This is a present for some friends, using their characters. The plot is mine where it doesn't copy the game, the main characters belong to my friends, and the standard disclaimer applies for the rest of it. Enjoy.


Millie

My sister sighed contentedly and stuffed her water bottle into her pack. "Well, Mills, I gotta admit this was one of your better ideas. You want to camp out here for tonight? Or head back?"

Camping is fun, and Rajan was looking contemplatively at the cliff ahead of us, planning his route. I squinted at the sky. "It's gonna get dark, huh? Raj, you wanna step out?"

He shrugged. "Whatever you want, babe. It is nice out. Smells good, too."

I took a deep breath of fresh air scented with dirt and pine and grinned. It was going to get dark, but it wasn't there yet. The sun was headed for the horizon, but it wouldn't reach it for a while, and the impending sunset hadn't even started to wash the blue sky with lemon. It would be a nice night; we wouldn't even need a tent. It was just a little cliff. We'd have plenty of time if we did it together. "One last rock climb?"

White teeth flashed in my baby's dark face. "Bring it," he grinned, stretching his arms behind him.

"I'm in," Mercy agreed. "Let's go!"

We strapped on our safety equipment, Rajan at twice the speed of everyone else and Mercy trying to pretend like she wasn't checking mine out of the corner of her eye. We're the same age to the hour, but sometimes Mercy thinks I'm 3. I winked at her and tugged on my harness to show it was secure; she chuckled and shook her head, following me to the cliff with reddening cheeks.

We made a straggly sort of line across the cliff, Rajan going first to set the anchors, Mercy cleaning behind us. It was an easy climb; lots of texture on the rocks. We probably could have done the whole thing without equipment beyond our helmets, but Raj would never allow something like that with me along. He's not overprotective, but he's careful.

"So," Mercy called up, "how high do you think we have to climb before we can see our house from here?"

I paused to look across the trees, out toward the ocean and home. "Um, halfway up?"

Above me, Rajan laughed. "I think a little farther than that, ladybug. Let's see... what, eight inches per mile? Ballpark, assuming perfect visibility..." He trailed off, muttering to himself. I couldn't hear him; he was almost to the top, looking up as he caught a new handhold. I spent just a second admiring the way the defined muscles in his arms flexed as he hauled himself upward.

Below me, Mercy was chuckling. "You're over thinking this, bro. It wasn't a serious question."

"Close to a mile," Rajan announced triumphantly.

I rolled my eyes, looking to Mercy for support against my adorable nerd boyfriend. "Eyes can only see so-"

Mercy's eyes widened and her jaw dropped in horror. On my other side, something hit rock in a trio of thumps. I looked over and saw a heap of red and brown cloth on the pine needles we'd started from.

"Rajan!" Mercy was already scrambling down at superhuman speed. "Millie, go down slow, ok? It's a free climb, you don't have protection. I'll take care of him." I started moving, as fast as I could follow, even though my brain was numb and refusing to tell me what was going on. Mercy yelled at me, but she didn't change direction. "Millie! I told you to be careful! Don't fall!" She hit bottom and raced over to the heap of cloth, her fingers running gingerly along it. "Raj, are you awake? Can you hear me?" No response. I pushed off and jumped the last eight feet, rolling on the soft forest earth to break my fall. My sister strangled a scream of protest, turning it into a sigh instead. "He's alive, and he doesn't seem to be bleeding to death." She turned back to my motionless boyfriend, continuing her assessment. My whole body had turned to lead. "He might have a concussion, and his leg is... wow. Damn. We need to get him help, fast."

That broke the spell. I raced over, shrugging off my pack, and dropped down beside him. "Is he awake?" I leaned over his short, dark hair, trying to see his face. His eyes were closed, his breath rough and fast.

"Not yet." Mercy hesitated, and my stomach sank a little more. "Mills... we have a problem. He needs help, and I don't know how we're going to get it to him."

"How far is it?" I asked, pulling my phone from my pack even though I hadn't been able to get a signal on it for hours.

My sister knew me too well to give an answer in irrelevant miles. "To the car? If we had turned back before we started this climb, we'd have made it about an hour after dark. But you can't get a car up here."

"What other options do we have?" We hadn't seen another soul all day, and my phone had no reception here, either. "Pretty soon he's gonna wake up" please, please, please let it be soon! "and be in a whole lot of pain." I looked around, scrambling for options. "Maybe there's a road nearby?"

"It's worth a shot. I don't remember seeing anything on the map, but it's such a densely populated island, it's likely that someone will be nearby..." Suddenly decisive, she stalked to my pack and tossed it next to me. She threw her own beside it. "You look on the map. I'll be right back."

I dug the map out of the front flap of Mercy's pack and unfolded it, turning on the lamp on the climbing helmet still strapped under my chin. Rajan had marked our route, numbering the stopping places in his little Hindi squiggles. I counted them off and then squinted at the lines around the last one, searching for anything that might help us. "No road; nothing for a car nearby. But it has a little trail..."

Mercy's voice drifted down from above me; she was halfway up the cliff again. "A trail? Great! Any sort of village or town marked on it?"

"A lil' something." The print was tiny, I could just make it out. "Miii-naaa-kaa-miii."

"Seriously? That's awesome! Even a little place should have a car and a phone. I'll- hmm."

She hung halfway up, thinking, while the shadows stretched out. I thought, too. "How do you suppose we get him there?"

"Ideally they'd come to him, but -"

Beside me, Rajan groaned and stirred, curling toward his injured leg and bringing his hands to his head. In an instant my hands were there with his, caressing them, brushing his face, squeezing his shoulder. He turned toward me a little.

"Ugh. Millie?"

Speech! And he recognized me. Hooray! "Hey, hey! How do you feel?

"Um, I think I'm gonna hurl..." He groaned.

Mercy had started back down the cliff at the sound of his voice. "That's normal," she assured him, clambering toward us. "Careful not to move your leg if you do. It's broken – it'll hurt like hell."

"Already does." He swallowed hard a couple times, moving one hand down to cradle his tummy.

"Don't go puking on me, ok?" He looked pretty bad. We needed to come up with something fast. "Mercy, what's your plan, then?'

"I don't like the idea of splitting up. Raj, you know what year it is?" He did. "How about the square root of 144?"

"Twelve," he responded patiently. "I was wearing my helmet, I'm not brain dead. Why would we split up?"

"There's a village nearby." If we didn't split up, we'd have to carry Raj somehow. That could be difficult, given his condition... "But we have blankets, we could always make a stretcher, right?"

Mercy nodded. "I think that's our best bet. More reliable than trying to find each other again on this mountain." She hopped to the ground and began stripping off her climbing harness.

Rajan got his hands underneath himself and pushed. "I can- oooooh." He sank back down, panting, his sweet brown face gone pasty gray and beaded with sweat.

"No, you cannot walk," Mercy noted briskly. "Millie, sit on him. I'm going to find some branches strong enough to make a stretcher from." She started digging through her pack for something.

She was leaving us alone? "Don't wander off too far, ok?" She could take care of herself, at least. Raj couldn't, so it was my job. I took his hand again. "You'll be ok. I think I have some painkiller..."

"I'll take the whole bottle."

Mercy found a bottle in her pack, tossed it and some water over to me. "I'll be back soon," she said, and wandered off with our ax into the trees.

I poured four little blue pills into my palm and dumped them into my boyfriend's mouth, following them with a dollop of water. "Here."

He swallowed gratefully and then leaned back, grabbing my hand again. "Thanks." He lay quiet for a moment, his eyes closed. Something, probably a squirrel, moved in the branches of a nearby tree, shaking a cluster of pine needles to the ground. Shame I didn't have any nuts. An army of trained squirrels could probably carry Raj back to the car in a hurry, and quite comfortably. Squirrels were soft.

Rajan interrupted my thoughts with some of the darker, serious ones I was trying not to have. "What happened? One second everything was fine, and the next – it was like someone shoved me, and my rope was just gone."

I didn't know what happened. When Rajan fell, the rope should have pulled on me, but it didn't. It should have caught him, but it didn't. He should have been able to catch himself, but he didn't. For someone as competent as Raj, it didn't add up. "You're sure you set up everything right?"

"I- as sure as I can be. I mean, its not the first time I've done this. And I never skimp on the safety stuff. I think it was right. And it felt like someone shoved me."

"Someone... shoved you?"

"I know it sounds weird. It's not like there was anyone there to do it. But – it was so sudden, you know. It wasn't just my hand slipping. And... it felt like fingers, splayed against my chest. I can still sort of feel them." He rubbed his chest, trying to erase the memory. I tugged his shirt free and pushed it up to bare his bronze pecs. An angry red splotch spread across his smooth skin.

"Hey wait... there's a mark – like a hand print. Look." I ran my fingers cautiously across it. It looked like burn. Raj shivered and pointed to the other side of his chest.

"And over here, too. Two of them."

A pair of hand prints, like somebody pushed him. "That's creepy! It wasn't me, I swear!"

"I know, Mills, I know. I wouldn't suspect you." He was laughing at me, shakily; he put a hand behind my head and drew me down to his shoulder. His heart was pumping, crashing on his chest like caffeinated ocean waves. He patted my head. "I hope Mercy hurries back."

"She'd better. It's getting dark." I sat up and dug into my pack to produce a flashlight to give Rajan. The one on his helmet wouldn't do much good, since once we got him onto the stretcher it'd be pointed pretty much straight up the whole time. At least he'd be able to see the stars.

"What are we going to do about the packs?" he asked, and I frowned. His voice was getting weaker. "We should probably rearrange them before she comes back. I can't carry mine, but they're not that full. We can fit most of the stuff in the other two, I think."

"I'll try. You just sit tight, okay? Let me know if you need anything."

"'K. I'll just pass out for a while then. Don't mind me." His hands were shaking and his face was getting paler. His eyes closed and his body went limp.

I shook him a little and his eyes didn't open. "Mercy?"

The sound of a wildebeest crashing through the forest was followed by the abrupt appearance of my sister at the treeline. "Millie? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine. He isn't doing well. Did you find anything?"

She sighed and melted a little, leaning one shoulder against a tree. "You scared me. Yeah, I found a couple branches that will work. I'm stripping them now. Should be another five minutes or so. I'll be right back." She wandered off into the shadows again.

So what exactly had happened? The rope, the hand prints... it was just too weird. Creepy, like ghosts and stuff. Not that I couldn't handle unusual; freaky stuff happens to Valentines. We're magnets. But usually there were more people around to call on. Mercy's awesome and all, but right now I'd have given an awful lot to have my parents or Raj's brother Eryc around. I want my mommy.

I quit thinking about it and started singing lullabies to Rajan while I rearranged our stuff.

The sun was down and the tree shadows were all mushed up into a big dark blanket when Mercy came back again. "Here we are. Best I could do on short notice." She laid out two long branches, even taller than Raj, all knobbly where she'd striped them down. "We'll wrap them in blanket a couple times and tie it off – bring the rope over? And cut some strips from my fleece. We're going to want cushions on the grips."

I threw her a blanket and did what she said, keeping an eye on Raj the whole time. He started looking around again when we were about half done; it was too dark to wink, so I blew him kisses while we worked. The time went by pretty fast. I was actually surprised when Mercy tied the last grip on.

We laid the stretcher out beside him and I gave him a confident pat before I slid my arms under his shoulders. "Help me lift him onto it?" I asked as Mercy perched beside his legs. "One, two, three!"

Rajan screamed and leaned over, puking into the dirt beside the stretcher. I burst into tears.

"Sorry! I'm so sorry," Mercy apologized. "It's done for now though. We'll get you to some decent painkillers soon. Come on, munchkin – you want head or feet?"

It took me a minute and a few deep breaths before I was ready to grab the stretcher handles at Rajan's head. "Ok. Let's go."