Kick Free

The canyon wind roars softly in my ears while blood pounds behind my eyes hard enough to blur my vision. My ankle burns beneath his grip. My shoulders ache from hanging upside down over empty space. Somewhere deep inside myself, beneath all the terror and exhaustion and pain, something cold finally settles into place. I do not trust him.

Maybe he means to help me. Maybe he does not. But I know exactly what happens if I let somebody drag me willingly into a hole in the side of this mountain. I tighten my fists. Mercury notices immediately. “Now hold on,” he says carefully. “Don’t go doin’ nothin’ stupid—”

I scream and kick as hard as I can. My heel slams into his wrist. Pain flashes across his face. Then his fingers slip. For one impossible second, nothing happens at all. Then gravity takes me. The cliff vanishes upward while the world lurches violently sideways.

Moonlight spins across black stone and empty sky as I plunge into open darkness. Wind tears the scream from my throat instantly while jagged rock rushes past close enough to touch. Mercury shouts something above me. I never hear the end of it.

My body smashes hard against the cliff face once, hard enough to explode pain through my ribs and shoulder before the fall continues. Rocks burst loose around me while I tumble through open air completely weightless and completely helpless.

This is it. The realization arrives strangely calm despite the chaos of the fall. Moonlight and stone spin together around me while the canyon tears upward to meet my body at impossible speed, but somewhere beneath the terror, a cold acceptance settles into place.

I am not going to die beneath a monster’s knife. They are not going to drag me screaming back into the desert. I am not going to rot chained inside some nightmare mine while those things decide what to do with me.

A hysterical laugh almost escapes my throat through the panic. Wind howls past my ears loud enough to drown out my own scream while jagged rock rushes upward through darkness beneath me. Every instinct in my body claws desperately for survival even now, but another part of me understands the ugly truth already.

If the desert is going to swallow me whole tonight, then at least it will do it with my fists still clenched and defiance still burning in my chest. I do not surrender to the dark beneath the mesa. I have thrown myself into it kicking and screaming. I go down fighting.

THE END