Ivory and Bone(76)

We travel in silence, too focused on our footing to speak, Mya a few paces ahead of me. At places the water is high, running over our feet, but then we reach the spot where the trail splits, the pathway following along the ledge that hangs above the water-filled ravine. Progress is slow—we move no faster than wet boots can safely move over wet rocks, which is not very fast at all. My attention never leaves the ground. It isn’t until Mya stops, holding breathlessly still on the path for just a few moments too long, that I take my eyes off the rocks beneath my own feet long enough to look up at her.

My ears find focus first—the rushing roar of water passing deep within the ravine, the echo of stones worked loose by the flood, plummeting into the torrent below. My gaze settles on her back, focuses on her straight shoulders, her legs, one foot braced behind her.

Beyond her is the broad flat shelf of rock—the very one I stood on when I came this way before—when I looked down and saw her far below.

Across from her, in a pose that mirrors her own, stands Lo.

I can’t see Mya’s face. I can see only a sliver of Lo’s. Neither girl stirs, not a muscle flinches. A cloud slides away from the sun and all at once we are coated in hot, dry light. Finally, Lo speaks. “Mya. I was hoping I would see you again. I was hoping you were still nearby—”

“You will not hurt her—” I start.

“Mya,” Lo says again, in a voice that not only shuts mine out but invalidates it, as if she never heard it, as if I’d made no sound at all, so fixed is her attention on Mya. “I have no hope left—whatever I’d hoped to accomplish, I’ve failed. I will not make it home.” She moves, her hands rising from her sides, and Mya takes a wobbly step backward, her foot landing in a thin stream of runoff that pours from the wall and splashes across the trail, spilling over the side and into the rapids below. Mya’s shifted stance allows me a view around her, and I see that Lo is only lifting the hem of her parka, revealing something red and dark and wet. The wound is grotesque, and a wave of nausea swamps me. Something inside me shadows over, dimming my vision, shrouding the injury in darkness and hiding it from my sight. Without thinking, I step back.

But Mya doesn’t flinch. Instead, she bends her head toward the wound, daring to move closer to Lo, to a place so close she is almost within range of Lo’s grasp. A long slow hiss of breath leaks through Mya’s lips until, finally, she speaks. “So deep . . .”

“It is.” Lo’s reply comes out half cough, half laugh. She gives Mya an eerie smile, her jaw clenched. “I fell . . . when you fell, when we struggled right here, before. The spearhead—I clutched it in my hands, waved it at you. Then . . .” Lo sags, dropping onto one knee. The hem of her parka falls back into place, leaving just a watery trickle of blood still visible beneath it, running down the side of her pants. “It wedged up under my ribs when I landed on the rocks.” She plants her foot and, trembling, rises back to her full height. “I wanted you to know. If my body was found, I didn’t want you to think that you had done it. I guess neither of us did it—”

“We both did it,” Mya says.

A cluster of fast-moving clouds fly overhead; shadows flit across Lo’s face. She shuffles a fraction of a step toward Mya, though it’s impossible to tell under these surreal circumstances—circumstances that seem to hold us suspended above the rules of movement and balance—if she intended to move or not.

“It was my own fault.”

“No,” Mya says. “It was an accident. A fall—”

“Not this,” Lo breaks in, her voice a wet rasp. “Before . . . It was my own fault.” She quiets, bends at the waist, convulses with a syrupy cough, then straightens. “The night I became lost on the gathering trip with your family. I’ve been angry for years about the suffering I endured that night, but I’ve known all along—I couldn’t even admit it to myself, but now I have to . . . I have to admit it to you. . . . It was my own fault.

“So much of both our lives turned on the events of that night and what’s been said of it since then. Now I am going to the Divine, and I don’t want to face her with that lie still on my lips.”

“It was no one’s fault,” Mya says, but I hear something in her voice, some hesitation, like a toe catching on a stone. “It just happened. Let’s not think of that now—”

“I have to—”

“No. You have to let me try to help you.”

My heart slips out of rhythm as I watch Mya slide forward, stretch her foot over the gap that separates them, and reach for Lo. Strength drains from my legs, the rock beneath my own feet sways, as four arms stretch up, Lo shuddering, her hands opening and closing at the ends of her raised arms. Mya slides closer, eases her hands around her shoulders, and enfolds Lo in an embrace.

Time holds still, as if it, too, were wrapped in that embrace. Every rule of nature—of rocks and water—of blood and legs and feet and balance—every rule is held suspended for one long exhale. Until, with a burst of blinding sunlight, the rules are restored. Mya’s feet shuffle over a surface slick with trickling blood mixed with water and the recent memory of ice. Lo’s eyes widen, and something like a gasp escapes her lips. “Help me.”

But it’s too late.

They both jerk, snapping to the side, then righting, almost catching themselves upright, but then tilting, slipping, their arms still entwined, both of them moving as one, plunging into the ravine.