Dark Matters - Michelle Diener Page 0,66

put the glove back on, and then made the mistake of looking down.

She felt everything in her stomach revolt and fought to stop herself vomiting.

She felt the prick of sweat all over her body, cooling uncomfortably in the icy breeze.

She leaned back against the slick, cold rock of the cliff, closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe again, to calm down.

Something nudged her, and her eyes flew open in time to see Dray bump against the rock and then spin away.

It helped to focus her.

Time to go.

“I'll get you out of here. I promise.” She reached out to him one last time, her fingers brushing his arm.

Above her, the color of the light seemed to change, and she looked up, saw the fog and low cloud had been blown away, and there was a spectacular sunset lighting the sky.

Tecra's two moons hung, white and impossibly beautiful, higher in the darkening blue sky, and while the sight should frighten her, because it meant night was falling, after the bland, blanketing white of the last few days, she felt her spirits lift.

She changed her climbing song from Le Freak to Mr. Blue Sky, and started upward.

Chapter 30

The climb down had seemed to take hours.

So when Lucy boosted herself up and found herself at the cliff top after what couldn't have been more than forty minutes, she nearly toppled backward.

In panic, she threw herself forward, fingernails tearing as they scraped on rock, and then, with the pack digging into her chest and stomach, she wriggled onto safe ground.

She twisted herself onto her back, and lay for a moment, looking up at a sky that had turned dark indigo. The two moons were glowing, one full, one in crescent, and the first stars were visible.

It was breathtakingly beautiful.

With a groan, she sat up, tossed the pack to the side and crawled to the pulley Dray had set up on a stone that stood about her own height and seemed to balance on the cliff's edge.

The pulley was fastened with no screws or nails that she could see, but it was holding fast, so she had to trust it was fixed on with some kind of high-tech alien glue that was going to take his weight.

Well, it was already taking his weight, she reminded herself, so it was too late to panic anyway.

The braking system had done its job, and stopped his downward fall, but now she had to pull him up. She remembered from science class that a single pulley halved the weight an object would be if you lifted it by hand. That might have still been a problem for her, because Dray was a good eight inches taller than she was, but she was stronger here, her bone and muscle denser, and she had no other solution.

She lowered herself to the ground and cautiously crawled back to the top of the cliff and peered over, her heart beating fast and hard even though she was almost completely lying on the solid ground above the cliff.

“Dray?”

There was no sound.

She wriggled out a tiny bit more, so she could see the rocks at the cliff's bottom, and the nynt were both still there, huddled together, so big, they were clearly visible.

She was glad neither was dead, but given the choice again, she would still have shot them.

“Okay. Let's do this.” She wriggled back, stood up, and then heard the sound of a hover in the distance.

And she remembered Rua.

Her stomach plummeted and her breathing sped up.

He must have been sent to the nearby town they had spoken about to get supplies, and maybe touch base with their superiors.

And now he was coming back.

She couldn't believe she hadn't thought about him once. Hadn't, also, thought about Bly and whether he was alive or not. She hadn't even gone to check on him.

Priorities. She heaved in a breath. She'd had other priorities.

And now she had no time.

She grabbed the rope, moved around the back of the rock, looked up to check the rope wasn't tangled, and started to pull.

Hand over hand, one foot braced against the rock, leaning back into it as she pulled as gently as she could so that she wasn't bashing Dray against the rock too much. The strain made her sweat, even in the icy air.

The burn in her hands, even with gloves on, made them suddenly cramp, and she almost cried out in pain as she jerked the rope, and then slowly fed it back, hoping the breaking system would