“Well, if I’m dead, I didn’t get into heaven, that much isfor damned sure,” I said. I already had a few cracked ribs thanks to Galina, but with the fall, I was pretty sure they were fully broken. I tested my position carefully. Moving dislodged a few pebbles which rolled straight over the edge. It was maybe a foot away, and I eased slowly out of the bush I’d been caught in. “I have about a hundred thorns in my ass,” I called as I pushed myself to my knees. I tried not to hear the hollow sound that underscored each breath. I sounded like an old-fashioned squeeze-box.
“Same,” she called back. “But the vest cushioned the fall. What about Mary Alice?”
I was just about to tell her Mary Alice hadn’t jumped when she made a liar out of me. The only warning I had was the squawking of the chicken as Mary Alice rolled over it when the pair of them came flying down the slope, tail over teakettle. They bowled straight into another cluster of bushes, even thornier than mine, and they stopped even closer to the edge.
Mary Alice was white as new milk when we got to her, and the chicken didn’t look much better. It was standing a few feet away, as if embarrassed by Mary Alice’s predicament. Helen and I hurried the best we could to pull her out. It took both of us—she was stuck fast—and a lot of swearing on Mary Alice’s part before she was free.
She sat on the slope, puffing hard and resting her head on her knees while Helen and I did the same.
“You okay?” I asked Mary Alice.
She nodded. “Nat’s goodies are kicking in. I’ll be fine—at least for six hours or so. That’s when they’ll wear off.”
“What goodies?” Helen asked.
I handed over my last two pills. “Take these and don’t ask questions.”
“Are you going to roofie me? Am I being roofied?”
“I said not to ask questions,” I reminded her. She gulped down the pills like a cranky cat, complete with gacking noises.
“You’re being the opposite of roofied,” Mary Alice assured her. “Give it a few minutes to kick in and you’ll feel like you could lift a building.”
“Can’t wait,” Helen said brightly. Her voice was shaking a little with fatigue, and she didn’t look great—none of us did. This job was hard enough when we were twenty, but at sixty-two? It took a hell of a lot more recovery time than it had forty years before.
“Did you get the backpack?” Mary Alice asked.
Helen swung the backpack around for us to see. It was covered in dust and had collected a few thorns, but otherwise it was in decent shape. I suppose it had been designed to withstand extreme temperatures, avalanches, and yeti attacks, after all.
She worked the buckles with stiff, bloody fingers. The inside had been specially fitted to hold a padded case, not quite two feet by three. She took it out, and we held our breath as she opened it.
We couldn’t see the colors exactly; the moonlight wasn’t strong enough for that. But something about that shifting, silvery light made it even more magical. We had just missed meeting her thirty years before, and here she was, turning up again. She had been pulled from her stretcher bars and therewere nail holes in the margins. I couldn’t see any other major damage, and something in my chest that had tightened when we lost her thirty years before began to ease.
We didn’t speak—you don’t speak on hallowed ground, andLedamade that rocky Montenegrin mountainside holy. She gazed serenely out at us, as unbothered as the moon by anything lesser than she was. We were grubby and human and small, and she was so much more.
I put out a fingertip to touch her. It was an unconscious urge, something about connecting with beauty, I think. But I stopped myself. She was untouchable. The centuries hadn’t diminished her. The skin was as luminous, the stare just as challenging. She’d been stolen, hidden, coveted, treasured, captured as spoils of war, and yet none of it had touched her. She endured, eternal as a goddess but vulnerable as a child. A single spark, an errant slip of the knife, could destroy her.
And it was up to us to protect her.
Helen packed her back up into her case. Wordlessly, we fitted the case back into the backpack, the spell broken.
“Where are we?” Helen asked, squinting at the moon.
I shrugged. “Somewhere past the viaduct.” I assessed what I could of the terrain in the fitful light. There was a narrow path, a goat track, that led past the edge of the bushes, switchbacking around boulders before disappearing into a pocket of trees.
“That way,” I said, pointing.
Mary Alice jerked her thumb a different direction. “Podgorica is that way.”
“So let’s just follow the railway track,” Helen suggested.
I gave them both a level look. “I’m not headed to Podgorica.”
I didn’t say her name. I didn’t have to. They knew I was going to find her. I started down the track, moving slowly. Behind me, I heard Helen hoist the backpack with a grunt and follow me.
I paused, looking up at Mary Alice. She had turned to where the chicken was staring at her with baleful, dinosaur eyes. “You coming?” Mary Alice asked.
The chicken didn’t make a move. Mary Alice started in our direction, and after a second, with a loud cluck of annoyance, the chicken came too.