Sara awoke at the first hint of daylight, with a sense of urgency whose cause she couldn't immediately remember. Then it came back to her. They had to get moving today, as soon as possible. Get over the ridge, start back down the eastern coast, travel at least a couple of miles before nightfall. Cherise was right, Sara thought, we should be able to make Purity in two more days after that.

Her right ankle looked huge, darkened with a bruise. It felt as though her entire right foot had been replaced with an oversized cement imitation.

Sara backed away from Cherise, and pushed herself up with her arms, using her left leg to stand, balancing on it. Tentatively, she put her right foot on the ground.

Immediately she winced, as pain signals exploded from her ankle.

She found, after painful experimentation, that she could put her weight on the foot, as long as she kept the ankle joint still, not bending it in any direction.

Cherise began stirring, and twisted her head around to look up at Sara. "Morning. How does it feel?"

Sara described the situation. "If I had some plaster to make a cast, we'd be in business."

"You'd be okay with a walking stick, do you think? Something to take most of the weight?"

"Yeah, I think that would work." She looked around. There was no shortage of fallen limbs. She tried to step towards a useful length of wood, gasped in pain, and hopped the rest of the way on her left leg. She picked the limb up, and tore away a few offshoots, to leave a single straight stick, about five feet long.

She took about ten steps, gripping the stick hard and leaning on it for each step with her right foot. She nodded. "This would work." She looked suddenly at Cherise. "Except..."

She wasn't seeing how she could carry Cherise and hold the stick at the same time. The position she'd been using yesterday -- Cherise upright against her stomach -- required Sara to use both hands to keep her there.

Cherise frowned, chewing on her lip. After a moment, she said, "What if you carry me wrapped around your waist? I could curl up tight and hold onto you. I don't think you'd need more than one hand to keep me from slipping down past your hip."

"You'd have to do a lot of work to keep yourself up."

"I don't mind! I should be doing a lot of work. You've been doing everything."

Cherise's excitement flowed into Sara. That should work! she thought. As long as I can use the walking stick, I think we can do this!

This was going to be pretty strenuous for both of them. Cherise was going to have to keep her elbows and thighs pressed hard against Sara's waist on either side. With that, and Sara's left hand curled under her to help stabilize her, Sara could use the walking stick, though walking would be exhausting. But it has to be done, Sara told herself. I have to get Cherise home.

Sara wanted to start out right away, but they both needed to gas up the engines first. Crawling once more, Sara moved to the nearest peach tree and stood on one leg under it, picking out peaches and dropping them, afterwards dropping to the ground again, scooping them up in both hands and knee-walking back, feeding Cherise and herself. On her knees, she picked up Cherise for toileting, the combined warmth of her own smile and Cherise's making her feel as though the sun had burst out from behind the clouds.

Finally it was time to try it. And to realize it wasn't that easy to see how to get Cherise into position.

After trying out a few other ideas, Sara had Cherise lie on her back, and then she crawled in between Cherise's arms and legs from the side, going between Cherise's left arm and left leg, then her right arm and right leg. As Cherise tightened her thighs and upper arms against Sara's side, Sara picked up the walking stick and jammed its end into the ground, using it to push herself upward and slowly rise to a standing position, the muscles in her arm writhing with the effort of lifting her own weight and Cherise's. Hooking her left hand under Cherise's hip seemed to secure her in place adequately. Standing at last, on her left foot, her right hand clenched tight around the stick, Sara nearly fell backward and had to use her right foot to stop herself, holding it as stiff as she could so the ankle wouldn't bend, biting back a scream of pain.

As she tried to walk, Sara found that she couldn't use only her left foot and the stick. The best she could manage to do, with the stick, was use it to hold about ninety percent of the weight while her right foot was on the ground. She did find that the pain was tolerable, and that was able to make the most minimal possible use of her ankle. After a dozen steps she was getting short of breath -- the pain was making it hard to breathe -- and she rested before going on. She continued that way, stopping every ten or twelve steps to breathe.

In every workout session, Sara had always tried to push herself beyond the point where she thought she could go no farther. I'm not done yet, she would say to herself at the point of complete exhaustion. Just one more. One more pushup. Lift this weight one more time.

I can do this, she told herself now. I can keep doing this for as long as it takes. Never mind what hurts. It's your body's way of trying to hold you back. Don't let it hold you back. You can go on.

It wasn't helpful that the ground was so uneven. Sara kept careful watch on exactly where she was putting her right foot, but frequently her ankle had to adjust to an unexpected tilt. Each time it exploded in pain, and Cherise could easily tell when it happened, with Sara sucking in a huge gasp through clenched teeth, trying not to cry out.

After about twenty minutes, the ocean breakers seemed to grow much louder. Ahead, it grew lighter, and Sara moaned, thinking at first she'd come to another farm clearing she would have to walk around. But it was the brightness of beach sand. The coastline had curved, and open ocean lay directly ahead. We were that close to the end of the island! Sara thought in surprise. And it's still morning! Maybe I can make a few miles down the coast today after we cross over!

Sara stopped behind the first line of trees, and examined the prospect.

Still hugging Sara's waist, Cherise whispered with feeling, "Oh, shit!"

Sara looked to the right, and finally saw what the mountain ridge looked like at its northern end.

In her shock, her right hand slipped and lost hold of the stick. She reached instinctively to grab it, and staggered forward, her right foot landing on a slight incline, the ankle turning. The worst pain of the day exploded in her ankle. Sara gasped, felt a wave of nausea at the pain, and thought she was going to throw up.

She fainted instead.

Sara heard a very worried voice behind her ear repeating, "Sara, Sara, talk to me! Talk to me!" Cherise was digging her chin into Sara's upper buttock.

Sara opened her eyes, and immediately closed them again, groaning at the throbbing in her ankle.

"Sara, say something, okay?"

Sara finally managed to find a shaky voice. "Are you okay?"

"Tell me about you. What's happening?"

Sara twisted her head around and gasped. "You're bleeding!" There was a smear of blood around Cherise's mouth and chin, and another on her shoulder where she'd tried to wipe it away.

"It's just my nose. I think it stopped already. But I'm pinned under you."

"Oh." Sara crawled out of the embrace of Cherise's arms and legs. She helped Cherise sit upright with her back to a tree, looked closely at Cherise's face. She swiped away some of the blood with her finger, looking closely to see if any more was coming out.

Cherise kept her eyes on Sara's, biting her lip. "You went down so suddenly, I couldn't tell if you... uhhh, saw it."

Sara looked behind her to take in the details, and said under her breath, "Yeah, I saw." She turned and walked back on her hands, her right leg stuck out straight in front of her, to sit beside Cherise, putting her arm across Cherise's shoulder. And tried to assemble the consequences in her mind.

All along, she had carried with her a mental image of what the north end of the island would look like -- the mountain ridge declining to a mere gentle rise and at last sinking out of sight under the water. She would carry Cherise over the rise and start walking down the island's eastern shore.

She wasn't sure, now, why she had visualized it that way. Probably, she decided, because she so much needed for it to be that way.

What she saw, instead, was an obviously impassable barrier.

There was a greater discontinuity, at this end, between the ridge and the surrounding forest. The vertical wall between the forest and the shelf along the base of the ridge, which had been just three feet high in the middle of the island, now was about ten feet. The forest ended right where Sara and Cherise sat now, but the wall of rock ran out farther, beyond the point where the beach curved in to meet it and form a bay. The gradually increasing noise Sara had been hearing was waves crashing against the wall. Above that wall, the shelf still ran, for perhaps a hundred yards before reaching sea level and vanishing. The mountains themselves, though perhaps only about a hundred feet high at this point, were formed of the same chaotic jumble of rock that they had been in the area of the trail, and ran, gradually lower, about another half mile out to sea before they, too, went under water.

Assuming she could find a way to get herself and Cherise up onto the shelf, Sara thought she might, possibly, pick out her own way, slowly, carefully, among the boulders, up and over the ridge, at considerable risk of slipping and breaking her neck. But not with an ankle she couldn't use, and absolutely, definitely not carrying Cherise.

The trail they had abandoned twenty miles back, the one that had surely been guarded days ago and likely still was, was the only possible way of taking Cherise over the mountains.

Sara had to consider going back to the trail now. She was completely out of other choices.

Their whole hope of returning to Purity Town on time had been based on being able to walk down the eastern coast from here. Starting with what remained of today, at Sara's current rate of movement as she struggled with her ankle, she thought it would require tomorrow, the day of her roast, and perhaps two more days after that to travel the twenty-mile distance plus whatever additional distance was added to it by the need to detour around various problems, such as farms and a couple of port towns smaller than Purity. They could then enter Purity at night, while the town slept, bang on the door of the restaurant and rejoin the restaurant party, on the night before the boat left.

Instead, they would need to travel that same distance down the western side of the island to the trail, arriving there still on the wrong side of the mountains. Then, even if they got there early in the day, they would still have to wait for nightfall to cross over the mountains unseen. If the entrance to the trail wasn't guarded.

Sara recalled her earlier thoughts on a night crossing. There would have to be clear skies, so that moonlight would show Sara the way -- if there were no light at all, Sara would be walking upright, as she must when carrying Cherise, completely blind, on a narrow trail where falling over the edge probably meant death.

Even if the clouds did clear, offering moonlight for the crossing attempt, Sara and Cherise would not only have to get over the mountains, but then also walk the remaining seven miles or so to Purity, all during the hours of night. They couldn't walk into Purity after daybreak, when the streets began filling with people.

And then Sara groaned, as she remembered one more thing.

Their crossing of the mountains would be taking place ten days after Sara had rescued Cherise -- on a night when the moon had been a few days past full. For the crossing, there would be no moon in the sky at all, all through the night. Even if the clouds did clear, there would be nothing helpful behind them. There would not be a moon bright enough, in the sky long enough, to make the mountain crossing possible, for at least three or four days after the new moon.

Sara squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Never mind that, she told herself insistently. We still have to try. There's no other choice. We have to start now. There should still be six hours or so of daylight today. I'll have to walk faster than I've been doing, and save a day somehow, but I can do it. The pain in my ankle is just pain. I've fought through pain before. We'll get over the mountains somehow. I'll figure out how when we get there. I'll fight anyone who stops us. I'll kill anyone who stops us.

She kissed Cherise, and said softly, "We have to go."

Cherise started to respond, but must have seen the look in Sara's eyes. She stopped and nodded, and went over onto her back so Sara could wriggle back into the embrace of her arms and legs.

Sara didn't think she had gone as much as a hundred paces back into the forest -- the crashing of waves against the seawall was still loud -- before the pain in her ankle overwhelmed her. Her arm, holding the walking stick and bearing most of her weight on every stride, was exhausted, shaking, starting to cramp, and her ankle was being forced into greater use. She leaned against a tree, her right foot upraised but throbbing nonetheless.

She started crying.

The achingly beautiful voice she had so long ago fallen in love with was saying softly "Sara... Sara... Sara..." behind her ear.

Sara calmed a little at the sound, and heard Cherise say, "We can't make it in time, can we?"

Sara couldn't make herself respond. It wasn't a return of her vocal paralysis. She was capable of speech. But she couldn't make herself admit to failing Cherise so completely.

Cherise rubbed up against her. "Sara, Sara, look at me."

Sara, her eyes streaming tears, turned. Cherise's eyes were doing the same.

"Sara, we're together. We're still free. That's more important to me than being back home."

Sara blinked, and a feeling of calming warmth flooded her body. Cherise was relieving her of the unstated imperative that Sara must find a way, no matter what, to get Cherise home.

I need to accept it, Sara told herself. For the next nine months, until the restaurant resumes operation next summer, nobody on the island can help us. We're on our own. But together. She actually found herself smiling. "It is to me too." She went carefully down to the ground, crawled out of Cherise's embrace, and held her silently, for a long time.

After several minutes, Sara could see Cherise's attention suddenly focus elsewhere. "Sara, what's that? See, behind that waterfall?"

Rainwater was gushing over the ten-foot wall separating shelf from forest, which Sara had kept in sight during the short-lived retreat. She felt safer near the wall, seeing it as protection from their enemies, at least enemies in that direction. "I see the waterfall."

"So behind it, why is it so dark?"

That did seem odd. Sara managed to stand, laboriously, her ankle still throbbing, and went to investigate, using the walking stick. "Back in a minute." Without carrying Cherise, the pain was only intolerable, not incapacitating.

There was, Sara found, a pool of water, a few feet deep, into which the flow from the shelf was dropping. Behind the falling water, there was an opening into a cave. Sara entertained for a moment a bit of pure wishful thinking that the cave might go all the way through the mountains to the eastern side, but it proved to be only about ten feet deep. Sara wondered how the cave had come to be there. She supposed the empty space might once have been filled with a softer type of rock that had been dislodged or dissolved by the steadily falling water. Whatever the cause, it seemed to be completely natural, not a product of human efforts.

Sara gave it some thought, and nodded to herself. We're going to be on the island awhile, she thought. And here's some shelter.

She went back for Cherise. "I want you to see this. See what you think." Sara didn't want to go through the whole process of getting Cherise mounted around her waist for such a short trip, so she carried her the original way, arms under her shoulders and knees, with her right hand holding the walking stick awkwardly ahead of her, distributing what weight she could manage onto it. It was hell on her back, and Sara's progress so slow that she would never have considered it for an all-day walk, but for moving Cherise only a short distance it was workable. Sara had to discard the stick when she reached the pool, and eased herself down into it, hopping toward the waterfall, just squeezing past it at its edge to set Cherise down on the floor of the cave behind it. She turned and boosted herself out of the pool with her hands and sat beside Cherise, examining the cave.

Cherise said, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the waterfall, "It's really hard to see the entrance from any distance away. And it's got the darkness of the forest going for it. Even when it stops raining and the water curtain dries up, it's going to be really hard for anyone outside to see into it." She turned to look at Sara with a smile. "And hey, no rain in here."

Sara smiled back. "So what do you say?"

Cherise smile broadened. "I think we're home." She leaned forward for a kiss.