CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Jane went from freezing to death with her mind drifting into delirium to an adrenaline fueled wakefulness. The mushroom dipped onto its side so that the spongy surface where Jane sat turned into a sheer cliff. She clung to the stalk with her feet flailing beneath. The mushroom was falling from the sky, and Jane couldn't see Trinket. Perhaps Trinket had fallen to her death.

Only Trinket hadn’t fallen. She was hanging from the edge of the mushroom, with one hand gripping a plump piece of mushroom flesh, and her body hanging from that single arm.

‘Alive,’ Trinket shouted, and Jane realised that Trinket was having fun.

With a wild lunge Trinket reached up with her free hand and grabbed Jane by her bad ankle. Jane felt next level pain. She screamed an obscenity. Between her legs she could see Trinket with her thrip cloak billowing over the immense darkness.

‘I can’t hold on much longer,’ Jane screamed.

In less than a second Trinket came up Jane’s leg, and with a nimble surge she grabbed the mushroom and brought her feet up. She scrambled up the spongy side, up to the mushroom stalk. Now she held the stalk and leaned far out, like a windsurfer, to bring the mushroom off its sideways slip, back onto a stable sailing plane.

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For a moment Trinket worked hard on the stalk, then she said, ‘We’re still going down … we have lost too much lift.’

Trinket thumped a foot down on the spongy outside part of the mushroom, getting the mushroom to rock so that it could pump the air beneath it, but more mushroom chunks broke off and bobbed up into the night. They were crashing, and Jane had hot tears of rage.

‘I can’t save it,’ said Trinket. ‘We are going to land in the high timbers and this will be a hard landing.’

‘So this is death,’ Jane yelled.

‘Perhaps not. Stand up on the mushroom to help cushion the landing.’

Jane stood and put her legs apart and hugged the stalk and tried shutting her eyes but found that was more frightening than having them open.

‘Move with me,’ said Trinket. ‘We might be able to slow the descent.’

Working their bodies up and down Jane and Trinket pumped the mushroom against the air. The mushroom's descent slowed. Only there were air pockets all along the sharp ridges of the mountain, and the mushroom got caught in a cold draught and suddenly dropped fifteen feet.

‘We are crashing.’

The fact that she was about to die had put Jane into a rage. She was too angry to be afraid.

Trinket swung on the central stork like a pilot wrestling a joystick to get a plane into control. Then the mushroom descended into the canopy of trees.

Trinket flung her body left and right, guiding the mushroom through craggy branches and dark blue leaves. She had her cheeks pinched in, and her eyes were bulging and she whooped with delight.

Jane bent her knees and shook her head at the stupidity of death.