A Spy's Life: Part Six

There are many ways that a teenage girl (not to mention trained spy and explorer) might react to finding herself in a deep, dark shaft and exactly ten seconds away from being fried alive by lava.

Scream.

Panic.

Freeze.

Say good-bye to the world and pray.

But Twist didn't do any of these, because first of all, she was not going to just accept her death *snap* like that. No, no, no. She would fight to the end. But looking around the shaft, she didn't see any way to stay alive -

- except that there was one patch of wall that wasn't stone at all. It looked like a flap, the kind that people used for their cat flap doors. She could probably fit through, and it was either die or try her only chance of staying alive. Hopefully the flap wasn't a dead end. If it was, she was toast.  So Twist pulled a zipline gun from her back, shot the strong string just above the passage, attached the zipline handhold, and let go of her hold on the wall. She rode the zipline at a diagonal towards the phony wall.

The lava seemed to rush up to her, a hungry maw.

Twist swung, and landed behind the wall-flap, and pulled the zipline equipment back behind her. But for all she knew, she might still be condemned. What if this tiny tunnel wouldn't hold off the plasma? Twist crawled along as fast as she could, coughing and sneezing the dust away. Who knew how long she would have to go on?

Twist hit a dead end, and at first thought that she was dead meat, but felt cool air blowing against her cheek, and looked up. Daylight! Earth! She was alive! Climbing out and into the breeze, Twist shuddered at the thought of what might have happened had she not noticed the passageway. Probably YKW's agency knew about it.

Twist sat down and put her face in her hands. "I should have known," she groaned. "When White Mage and I captured him, he must have somehow had an alarm button or something . . . to call for help. What if he really is part of a spy agency, too?"

She remembered what she'd told him when she'd confronted him in the jungle. It's cat and mouse, and it's too late to return to your mouse hole. And he'd said, "When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby." He knew that he would be helped. They'd been set up!

For the whole day, Twist followed a slight smoke trail in the sky. They must have gotten away by air. She walked, climbed, and ate an apple from her backpack. Insects buzzed around in the air, and Twist got very tired of climbing over everything. The water that seemed to consume everything in this darn rainforest clogged her every move. And it didn't help that there seemed to be something watching her . . .

What was worse, the fear of death - as in looking death in the face - or the prickling feeling of being watched and followed? The latter, Twist decided - at least the first was confrontational. The second was the cold, panicky fear of being stalked. No matter how much she admired jungle cats, it wasn't like they would change their nature just because she loved them. They were still wild. So when Twist spotted a slightly gleaming pair of eyes in the darkness to her left, she wasn't so much surprised as certain that she had to get away . . . somehow.

The wild wasn't a safe haven. Twist ran and ran. Until one moment when she saw a patch of white flashing by - a bit of paper, on a tree.

Huh.

Twist stopped and turned around. Pinned to the tree by its own sap, probably. She crept closer and read:

Enjoying the scenery?
There is a particularly beautiful view east. Where the waterfall is, there is a tall outcropping of rock that is very thin. No weapons allowed. Only holds two people. Bring any of your friends and you're going down. Temporary truce.
"The mouse."

Twist's mind slowed to a halt. She read it once, twice, three times. YKW was inviting her to what amounted to a tourist attraction by a waterfall. This could be her chance to get him to tell her where White Mage was. But how could she, when they would both be a few meters from plummeting to death?