Chapter 1: The Pit and the Pendulum

"Hell's bells," I thought, as I dangled over the lava pit. It was only a small pit, but I could still feel the heat as though I were peering into the oven to figure out whether the turkey was done. My wrists were aching, my skin was starting to sting from the heat, but what tormented me most was my itching nose. And, of course, the sight of Doctor Hypatia Garoux cackling and dancing on the edge of the pit. I was hoping she'd do a Gollum and plummet into the fiery depths, but Lord of the Rings is fiction. Not just fiction, fantasy. Things don't happen like that in real life.

Maybe if I swung back and forth, I could gain enough momentum to reach the edge and use my feet to scrabble up and out. But as soon as Pace noticed what I was doing, she grabbed her slingshot -- which had been her weapon of choice since we'd both arrived at St. Basilissa's (she's the patron saint of chilblains. No, really, you can look it up) -- and fired a rock at my butt. She's a pretty good shot.

"The next one knocks you in the head," she said as the waves of pain traveled across my back and down my legs. "Hold still and roast."

"Jeez, Pace, what did I ever do to you?"

But I knew. Oh, yes. There was a paper in the Journal of Applied Fluvial Geomorphology with my name on it. And the research was hers.

"You were never going to publish!" I grunted through the pain and the heat. "You kept wanting to run the models one...more...time! The world doesn't have time for that! They needed to listen, they needed to know!"

Pace went still. "No! It's too early. We know the sediment is alive, but we don't know its intentions."

"INTENTIONS!" I screamed. "It's SEDIMENT! It hasn't got any intentions except to be borne in blissful unconcern down the river and silt up the delta. The sediment isn't the problem!"

Pace knew what I meant. Her academic advisor, whom we'd both once considered a colleague, even a friend, had disappeared two years ago, just after Pace had successfully defended her dissertation. Not long after that, the sediment load in the Purple River had increased fivefold. Pace had this cockamamie idea that the sediment had consciously decided to leap into the river to seek its fortune. Me, I had a different theory: Dr. Kortnozzle was in the hills at the headwaters, stirring up trouble as well as sediment.

I knew that if I could draw enough attention to the increase in sediment, someone -- someone with more skills and firepower than I had -- would catch the hint and go after Kortnozzle. As far as I could tell, though, the article had sunk (as it were) without a ripple.

Meanwhile, Pace had gone mad with rage that I'd gazumped her research and published first. I couldn't blame her, but that didn't mean that being barbecued over a lava pit wasn't a bit of a disproportionate penance. "Pace, please! I can publish a retraction!"

She just rocked back and forth on her heels, watching me spin slowly over the pit, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. I wondered whether, if she gave me a shove, I would start to demonstrate the earth's spin as I swung. Maybe Pace should have set little pins up for me to knock down as the earth turned beneath me. I would probably be toast -- literally and figuratively -- before I'd dangled long enough to be a human Foucault's Pendulum, though.

"Pace, listen. Let me go, and I'll use my fellowship money to fund the field research you and Jasper need to finalize your data. You can go and have lunch with the sediment, whatever you want. And I'll run all the sims for you with my server time. I swear it."

Pace gave me a suspicious look. "You know if you betray me a second time, I won't bother with the fun and games. I'll kill you immediately."

"I know. Reel me in, and you'll see I mean what I say."

Slowly, Pace reached down and picked up a rope with a vicious-looking hook on the end. She whirled it around her head and flung it out, jerking back on it at precisely the right moment to hook the rope from which I hung. She pulled me over to the side of the pit, not very gently: I raised my knees just in time to avoid having my face slammed into the rock. She stepped backwards, dragging me up to the lip, and I wriggled until I got my legs and body onto the ledge. Pace cut the cords on my wrists, and I scratched my nose frantically.

"Right," said Pace as I got clumsily to my feet. "As soon as we get back outside, I'll phone Jasper to meet us. We'll bring you by the admin office to do the paperwork for the funds transfer, then we're off to the hills. You know I'm insane and unpredictable. So you won't try anything. Will you?"

"Of course not." Not until I saw my chance, that is.

To be continued....