FALLING FOR THE LAST TIME

POV: Thessaly Vance

My hand slipped first. Then the rock gave up.

I felt it before I understood it, the wall tipping away from my fingers like it had decided it didn't want me anymore. My stomach dropped straight through my body. I grabbed for anything, a lip of stone, a crack, air, and caught nothing.

The rope caught me instead.

It jerked hard against my harness, snapping the breath out of my lungs, and for one second I hung there in the dark, spinning slow, staring up at the wall I'd just fallen off of like it had betrayed me personally. Three feet. That's all I dropped. Three feet shouldn't have scared me the way it did.

But something was wrong with how it felt. Ropes don't stretch like that. Not this one. Not the one I checked myself two hours ago before anyone else was even awake.

"Get down. Now."

The voice came out of nowhere, low and sharp, cutting through the wind like he'd been standing there the whole time, watching me fall before I even knew I was falling. I twisted against the harness and looked down at the ledge below the practice wall.

A man stood there I had never seen in my life.

I'd been at this camp four days. I knew every face by now, every jacket, every laugh coming out of the mess tent at dinner. I did not know this one. Tall, still, arms crossed like he was bracing for something, watching me the way you watch a pot you already know is about to boil over.

"Who are you?" My voice cracked more than I wanted it to.

"Climb down. Slow. Don't put weight on the left side of the rope."

That should have made me angry. Some stranger telling me how to handle my own gear at midnight, on my own wall, like I hadn't been doing this since I was twelve years old. But there was something in the way he said it. Not bossy. Not scared either. Just certain, like a man reading off a fact he already knew the ending to.

I climbed down anyway. I don't know why. Maybe because some part of me already believed him more than I believed the rope.

My boots hit the dirt and my legs shook harder than they had any right to after a three-foot fall. I turned around to tell this stranger exactly what I thought of him showing up out of nowhere in the middle of the night, and the words died in my throat.

He wasn't looking at me anymore.

He was looking at the rope.

Not the way you look at a rope that just did its job and saved someone. He was looking at it like it had failed him personally. Like he expected exactly this and hated being right.

"Move away from the wall," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"Now, Thessaly."

I froze.

I never told him my name.

There was no name tag on me. No badge. Nobody introduces themselves before falling off a wall at midnight. I stood there with my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I thought he could probably hear it, and I opened my mouth to ask how he knew who I was, and that's when the beam of his headlamp swept low, over the last two feet of rope still hanging from the anchor above us.

I saw it too.

A clean line, cut halfway through, fibers frayed white and sharp where a blade had gone in and stopped. Not frayed like old rope wears down over years of use. Cut. On purpose. Deep enough that one more good pull, one more hard fall, would have finished the job the wall started.

The air went out of me.

"That's..." I couldn't even finish the sentence. My eyes kept going back to it, that clean little slice in the middle of a rope I trusted with my life two hours ago, and my brain kept trying to build an explanation that made sense and failing every single time.

"I know," he said, and it wasn't an answer to anything I'd asked out loud.

I looked up at him. Really looked this time, past the fact that he was a stranger, past the fact that he'd known my name before I gave it to him. His jaw was tight. His hands weren't shaking, but they were curled into fists at his sides, like he was holding something back that had nothing to do with the cold.

"You knew," I said slowly. "You knew this was going to happen."

"I didn't know when. I knew it would."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"No," he said, and for the first time his voice cracked too, just barely, just enough that I caught it. "It doesn't. Not yet."

I should have been furious. I should have screamed for camp security, demanded his name, his badge, anything that would make him a person I could report instead of a shadow that appeared exactly when I needed saving. Instead I stood there with my pulse still hammering from the fall, staring at a man I'd never met, feeling something twist in my chest that had nothing to do with fear.

He was scared. Not of me. For me.

Nobody had looked at me like that since my father died.

"Who are you?" I asked again, quieter this time.

"Kester." He said it like it cost him something. "Kester Hale. I'm the camp medic."

"Camp doesn't have a night medic."

"It does tonight."

That should have been the moment I laughed at him, told him to get lost, and gone straight to Aldous's office to report a strange man wandering camp property after midnight. But I didn't move. My eyes kept drifting back to that rope, that clean cut nobody accidentally makes, and back to him, standing there like he already knew exactly how this whole night was going to end before it happened.

"Somebody did this on purpose," I said. "Somebody wanted me to fall."

"Yes."

"How do you know that? How do you know any of this?"

He didn't answer. He just looked at me the way you look at someone you're about to lose, which made no sense at all, because we had just met. After all, he was a stranger standing on a ledge in the dark who somehow knew my name before I said it, who somehow knew the rope would fail before it failed, who was looking at me right now like this wasn't the first time he'd stood exactly here, watching exactly this happen.

"You need to trust me," he said. "Starting right now. I know that's not fair to ask."

"You don't get to ask me to trust you. I don't even know you."

"I know." His voice dropped so low I almost missed it. "You will."

Behind him, back toward camp, a light flicked on in one of the tents. Someone was awake. Someone had heard something, or seen something, or knew something they shouldn't at this hour, and Kester's whole body went rigid the second he noticed it too.

"Get inside your tent," he said, fast now, all the strange calm gone out of his voice. "Lock it. Don't open it for anyone tonight. Not even me."

"Wait,"

"Thessaly." He grabbed my arm, just for a second, just long enough to make me look at him instead of the light moving toward us through the dark. "Whoever cut that rope is still on this mountain. And they know you're still alive."