Page 62 of Trusted Instinct
Bracing with one hand, she toggled the button that slowly, slowly moved the driver’s seat backward.
She paused. Where the seatbelt had compressed before, it had been the anxiety she experienced in many yoga poses. She knew from her daily practice that the calmer she could remain, the better she would be able to navigate to the other side of this fiasco.
Whew, the anxiety of her precarious position lit panic in her brain like a match to dry kindling.
Auralia fought to stay in the moment and to process. Panic or freeze was life-threatening, and the danger of both had become a ratatatat at her temples and oddly in her sinus cavity.
She hadn’t had an expectation for how her body would move in space while she adjusted her seat. The idea had been to keep things as even keel as possible. Moving weight in a straight line toward the back of the car seemed reasonable, but shifting to the side, out from under the wheel, and then back through the tiny crawl space seemed jarring.
Doli had done it, but Doli was serpent-like in her ability to move her body. She was as fluid as the ribbon of a rhythmic gymnast.
Auralia was athletic and trained hard for survival’s sake, as well as for the pleasure of strength; she didn’t have Doli’s hypermobility. She wasn’t convinced that she could slither to the back seat without causing the car to rock.
Pulling a knee off the ground, she wedged her leg against the steering wheel. She stilled and waited for the gust to still. The car seemed to handle one change agent; she didn’t want to push the boundaries.
Slowly, she lifted her right hand to wrap around the metal posts of her headrest. It was a squeeze to get all four fingers into place.
So far, so good.
She raised her left hand and was able to wrap just her index finger into place.
She’d forgotten the seatbelt.
Auralia pressed her lips together as she scolded herself for forgetting a step. Every movement felt like she was taunting fate.
How to move forward? She was a little stuck.
Finally, Auralia wished she hadn’t put both of the black bags in the back.
She’d done it for fear of the plastic getting over her nose and mouth, and if she blacked out, she’d never wake up.
It would be unforgivable for her to die and put so many loved ones into churning grief. Creed and Gator would blame themselves for not saving her, and that would become a lifelong burden.
I’m going to survive this. I just need to think clearly and choose wisely, and then hope that my guardian angel didn’t go off on a damned coffee break.
She lowered her hand, knowing that she would take more of her weight onto it, and pressed her leg harder against the steering wheel.
The release came with a gust of wind.
Back and forth, back and forth she teetered.
The car slid an inch, and her stomach dropped with the lurch.
As the wind abated, she pressed her leg and pulled her hand until she could tuck her knees and swing both bare feet onto the steering wheel.
Crouched, she reached for the back window as she straightened her legs.
But she was stumped because she seemed to be dangling from her back tires. Yes, that last slip and slide seemed to catch or latch or something. Something was different.
She should have set the hand brakes to lock the rear tires.
Honestly, what would stop them from simply rolling over the rail?
Fatal mistake?
Breathe. “You can’t fix that now.” It hadn’t even occurred to her until she tried to imagine if dangling from her tires was a good thing. The physics of this said no; this wasn’t good at all, mainly because the rear window wasn’t over land anymore.
The only thing Auralia could think to do was to turn over onto her belly and reach a hand out the window for the rail, let the bags go—there was no way for her to take her things with her—get the other hand out of the window onto the rail, pull her body out of the car to dangle over the raging river. Could she do a pull-up? Adrenaline might help, but the thickness of the rail meant that she would have to cup the top of it. They weren’t painted, and they were wet, so they were probably slick. If someone was on the bridge and could grab her wrists, that would be helpful, but surely that was wishful thinking, because anyone on the bridge was either injured or actively helping someone else.
