At the ankle. Your free hand throws itself up and back and your fingers close on canvas - on the loop - on the very bottom edge of the harness webbing as the thigh loop slides off your heel and lets you go -

- and you swing.

You swing wildly off the harness strap, one-handed, your trapped leg now dangling free, the entirety of your body weight suspended from the four fingers and thumb of your excruciatingly sore hand.

You scream. You can't help it. You scream and you swing and you do not let go.

The harness creaks as you rapidly bring your left hand up.

Two hands on the harness.

You loop your forearm through one of the leg loops - through it, properly, elbow-deep, hooking your bicep over the canvas - and you hang from the bend of your own elbow, then up over your shoulder and your hands shake out.

You are right-side up.

You let yourself cry properly for ten seconds because you have just survived the worst five minutes of your life.

The blood in your face begins to drain. The pulse behind your eyes eases. Your vision, which had been blooming black at the edges, starts to clear. You hadn't realised how bad it had got until it begins to lift, and the relief is so palpable it nauseates you.

Then you reach up, free hand trembling, and you take hold of the proper line - the line, the rope above the carabiner, the one that goes up - and you wrap a coil of it around your forearm, and another around your wrist, and with a much simpler swing now you're upright, you brace your boots against the rockface. Soles flat, knees bent, and you begin, in the slow shaking manner of someone who is running on stolen reserves, to walk yourself up.

The burn in your forearms, the shake in your knees, the rope creaking, the slow shuffle of boots against rock - and then there's a gap, and then you are here, dragging yourself up and over the edge on your stomach, fingernails scrabbling, knees scraping, the harness loose and twisted around your torso, and just as your arms give out, you collapse face-first onto cool stone.

And then every feeling that had to be pushed aside to make room for adrenaline comes out of you.

There is no one to perform for. To crack a joke for. And the sob that comes up out of your chest is so big it bends you forward until your breath indents the sand beneath you. The next one folds you all the way down. You go from all fours to your side to a small curled infantile thing on the ground, the harness twisted under you, your cheek against grit, and you wail.

Wail.

The body emptying itself - an ugly, gulping, broken series of splutters, no shape, no rhythm, just heaving, guttural cries that come up faster than you can take air for them, until you're choking on your own breath and gasping and sobbing again.

You don't try to stop it.

You don't think you could stop it.

Your hands come up over your face - your forearms, really, because your hands are destroyed, you can't bear to touch yourself with them - and you press your arms across your eyes and you sob into the crook of them and you can smell the iron of your own blood and the salt of your own tears and sweat and you cry, and cry, and cry.

"Don't want this," you babble, wet and muffled, into your own forearms. "I don't - I want to go home-"

It's small. A child's voice. A six-year-old who fell off their scooter and scraped their knee.

"I want to go home - I want to go home, I want to -"

What did you do?

What did you do to deserve this?

You don't know. You genuinely, genuinely don't know. You were pulling pints in shitty old South East London three months ago. You were fine. You were bored. You were a person with a job, studying for your Masters, a small bungalow of your own, and a slightly disappointing dating life and an opinion about the new Gail's opening up on the high street, and now you are lying on stone in a cave in a desert in a country that used to excite you, with blood crusted in your hairline and a man's antique cufflink zipped into your shorts, and your hands are gone - your hands, your hands -

You sob harder.

After Cornwall - after the bridge, after the rotten plank, after Sam's chest over yours and his hands fisted in your jacket - you'd made a joke about it. Lying on the stone catching your breath, crying and laughing at once, you'd looked up at him and said something, you can't remember what, something stupid and flippant - you'd been good at that - shrugging things off.

You try now. To turn your tears into laughter. The mouth tries to do it. Well, that was a bit much. That's one for the diary. There's a career in the circus for me yet.

But the reflex is empty. There is no light, wry version of this.

God, you're sick of the taste of blood.

Sick of going back to whatever godforsaken hotel or rental Scott's carted you off to and having to stare in the mirror for ages just to recognise yourself.

Because that’s what it takes, now. Long minutes at a bathroom sink, leaning in close enough to fog the glass, looking past the bruises and the gauze and the puffy eyes and the sunburn and the slack tired set of your mouth, hunting for you.

Sometimes you find her. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes she’s somewhere behind the eyes, just barely, and you have to hold her gaze until she looks back.

You hate it.

You hate that you can’t just - you can’t just be seen. You can’t be looked at by someone who knows you well enough to do the work for you. Who looks at you with kinder eyes. You can’t be looked at the way -

You want his hands on your face. Broad and a little calloused and warm, cupping your jaw, thumbs at your cheekbones - looking down at you the way he had then, like there was nothing in the room except you, like the rest of him had gone quiet just so the looking could be louder than your mind after waking up in another man's brain matter.

You want him to look past the blood crusted in your hairline again. The grime. The split lip you hadn't noticed until just now, the salt of tears stinging it. Just like he did in Chatham. The bruise blooming along your side where the rockface had walloped you. Your disgusting hands. You want him to look past all of it to whatever's behind all that - the you of you, the thing you can barely feel anymore - and you want him to thumb a streak of blood off your cheekbone and say it in that quiet, softened voice he uses when there's no one around to hear it, you're alright, sweetheart, I've got you, you're alright -

You wipe your eyes with the backs of your wrists. How fucking pathetic.

You hate him.

You hate him and you miss him, and it's unfair and stupid and embarrassing because he's the reason you're here, he is the reason, and yet here you are, lying in the dark with your face in your forearms wanting him to hold you, and you don't know how both things can be true at once and you don't have the strength to work it out, you don't have the strength to do anything -

Your stomach turns.

A flat, sudden lurch - the adrenaline finally catching up with you, your body remembering it's been hanging upside down, that it just escaped death again, that it hasn't slept properly in weeks and that still has no fucking clue about what exactly turns it into this feral beast - and a hot wave of nausea climbs up the back of your throat and you have to clench your jaw against it, swallow hard, breathe through your nose. The smell of iron makes it worse. You roll onto your back, slowly, and stare upward at a ceiling of stone you can't really see in the cone of the torch beam.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

The nausea recedes slightly.

You lower your arms. Look at your hands.

The light catches them, lying limp on your stomach, and you look at them properly for the first time since the lip. The gauze on your left knuckles is shredded, and what's underneath is pulped, raw, weeping, a bright wet red against the older brown of the dried scabs. The surgical tape over your missing nail has peeled off entirely, exposing the soft, raw underbed, with multiple cuticles bleeding sluggishly onto your scraped knuckles. Your right hand is - somehow - worse. The skin across the heel of your palm has come away in a long strip, like rind peeled off a fruit, knuckles swollen to the point that you don't think you'd close that fist if you tried.

It's a miracle you climbed your way up here.

You don't have a word for what's happening in your chest other than… grief. It's grief, you think. It's grief for your hands, which is mad, which is insane, but they were your hands, they had pulled thousands of pints and held a thousand glasses and typed a thousand stupid texts to a thousand stupid people, and written the majority of your long-forgotten dissertation, and they were yours, and now they are these, these things, these pulped, hideous things that frighten you.

The work hadn't even been good work. You'd complained about it, hadn't you. You'd whinged about an RSI developing in your wrist at the end of every shift and rolled your eyes about the regulars and called in sick when you were just hungover, and you had taken those hands - those ordinary boring functional hands - entirely for granted.

Even that. Even that has been taken.

And underneath that, quieter still, the worse thought begins to surface - the one that had whispered at you on the rope and that you had outrun by climbing, and now that you're not climbing anymore, it catches you up.

If this is what's left.

If this is what your life is now - Scott, another rope, another cave, another threat, your hands getting worse, your sleep getting worse, the incessant possession of your body pulverising you to a shredded up, sobbing mess - then…

You don't finish it. It sits on your sternum it doesn't ask anything of you. It just is.

A quiet option that has slipped itself into the back drawer of your mind: if this is what's left, maybe it would be a kindness to stop. Maybe the worst thing is the thirty more caves after this one, and the looming threat of life in prison after those, and the slow grinding-down of you into something that finally just gives, and maybe - maybe -

Your eyes squeeze shut.

Stop. Stop, stop, stop.

The walkie-talkie fizzles.

A short, dry crackle from the dark, somewhere off to your left along the lip of the drop, much closer than it had sounded from below - and then the small mechanical click of an open channel, and then nothing. Just static. The carrier hiss of a radio waiting for someone to talk into it.

You stop breathing.

The crackle holds.

Then -

"You with me yet?"

You give yourself thirty seconds. You count them. One, twelve, twenty-seven. The crackle of the open channel hisses in the dark off to your left, patient, expectant, and you breathe through it.

Up.

You push.

Your body refuses for a half second and then, grudgingly, complies - and the noise that comes out of you as you lever yourself to sitting is embarrassing, a long low groan of pain that doesn't stop until you're upright.

You sit there for a moment, hunched, hands hovering uselessly in your lap because you don't want to put them anywhere.

The harness.

Right.

You shrug it off your shoulder where it had twisted across you in the climb and you lay it out in front of you on the stone, properly, the way they showed you the first morning at the first site. Leg loops. Waist belt. Chest piece.

You step into the leg loops - slow, slow, one boot at a time, trying not to scrape the loops up your shins because everything hurts - and pull them up your thighs. Tighten one. Tighten the other. The canvas bites into various bruises and you grit your teeth.

Waist belt. You pull it round. The buckle is awkward with hands that don't fully close - you have to use the heels of your palms, push and feed and push - and on the third attempt it clicks home. You yank the strap. It holds.

Chest piece. Up. Across. Through the loop. Click.

Right.

You drag in a breath, and you sniff again, and you scrub at your face with the cleanest patch of your forearm you can find, and you make yourself look at where you are.

The light beam cuts across stone. You're sitting on a ledge - narrow, maybe a foot and a half wide, running along the side of the chamber from the cliff lip behind you back toward - you turn your head and follow the beam - where it tapers off into the dark some distance away. Ahead of you, on the inner side of the ledge, the rock rises in roughly hewn courses, hand-cut, with the same soft-edged tool marks you'd noted on the way down.

And then, several feet up the wall, just within arm's reach if you were standing.

Recesses.

Five of them. Small jagged squares cut into the stone in an uneven row, each no bigger than a fist, the kind of thing you wouldn't notice if you weren't sitting bleeding on the ledge directly below them.

Two have been gouged - not naturally, not weathered, gouged out, the cavities cut wider and uglier by something that wasn't a chisel and wasn't gentle, the insides scored with deep parallel scrapes that catch the light in a way that turns your stomach. You already know this is the evidence of your clawing.

The other three sit untouched. You don't look at them for long. Decoys, maybe. Maybe not. You don't have the fingers left to find out.

The open recesses go back maybe eight or nine inches into the wall. A hiding place. For something small and cufflink-sized.

You stare down at the recess, and then back over your shoulder at the lip of the drop behind you, and you try to piece together what happened while you were unconscious.

You'd- no, it… it had torn the harness off - every buckle, every clip - because it had been in your way, because the harness was attached to a group of men thirty-odd metres above you telling it to come up, and it didn't want to come up. It wanted the thing. It had clawed and clawed and clawed until the covering gave way, until the cavity opened, and rubble fell, and then - and then the cufflink had dropped. Out of the recess. Down. Bouncing. Skittering. Toward the edge of the ledge and over it-

And your body had dived.

Leapt, off a one-foot-wide ledge into the dark, after a thing the size of a coin.

And by some miracle, had caught it.

And the second her fist had closed on it, you had come back, snapping into your own body mid-fall, mid-tangle, mid-snag, blood pooling in your face and your shoulder smacking rock and-

What kind of animal do you keep becoming? What kind of thing - to claw open a stone wall with bare hands, to feel no pain at the splitting of nails or the pulping of fingertips, to track a falling object off a cliff with such single-minded bestial want that throwing your body off it was the only logical move. The absolute indifference to your own life, your own - your own self - that you had operated with. Treated like a pair of disposable gloves. Worn down to the meat.

You're going in circles.

Right.

The walkie-talkie is maybe four metres along the lip, lying on its side at the very edge of the drop. Four metres. Four metres of ledge a foot and a half wide, no handholds, the void to your right, the wall to your left.

You stand and your head swims at the change in altitude, swims, the blood that had finally drained from your skull now doing other unpredictable things, and you have to lean against the stone for several seconds while the chamber stops doing a lazy spin.

Okay.

Okay.

Inner shoulder against the wall. Boots on the ledge. You walk, then once you reach the walkie, you crouch - carefully, hand against the wall. You pick it up and bring it close to your face.

You don't trust your voice for a second, so you breathe, once, in and out, slow, through your nose. The sound of it is small and rough and you hope, you hope, the EQ flattens it out by the time it reaches him.

You press the button.

"I've got it."

The carrier hiss holds.

"Welcome back to earth, babe. You're coming through a bit quiet - can you say that again?"

Sigh.

"The- the cufflink. I've got it."

"You're fucking joking."

Scott's voice has come up an octave and lost its drawl entirely, and you can hear, faintly, behind him, Rob saying something off-mic and Nick laughing, and Scott telling them both to shut up, shut up, hang on, and then his voice comes back, thrilled.

"YES."

It bursts out of him. A boyish whoop.

"Right - right, alright, hold on, love, you sit tight, we are reeling you up. We are reeling you up right now. Just follow the pull, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Good fucking GIRL. Christ. Christ, that's my girl. Hold on. Don't move. Don't fucking - yeah, alright, NICK - hold on, darl', just hold on."

The channel cuts.

You stand on the ledge with the walkie-talkie loose in two fingers and you listen to the silence after his voice.

That's my girl?

Prick.

You turn, slowly, and let the headtorch sweep the chamber one last time. The drop you'd dangled from. The lip you'd dragged yourself over. The smear of fresh blood on the wall by the recesses. The slow black void to your right, into which an hour ago - however long ago - you had nearly, very nearly, gone.

Would he be proud of you? Would he take it all back?

You hope Sam is having a very bad day.