Chapter 18: That One Counts

Katja stood at the broken bridge end and watched Harvey measure the gap with his eyes.

For once he did not say the number out loud, and that was how she knew it was bad.

It was fifty feet, and the Shelf was still drifting. The only thing joining the islands was the old zip line.

It ran from Landing's flagpole down to the big pine, steel and sagging, with a single trolley on it.

It only went one way, which was down.

He dug the clicker out of his pocket, where it had been since dawn, and put it back in her palm without a word.

"We ride," he said. "Everybody. One at a time."

Forty families looked at the cable, and then at him.

A man with a bad knee raised his hand. "Do we get harnesses?"

"We get lanyards," Dot said.

She had carried an apron full of them out of the storeroom, in every colour Lyle had ever invented.

Harvey tied the first harness out of twelve of them braided together, a seat and a belt, with a bowline at the clip.

It read TIER 3 in blue about sixty times.

"Teddy!" he shouted across the gap. "Hold the return line!"

On the far cliff, a hundred small figures lined up behind a skinny one waving a camera.

"I've got it!" Teddy yelled. "It's going great! Don't look at the camera!"

Dot went first, because somebody had to test it and she was the heaviest.

She landed at the pine and tied her ladle to the end of the cable with a lanyard, to stop the trolley.

The man with the bad knee went second.

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