***
“Ceril!” Saryn screamed. She fell to her knees and edged closer to the maw. The purple sunlight did little to penetrate the blackness, and she could see nothing but clouds of dust floating around. “Ternia! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
No response.
She pushed herself to her feet, and the section of ground she touched gave way beneath her hand. She lost her balance and might have fallen in, too, if Chuckie hadn’t been there to catch her.
“Careful, Saryn,” said Chuckie.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You good?”
“I think so. You?”
“I'm breathing and not in the hole. I'm dandy,” Chuckie said.
“Ceril fell in.”
“We need to get him out of there,” he said, and walked toward the hole.
“Are you stupid, Chuckie?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Excuse me?”
“You just saw the edge give way. You just stopped me from falling in, and now you're going right back to the edge? What, do you think you’re going in, going down there?”
“Sounds about right, yep. If Ceril’s in trouble, we go in and help him. It's simple. You'd do the same for me. So would he. The thing is, though, I'm not going to be falling in like you were about to do. I'm going to take this rope,” he raised his left hand to show her the rope he had taken out of his backpack, “and I'm going to tie it to something solid over there.” He pointed at the nearest ruined building. “Then, I’m going to lower myself down there, make sure Ceril's alive, and get him out if he is.”
If he’s alive, Saryn thought. If. She couldn’t think about that right now. He was alive, he had to be, and they had to do something to get him back to safety.
“You’re right.”
“Yep.” He turned and walked to the nearest building. “Mind helping me tie this off?”
She trotted over to him and took the end of the rope. “I’m not really good at any of this,” she said. “I never took anything but basic interdisciplinary combat, and I never had any survival courses. I don’t know how to tie knots.”
“It’s not too hard,” Chuckie said. “It’s just wrapping the rope around itself a bunch. Just take your end, wrap it around the middle of this column here.” When she had done as he asked, he took the rope from her. “Yeah, and then you just take the loose end and…” He tied the knot effortlessly. “See?”
Saryn tugged at it, checking its stability. She looked Chuckie in the eye and said, “I'm going, too.”
“What?”
“I'm going down there, too, Chuckie. You can't think I'm going to stay up here in the open with you both down there getting into who-knows-what.”
Chuckie grimaced and said, “Well, how do you suggest we do that, then, Saryn? I need you up here to lower the rope for me to get down there. I doubt there are any walls to rappel down.”
She thought about it for a moment and said, “We'll Conjure our way down. Those Jaronya can Conjure wings, right?”
Chuckie nodded apprehensively. “Maybe…”
“Well, I don't think we can do that,” she said. “Our nanite skins don't have enough tech to do it, nor,” she added, “do we have the finesse in controlling them if they did. But we can Conjure shock absorbers and parachutes. Combine that with the ropes, and I'm pretty sure we can jump into the hole and not, you know, kill ourselves.”
Chuckie blinked at her and said, “You're serious?”
She nodded.
“What about meeting up with the head honcho of Purpletown here? We were given an hour. Don't you think that at least one of us should at least make it?”
“Ceril is more important.”
“It's not that I don't agree with you, Saryn,” said Chuckie, “but these guys have kidnapped us, and are keeping us prisoners. I'm thinking that maybe doing what they say this time might be a pretty good idea. Especially since it sounded like it may be our one chance to save our asses.”
“Look.” She dropped her hands to her side and tossed a stray sprig of hair out of her face with a flick of her neck. “We don't know what they want. We know they think we're saviors of some kind. We know they want to try us for killing two of their soldiers or scouts or whatever. To me, those are pretty contradictory ideas. I don’t really want to see which one they choose. If we're late—”
“We're going to be,” Chuckie interrupted.
“—then we can deal with it,” she continued without pause. “And so can they. We need to make sure that Ceril is alive—like you said—and get him out of there if he is. And if he’s hurt, his chances are better with both of us down there than just one of us. And who knows what they'd do if only one of us shows up to their meeting. They might see that as being more disrespectful than missing it entirely.”
“We’re so screwed,” he said. “Okay, whatever. You're the brains of this operation. Just tell me exactly how you want to do this.”
She did, and ten minutes later, they were both secured by ropes tied to the base in the ruins. They nodded at one another, and leapt into the purple haze of dust.