The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel Read Online Free PDF

o’clock. She glanced at her wrist. Her watch was gone. Either she’d been in the bottle five or six hours or a night and a day. Instinct—or body clock—suggested the latter. Fear prickled in her belly. Thirty hours as a prisoner.
    Prisoner. The word stuck crosswise in her brain, striking ice crystals from bone. Someone or something had taken her and imprisoned her, stolen her clothes, her watch, her ID, stolen who she was, and hid the leftovers in a pit like garbage.
    Or, like leftovers: to be eaten later.
    Again Anna started to cry for help. Fear of the answering silence cemented the sound in her lungs.
    Soon, somebody—or something—would come. Monsters are a lazy bunch. They don’t take all the trouble to catch a thing and put it in a bottle if they don’t want it for some reason. They’d want to talk to it or poke it with sticks or make it sing or dance or fuck it. They would do experiments on it at the very least and torture it at the very worst.
    Unless they just wanted to watch.
    Suddenly Anna could feel hidden eyes leering from behind the rim of her hole, eyes that watched her vomit and scream like a fox in a trap. Watched her naked.
    Scanning where cliff met sky, she studied every shadow, rock, and crack.
    Nothing.
    No one.
    The sense of being watched didn’t leave her.
    Her arm was throbbing, a pulse of all-encompassing pain. The ends of her fingers were numb and turning blue. She eased herself down until she was flat on her back, her bloodless dying limb supported by the sand. Draping her uninjured arm over her breasts to cover her nakedness, she studied the high eye-shaped rim of her world. The sun would come back or the monster would come back or insanity would come back or she would die of thirst. The last option seemed the least nasty.
    “You have one job,” Molly said, as she had so many times over the past few months. “Staying alive.”
    “Damn it!” Anna grumbled. “Why do you have to make things so hard?”
    With her sister’s admonition tolling in her head, Anna realized how desperately she wanted a drink of water. The maiden whose paw she’d intended to de-thorn for a drink must not have come through. Lying in a stupor for—hours? a day?—the lining of her nose had dried to parchment. In place of her tongue was a splintery wooden clapper. Thirsting to death lost its place of honor as the least nasty possibility.
    Along one curving edge of her prison jar, green plants with wilted white flowers grew. Datura, deadly nightshade; Anna knew that from the pamphlet she’d had in her pack. They needed water to grow. She could dig, then drink from the seep. The optimistic thought was stillborn; desert weeds needed drops, not buckets. If a plant needed serious water to live it would take root in Oregon or Louisiana, not on Mars or the Colorado Plateau.
    Galvanized by attention, Anna’s thirst became its own entity, a clawed evil, tearing at her throat and shredding her thoughts until she could think of no worse death than death by thirst.
    Deadly nightshade.
    Did one get the “deadly” if one ate it? It was good to have options. Rising to her feet was too labor intensive, so, shutting out Molly’s “staying alive,” she held her worthless arm across her belly and knee-walked toward the plants. Chewing on the leaves or the blossoms might produce some moisture or it might kill her. Either way, she figured she was ahead.
    Reaching for the juiciest-looking leaf, she noticed a deeper shadow , round and dark, like the back of a turtle—or a land mine—to one side of the scrap of living green. It was half hidden in the sand. Approaching the object with the suspicion of a cat in a new country, she shuffled toward it, each small movement driving knives into her skull and shoulder. Tentatively, she nudged it with her knee. It didn’t explode.
    It was an old metal canteen, the brown-and-blue fabric cover faded to grays. Folding herself down, she tugged it free of the sand by its army green