Free Reprisal by Mitchell Smith

carabiners, and her harness over her shoulders. She closed the Volvo's trunk, and bent under the load, climbed back up to the cave's mouth, careful of her footing.
    In two trips, she hauled her gear inside, and down a rough passage slightly more than two feet wide ... piled the pack, sleeping bag, and rope sacks, then went back and closed and locked the gate behind her.
    Hefting the gear again, Joanna moved farther down the passage into deeper darkness and damp, the daylight only a faint glow behind her. ... She switched on her helmet lamp, and by that yellow cone of light, sorted out her webbing, then buckled on the sit harness, checked the adjustment--tight, but not too tight--and did the same for her chest harness. Then she buckled a one-inch-wide webbing strap up from her waist to connect them.
    After Budwing fell, Chris Leong had bolted two steel rigging anchors into the low stone ceiling of the passage, just short of the mud-slide chute. Joanna tugged the Blue Water's working end out of one rope sack, snapped back-to-back carabiners up into each anchor fitting, then tied into one set with a figure eight on a bight loop ... took the line over to the slightly lower anchor and tied another figure eight through the carabiners there. She examined the anchors' set by her helmet light, saw that the limestone they were bolted into was sound-not flaking, not cracked--then checked her rigging knots again, dressed and set them hard.
    Joanna dug for the Blue Water's running end, tied a looped knot there to keep from rappelling off it into the pit--then began the routine of attaching her gear and herself to the rope. She snapped the web-tape runners of her pack and rope sacks to her harness loops with small bent-gate Petzl carabiners, then clipped her rack descender to the steel link at the front of her sit harness, and threaded the Blue Water back and forth through the rack's small bars.
    She tested her harness buckles, snapped the safety shunt's runner to her waist link, and clipped the shunt onto the rope, for backup braking in case the rack failed. ... Then she double-checked everything she'd done, looked along the passage's wet mud floor for anything she might have dropped, anything forgotten, overlooked.
    When she was sure, Joanna backed slowly away from her anchors, feeding out rope through the rack, keeping tension on it ... gripping the shunt with her left hand to let the rope run free. She backed down until the heels of her boots rested just at the edge of the irregular black mouth of the chute.
    Then she stepped back and down--and instantly began to slide fast on slick mud
    ... kept her feet straddled wide as she skidded backward at a steeper and steeper slant into darkness. She clamped the rack's bars in her right hand to slow herself, half sliding, half dangling from the angled rope ... and looked up, trying to find the carabiner hanging from the chute roof. They'd rigged it suspended from a web-tape runner bolted to the chute ceiling, to pass the ropes through ... run them high at the pit's stone lip, out of the mud.
    Joanna caught a gleaming in her helmet's light, saw it was the carabiner hanging above her and to the left, and clamped the rack's bars to stop. She reached up with a loop of the rope in her left hand, unscrewed the carabiner's gate with thumb and forefinger, snapped the Blue Water in, and screwed the gate shut.--That was just done, and the shunt gripped again, when the pack and rope sacks, trailing on their tape runners, slid suddenly downslope past her, toppled over the rock's edge and into the pit.
    Their weight yanked at her, and Joanna slipped and fell hard, skidded down the mud slope on her belly, and was over the lip and falling into blackness, emptiness.
    She felt fear flash through her, bright and freezing cold. The rack. Hold tight ... hold tight.
    And she gripped it, gripped it with all the strength in her right hand, squeezing the rack bars together so the rope hummed, then whined running