out. It wouldn’t have taken him much to join the dots.”
Something between fear and rage took her through the next three moves. She looked down past her feet at a scraping sound, and saw that Brett was on the wall. He was clumsy and inelegant, but he was strong, too. He was making easy work of that first jug.
He was coming up to get her, presumably planning on catching up with her and pulling her off. The sick feeling in her stomach increased.
“Jojo, please understand that you’ve made me do this,” he said, his voice a little breathless as he shifted round, preparing to make another move. “Just like Aleksy did. I have never wanted to harm anyone.”
“You didn’t want to harm Aurora when you raped her?” Jojo asked.
“Harm her? She enjoyed it. She wanted it. I saw how she looked at me all evening….” He paused as he made another effortful move, and then went on. “You know I never meant her any harm. When I saw she’d died…it was awful. And I’ve been protecting all of you”—he shifted again—“for thirty years. I could have framed any of you easily. But I didn’t. I kept you all safe.”
Jojo moved up once more, and now had reached the farthest point in this climb she had ever made. The point beyond which she had never gone. She was more than twenty feet up, and the next move was the one that meant launching herself into space and hoping. The last move before she could grab the upper lip and top out. One more move before she could pull herself up onto the grassy top of the sheer face.
She’d bottled it every time, even with a rope. It had been too high. Too far. She’d abseiled back down, angry with herself. But now she had no way of abseiling, and doing some of those moves in reverse was going to be gnarly. The simple thing—the safer thing—would be to go for the top.
“Are you frightened, Jojo?” Brett asked, in a voice that was suddenly very different. He wasn’t trying to explain. He was trying to scare her.
It gave her a cold feeling realizing that it would be a lot easier for him if she simply fell.
“Why would I be frightened?” she asked, though she could feel adrenaline pulsing through her. Her left leg had started to wobble slightly, and she had to breathe consciously to stop it getting worse.
“Everyone’s scared of dying,” Brett said. “Even Aleksy. You should have seen his face as I shoved him off backward. He thought he’d made it to the top.”
Jojo closed her eyes against the image of him falling, but it was still there. The vision of his long, slow descent to the ground. It made her feel as though she were falling already.
“I guess Aurora…must have been frightened, too,” she said.
He’d made another move. He was closer to her. Feet away. What if he got close enough to grab her foot while she was there, frozen? Would she be able to hold on?
“She should have gone for help, instead of crawling away,” he said. “But I suppose she was confused. She thought it was safe in there. And instead, she died there, all on her own.”
Jojo shook her head. She thought of the brilliant, kindhearted girl, and it made her heart ache. But it made her furious, too. That he’d cut her life short for the sake of gratuitous sex.
“Fuck you, Brett,” she said, and without thinking any further, she launched herself at the final hold.
The moment of hanging in space was vast. There was a seemingly minute-long delay before some kind of contact.
The feeling of her hands closing on the final juglike hold was almost unexpectedly easy. It was only instinct that made her close her hands on it while her brain caught up and realized that she had made it.
Her right foot kicked something and she scrabbled at it. She found a large bulge beneath her. It was like standing on a step.
She smiled to herself. It really had been as easy as everyone kept saying.
She found another, smaller hold with her left foot. She pushed up off it until she could put her right hand over the lip. She dragged and kicked herself upward until she had her right toes onto the edge, too.
With a shaky last push, she stood up, and turned to look down at Brett.
He was doing well for a non-climber. And particularly so for someone wearing