Jack wasn’t kidding when he said he was a good climber—he scaled the beanstalk fast, and made it look easy the whole way. That made sense, I suppose. He was literally made to do this, I suppose. That didn’t keep me from feeling bitter and resentful as I struggled the whole way up though, especially considering the fact that we were playing for pretty high stakes here.

I started off pretty strong, making it up the first fifteen feet in good time and with relative ease.

I started to slow down a little after that, and by about twenty five feet up, my arms were starting to hurt from pulling my weight.

At thirty feet, I made the mistake of looking down.

I’d always enjoy climbing rock walls. I used to do it every time I came across one, and even briefly experimented with real rock climbing out in the mountains when I’d joined a climbing club in college, before my class load got too heavy and I ducked out. So I wasn’t scared of heights, exactly, but I suddenly realized in that moment that there is a very big difference between being thirty feet off the ground while strapped in a harness with half a dozen different safety features keeping you safely suspending in the air, and being thirty feet in the air with nothing between you and the unforgiving ground but the strength of your own arms. And now that my strength was starting to fail, I was suddenly realizing exactly how precarious of a position I had put myself in.

I clung to the beanstalk, gripping the base of one enormous leaf so tightly with both hands that my fingers started to go numb.

Erik was coming up below me at a much slower pace, and it took a while for him to catch up and realize I’d stopped moving. He stopped right underneath me, his head next to my foot.

“What are you doing, Rikki? We’re not even halfway yet, keep going,” he grunted.

“I can’t,” I replied, my voice high and tight.

“What, is there no handhold that you can reach form there?”

“No—that’s not it. I just… I can’t. I can’t keep going.”

“Yes you can, you just have to do it—don’t think about it, just do it.”

“No, I mean I literally can’t. I can’t let go, my hands have seized up. I looked down, Erik. I shouldn’t have looked down.”

Erik made an exasperated sound, and then started to shuffle over to the side so he was on my right rather than directly below me. He climbed up higher until he was beside me and our heads were level. Despite the fog of terror that had suddenly clouded my head, I noticed that he was breathing heavily, though he seemed to be trying to conceal the fact.

“Rikki,” he said, his voice low and serious. “You can’t stop now. We’re nearly halfway, you literally can’t stop now. You either have to keep going up, or you’ll have to climb back down. If you stay here without going anywhere, you’ll only exhaust yourself. You’ll become too weak to climb at all, and then you really will fall. This isn’t negotiable, you have to make a choice, and you have to make it now. Up, or down?”

“This is a terrible pep talk,” I squeaked, screwing my eyes shut tight, as if the distance to the ground would just melt away if I couldn’t see it.

“If I had time to gently walk you through this, I would. But this is a serious situation, and you’re going to have to act to get out of it, not wait around for me to say nice things until you get control of yourself. You came this far. If you keep going, you’ll be at the top in just a few minutes. And after that, this part will all be over. You can make it a few minutes, can’t you? You can be afraid for a few minutes. You can be brave anyway for a few minutes. You can climb for a few minutes. But you have to do it, because doing nothing will only get you hurt, do you understand me?”

I swallowed hard. He was right. I’d already come this far, I could go a little farther. It didn’t matter if I was afraid or not, I had to do something. Somehow I managed to pry my eyes open again, and I looked at Erik’s grim face, pale in the weak moonlight. He had one arm hooked around a vine, and the other hung awkwardly at his side.

“Erik—what’s wrong with your arm?”

He grimaced. “Nothing.”

“No, seriously, what’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Is it from when the giant hurt you? Is it still hurt?”

“It was better before, it wasn’t hurt that bad.”

“It looks like it hurts now though!”

Erik ground his teeth in frustration, but I got the sense that it was frustration with himself, not with me. “…Yes, it hurts now. This climb hasn’t been easy on it. And hanging around here waiting for you to get a grip on yourself isn’t helping either. So please, let’s just go and get to the top of this damn tower already.”

“Go ahead of me,” I told him.

“No.”

“Go on, I’ll just slow you down! Go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

“No. I’m not moving until you go first.”

My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking, but I had no choice. He clearly wasn’t going to go anywhere until I started moving again myself, and with his hurt arm, the longer I remained frozen with anxiety, the more difficult the climb would be for him. It was the push I needed to force me to unclench my death grip on the leaf stem and reach for the next one above my head, pulling myself up another foot.

Hand over hand, foot by foot, I continued to climb, focusing on the dark silhouette of Jack above me, and the faint light shining through the shuttered tower window like a lighthouse beacon. Below me, I heard Erik’s labored breathing as he too continued the seemingly endless climb.

Somehow, I made it. With an enormous effort of will, I heaved myself up the last two feet of beanstalk until I drew level with Jack, the shuttered window set in the top of the tallest tower so close, we could reach out and touch it.

It took almost two minutes for Erik to catch up, and when he finally did, I saw that he was pale and sweating. His bad arm, the one wounded in the giant attack, shook badly anytime he put any of his weight on it.

“Hurry up,” he grunted, slightly breathlessly, and jerked his head towards the window. “What are you waiting for, an invitation?”

“Are you okay?” Jack asked, his brow furrowing at the sight of Erik’s obvious distress.

“I’m fine,” Erik snarled through his teeth, “just go already.”

“Are the shutters fastened?” I asked Jack, who was closer to the window and could see it better in the weak moonlight.

“I can’t tell; if they are, it would be from the inside,” he replied.

“Kick the damn things in if you have to,” Erik snarled.

Jack didn’t kick them in, but he did stretch out one long, lanky leg to give them a push with his boot. They rattled, but didn’t open.

“I think they’re unfastened, but they open outwards, not inwards,” he said. “I’ll have to grab them to pull them open, but…” he glanced down at the eighty foot drop into blackness below us, and the three foot gap that was between the beanstalk where we clung and the wall of the tower. It was slightly too far out of reach for him to be able to reach the window ledge without having to take both his hands off the beanstalk. It could be done, but I certainly didn’t blame him for being hesitant to try it.

“If you can’t open them yourself,” Erik said, grimacing as he tried shifting his weight and letting his bad arm fall to his side with a wince, “then knock.”

Jack looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I shrugged. “Knock,” I said.

Jack reached out with his foot again, and lightly tapped the window shutters three times with the toe of his boot.

Several seconds passed, and nothing happened. Jack was just stretching out his leg to rap again when there was a shuffling sound, a loud sniff, and the shutters were pushed open. A young woman stood there, illuminated from behind by the soft orange glow of firelight. Her expression was one of utter confusion at first, clearly wondering who, or what, on earth could possibly be knocking on a window that was eighty feet above the ground. When she saw the three of us there, hanging in space as we clung to the side of a monstrous vegetable plant and all staring right at her, she gave a little cry of surprise and staggered back into the room.

Jack didn’t waste any time on niceties. He stuck out his leg again, rested one foot on the window ledge, and pushed off of the beanstalk with the other. He grabbed the edges of the window as he went, using his own momentum to throw himself right into the tower room. I went next, copying Jack’s movements exactly before my brain had time to freak out at what I was about to attempt. I sailed right through the open window, Jack reaching out to grab me by the outstretched arms and haul me inside as I went, just in case I didn’t quite make it on my own. I collapsed into him, my heart pounding and my hands shaking, and once I realized that both my feet were once again planted firmly on solid ground, a slightly hysterical laugh bubbled up to my lips.

I cleared my throat and quickly struggled to pull myself together before relief and adrenaline turned me into a gibbering mess. We weren’t done just yet. I turned back to the window, and saw Erik struggling to shuffle around the beanstalk, so he was positioned in front of the open window. He turned his body as much as he could and crouched, getting ready to make the jump, but his hurt arm was still dangling uselessly. Both Jack and I rushed to the window just as he pushed off. Jack, the tallest of the three of us, reached the window first and leaned halfway out of it, grabbing Erik by hand that was outstretched to grab the window sill. I was there a second later, snatching Erik by the shirt as he flew threw the air towards us, and I hauled backwards as hard as I could, yanking him into the room.

It was lucky I did, because the moment that Erik’s foot landed on the window ledge—his bad foot, the one he had sprained during his run in with the giant—it gave out on him and slipped right off the sill. He went down hard and fast, but because Jack and I had managed to pull him halfway into the window, his chest hit the sill and he was able to cling on instead of falling to his death. Jack and I yanked him the rest of the way in and he fell to the floor, panting and swearing.

“Damn it,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “I think I twisted it again.”

Crap. Well, we’d have the cross that bridge when we came to it. For now, I turned to face the room.