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“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Leander said, as if he were realizing something horrible. “All we can do is wait.”
I desperately hated it, but he was right. All we could do was wait and watch Lucius make his way slowly across. We couldn’t rush out to get him and pull him on, we couldn’t throw him more rope to pull him closer, and until he was well over halfway across the bridge, we couldn’t even call out and have him hear us.
“Was it that treacherous when you all crossed?” Lucius asked, pale and panting, once he reached our side.
I didn’t care how much of an ass Lucius could be, I pulled him into my arms and squeezed him tightly. It was a sign of how harrowing the experience had been that Lucius hugged me back.
“It wasn’t so bad for me,” I said, “but everyone who’s come over said it got a little worse each time.”
“The tower doesn’t sound right,” Lucius said. We all stared blankly at him, until he went on with, “After Darius crossed over, the tower holding the suspension chain on that side started to make weird sounds.”
“Like cracking?” Mara asked, all color draining from her face.
Lucius froze, then nodded quickly.
I panicked. It was as bad as it had been when I’d been out in the middle of the bridge, looking down. I broke away from the others and hurried to the end of the bridge, listening for all I was worth.
Appius had already started across. I let out an involuntary whimper and grabbed the suspension tower on our side of the bridge to keep myself from sinking with fear. Appius seemed so small out there, balanced over a chasm so wide and so deep that one slip and he would be taken from me forever.
A heartbeat later, the plank Appius had just stepped on about a quarter of the way from the other side, fell out from under him. He was still so far away that for us, it happened in silence. We could only watch as Appius gripped the suspension chain with both arms and continued on.
Two rope sections later, it happened again. This time, Appius jerked downward when the plank disappeared from under him.
“No!” I called out, sinking to my knees.
It wasn’t happening. I couldn’t watch it, but I couldn’t look away.
Appius gripped the suspension chain with both arms again and shimmied along at a snail’s pace.
Another plank fell out from under him, mere seconds after he’d refastened his clip to another section of the chain. Again, he pulled himself up from where he’d slipped and forged on.
“Appius!” I called out once he was near the center of the bridge. “You can do this! We’re right here, waiting for you.”
“You can do it, Appius!” Leander cheered.
Darius joined in, then Mara and Lucius as well. For a few minutes, it seemed to bolster Appius, and he pulled himself on.
But I could see something was horribly wrong. The bridge began to sway and dip far more than it had when I’d been on it. Even when Lucius had been on it. Worse still, planks were now falling off along the whole length of the bridge, not just where Appius was moving and putting his feet. They seemed especially loose at the far end of the bridge, where we’d all started from.
Appius was about three-quarters of the way across, only about thirty yards from us, when Lucius suddenly grasped his head with both hands and started moaning, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!”
My throat was already closed up as I concentrated on Appius, willing him to move faster, to reach us as quickly as he could. When I twisted to look at Lucius, then turned and followed the line of his sight, I cried out in abject fear.
The tower that held up the bridge on the other side of the chasm was crumbling before our eyes, as if it were made of sand. As it did, the suspension chain sagged more and more, quickly going slack. That was why the planks were falling out at an alarming rate now. That was why the entire bridge started to go down.
“Conrad?” Appius’s high, terrified voice called out to me.
I tore my eyes away from the tower and looked straight into Appius’s huge, terrified eyes just as there was a deafening crack and the entire bridge snapped free of the tower on the far side.
I watched as if everything were happening in slow motion. The far end of the bridge dropped down, swinging across the gaping, silent chasm in an arc that was almost beautiful it was so graceful. It was one, long sweeping gesture that caught Appius up and sent him plummeting down and out of my sight as well.
“Conrad!”
“Appius! No! No!”
There was a massive crash as the loose bits of the bridge slammed against the side of the cliff.
“No! Appius!”
