“It’s too late,” I cry. “We’ll never get out of here now.”
His voice has all the passion and determination that I have lost. “It isn’t too late. We’ll walk upstream in the direction we saw the light. Ro and I entered the complex at a pool that had four streams flowing out of it. This has to be one of those streams. We’ll tie ourselves together with the rope and I’ll lead. You and Cook carry your mother. Your sisters will each take a baby.”
His plan makes sense, and his firm tone steadies me. I sniffle, sucking up my tears as a pinch of hope lightens my heavy heart.
He whispers in my ear as intimately as if we were alone. “Instead of telling ourselves what we can’t do, we have to believe in what we can do. Let’s go.”
He unwinds the rope and loops us together into a shuffling centipede with ten legs, everything done by feel. To my amazement Amaya volunteers to go last.
“I’ll scratch and bite anything that tries to eat us from behind,” she hisses, poking me in the side with a finger. We all laugh nervously.
Kalliarkos takes the lead, followed by Maraya holding our baby sister. Cook and I make a basket with our arms to carry Mother. We stick close to the water and creep forward with slow sweeps. Small stones and uneven bits of material crunch and slide under our feet. Mother weighs like an unwieldy sack of lead. Amaya sticks so close behind that she notices when Cook or I shift at all and is there to steady us.
Kalliarkos and Maraya give warnings over their shoulders: “There’s a dip in the ground.” “Careful, to your right, something hard and round that rolls.”
Suddenly Kalliarkos grunts in pain.
“Hold on, I just kicked a big rock.” The scrape of a heavy object on stone shudders through the darkness, then he mutters a curse. “There’s rubble we have to climb over.”
We untie Maraya and give her both babies. She waits alone in the dark so we can shift Mother by feel up a rugged ridge of what feels like collapsed stone columns and down the other side. It’s exhausting, and if we didn’t have all four of us working together we couldn’t manage it. But we do, and when we get down on the other side Cook and I sit with Mother’s limp body braced between us as Kalliarkos goes back over the rubble to fetch Maraya.
“Do you want me to take a turn carrying Mother?” Amaya asks, squeezing my hand. “I know I’m not as strong but I can manage for a little distance.”