I pause beneath the lowest rung to take a centering breath. I lower my shoulders, bend my knees as much as I can, and push against the hard ground. As I explode upward, I extend my arms over my head. My palms hit the first foot-long spike hard. My left hand closes tightly around the ridged steel, but my right loses its grip. I swing like a monkey by one arm, gritting my teeth to keep from letting out a groan.

Even when you’re healthy and well rested, one arm chin-ups are arm-busters and back breakers. But in the gym you don’t have adrenaline powering you to save your own life.

Engaging my arms, my core, and muscles I can’t name, I raise myself until I find a firm grip with my right hand. Then, legs swinging, I pull my chest up to the level of the spike and throw my right elbow over the rung.

I pull hard, reaching for the next rung, until my kneecaps are balanced on the rebar. The posture is pure agony. I pull again until I am standing on the lowest spike, seven feet off the ground. I see the flashlight poking at the lower entrance to the gap. I don’t dare move, for fear of alerting Jewett to my position. All that needs to happen is for him to raise his eyes.

But he has grown careful. Maybe the question about whether I am armed or not has begun to worry him. I see the beam of light probe the chokepoint between the tree and the boulder. It stops when it finds my blood trail. Then it rises, scanning the boulder from the base to the top.

The radio squelches again. Jewett fumbles to kill the volume, but it takes seconds for him to find the knob in the dark.

The distraction gives me a chance to ascend to the next rung. Now I am standing ten feet above the frozen earth, holding onto the ladder for dear life. I am afraid that if I draw my knife, I will lose my grip.

It’s apparent that Jewett suspects an ambush. He thinks I’m crouched atop the glacial erratic. He can’t see the tree stand from the bottom of the snow-filled alley. He has given no thought to the seemingly unclimbable oak tree to his left.

My heart is beating like a war drum.

He begins creeping forward, probing the rock face with the light, illuminating the mosaic of orange and sage-green lichen. The pattern is intricate, beautiful. In the dark I never saw it.

If Jewett’s finds the place in the snow where I leapt up, I am dead.

But he is preoccupied with the boulder. He searches for footholds with the beam, continues its slow ascension of the rock.

Come on.

It takes everything in me to keep from shivering, to avoid knocking snow loose, or making the faintest noise.