He gave her both. She took them with trembling hands and then seemed to lapse into a kind of half sleep.
What a place to be, Gideon thought: jammed into a little crack barely three feet deep on an exposed cliff face maybe twelve hundred feet above the ocean, unable to move, lashed by rain and wind, with a companion who was sick and growing sicker. The sky darkened further and a peal of thunder roared above them. More rain lashed down, developing into a massive downpour. It was like sitting behind a waterfall. Gideon fished out the canteens from the drysacks and filled them with the dirty water now streaming down the sides of the cliff. Amy began to shiver uncontrollably and he took off his shirt and forced her to put it on, despite her feeble protests.
She was going downhill. He took out the sat phone. There was very little battery left. Shielding it from the rainstorm with his body, he turned it on. The screen came on, the SEARCHING FOR SATELLITES legend appearing.
The searching went on and on. They were clearly in a bad position, jammed into the cliff. He tried to hold it out, chancing the soaking, but the searching didn’t stop. The battery symbol began to blink red, fast. The display dropped from two percent remaining to one percent. And still the phone couldn’t locate satellites.
He quickly shut off the phone. He would have to make the call from the top.
“What…are you doing?”
He squeezed her hand and tried to smile. “Trying to call Glinn. No luck — we’re too close to the cliff.”
Ten minutes went by in silence as the rain poured.
“I’m frightened,” she whispered.
This admission scared him more than almost anything else.
Her face was small, her eyes burning and moving restlessly about, her lips white and trembling. Her reserve of determination, the stoical mask of self-assurance that never left her, had crumbled away. She looked terrified — as well she might. There was no way she could keep climbing in her condition — she was stuck in this horrible little crack of rock. They were in a lethal situation. He needed to think, try to work out the options.
“What do we do?” she asked, almost plaintively.
Gently, Gideon spoke to her. “You rest — let me worry about it.”
There was silence for several minutes. She squeezed his hand. “Talk to me. Please.”
“It’s going to be okay, Amy.” He felt lame saying it. He was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be okay.
“My name isn’t Amy. It’s Amiko. Stop calling me Amy.”
“Of course. Amiko.”
She let out a long, shuddering sigh, her eyes closing, opening, as if in slow motion, her hand clutching his like a frightened girl. “My father was Japanese. My mother, Swiss German. I was…born in Japan.”
“You don’t have to tell me all this, not now—”
“I have to talk,” she said. “I need to talk. I want you to know some things. If I die.”
“All right.”
“My father had three sons from a previous marriage. All pure Japanese. He was very traditional, very old-fashioned. My mother was…a cold, cold woman. When I came along, I just wasn’t what my father was looking for in a daughter, I guess. I tried, I tried so hard to earn his respect and love. I did it all. But no matter how many karate courses I took, or ikebana, or music lessons, no matter how many A’s I got in math, no matter how many Vivaldi concerti I played on the violin…It wasn’t enough. I was a girl. And I wasn’t Japanese. Not in his eyes.”
She paused, breathed hard.
“When I was twelve, my father was transferred to…a job in America. My older half brothers, all successful with their own careers, stayed in Japan.” She paused again. “I always felt out of place in Japan. Now, in the US, I felt even more out of place. And my father…he didn’t understand America. He was a fish out of water. Things went downhill. We never seemed to have any money, although my father seemed to have a good job. My mother left — just walked out — I never knew why. And then, one day, I came home from school to find my father dead. He…he’d killed himself.”
“Amiko, how awful. I’m so sorry.”
“And then it came out. He’d been laid off eighteen months before. To save face, he continued to leave the house dressed in a suit every morning, not returning until the evening, spending his days in libraries, employment offices, and finally in parks and other public spaces. That was it for me. I was seventeen. I think maybe I wanted to die, too. I just left everything behind. Worked my way through college, by myself…That’s when I tried acting. I was good, but that was no way to make a living…Went to graduate school. That’s when Glinn found me. I did a few black-bag jobs for him, researching treasure maps with my knowledge of ancient languages, and then…following up on what I learned. And here I am.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again.
“And your mother?”
“Card on my birthday…Gift certificate for Christmas…Never saw her again.”
Gideon felt terrible for her. And all this time he’d been feeling sorry for himself, thinking he’d had a rough childhood. No wonder she’d been forced to overcompensate, show a thick veneer to the world.
“Water…I need water.”
Gideon put the canteen to her lips, and she drank. He felt her forehead. It was burning hot.
And now it was growing dark. Night was coming on. The rain poured, thunder rolled across the waters, illuminated by flashes of lightning. The roar of the sea filtered up from far below, the cliffs shuddering even here with their great power as they struck the rocks.
“Talk,” Amiko whispered. “Please.”
Gideon hesitated for a minute. “I’ve got a terminal condition.”
Her reddish eyes swiveled toward him. “What?”
“It’s called an AVM. This big knot of veins and arteries in my brain.”
“Can…can it be operated on?”
“No. Inoperable. Incurable.”
“How long until…?” Her voice trailed off.
“Ten months, give or take.”
He didn’t know, exactly, why he was telling her this. It wasn’t as if the mood needed to be any bleaker. Somehow, it was all that was coming into his head.
“Oh, Gideon,” Amiko murmured.
“It’s okay. I’m reconciled to it.” Maybe, in some strange way, it would make her feel better — knowing she wasn’t the only one of them bearing a secret burden.
“So that’s why you wanted to be the first to try the lotus,” she said.
“Yes.”
They fell silent for a moment.
“Don’t let me sleep,” Amiko pleaded.
But she sank into a fitful sleep anyway, shivering and moaning, her head tossing back and forth. Gideon looked out over the darkening ocean, a feeling of despair washing over him.
48
As the earth darkened into night, the rain lessened into a fitful drizzle. Amiko’s fever remained high. Gideon hoped that when she woke up, she’d be stronger, but as the night wore on and her fever only got worse, he realized this wasn’t going to happen.
Only one possible solution presented itself: he would have to finish the climb solo, rig a line, and then come back for her and try to haul her up somehow. He could call Glinn from the top, but a rescue would take a few days at least and by then, jammed in this crack, exposed to the elements, she’d be dead. He had to get her to the top, into some kind of shelter, with a fire.
He went through both drysacks and combined the ropes. By measuring them out, he figured there was about a hundred feet. It wasn’t climbing rope, but it was sturdy marine nylon and it seemed like it would hold the weight of a human.