Chapter 2 - The Woman on the Rope
She descended like someone who had done it before.
Not gracefully.
Not cleanly.
The cliff tore at her hands and slammed her knees against the rock. She controlled the slide by pain, friction, and stubbornness, boots scraping across wet stone while the tow rope burned through her grip. Halfway down, she hit a shelf hard enough that I thought she had broken her hip.
She kept moving.
“Who the hell is that?” Carter shouted.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But some part of me already understood we were no longer the only trained people on that cliff.
The woman landed twenty feet above Tyler, swung hard against the rock, then dropped the remaining distance with a controlled fall that ended in a skid across slick black stone. A wave broke over her legs. She staggered, caught herself, and moved straight toward the crack.
Tyler coughed water and tried to focus on her.
“Ma’am,” he gasped. “Don’t come down here.”
She ignored him.
The boulder pinning him was not fully settled. It shifted with every surge, grinding deeper against the surrounding rock. If we pulled Tyler without relieving even a fraction of the pressure, we could break him worse. If we waited, the tide would finish what the rockfall started.
The woman dropped to one knee, ran her hands along the stone, and studied the boulder with terrifying speed.
Then she looked up at me.
“Rope around his chest and under the arms,” she shouted.
“Who are you?”
“Not now.”
Her voice cut through the storm like command.
I moved.
Hale and Carter braced the line above me while I scrambled lower. The second rope we had left was too short for proper rigging, but with the tow rope and our remaining gear, we could create a crude pull from the ledge. It was ugly. It was dangerous. It was the only option.
The woman wedged herself into the gap beside Tyler.
That was when I saw the scar.
Her shirt had torn open across her back, revealing a long, old scar running down her spine. Not fresh. Not pretty. A brutal white line, raised and uneven, the kind of mark left by surgery, blast trauma, or both.
She pushed her shoulder beneath the edge of the boulder.
I yelled, “No. It’ll crush you.”
She looked up.
Her eyes were pale gray, furious and calm.
“My spine can take the weight,” she said. “Pull him up.”
That sentence made no sense.
Then she braced.
May you like
The boulder shifted.
And Tyler screamed.
