She sent the Class 9 students first.
This was strategy, not preference. The Class 9 students — Vikram and three others, all fourteen — were the oldest and strongest, and she needed them on the other side of the water section to receive the younger children. She needed them at the anchor point above the road, where she had identified the flat area Vikram had described — visible from here, a shelf of rock maybe fifty metres up the slope above the road, solid and wide enough for all thirty-two children and then some. She needed the older students there so that when she sent the Class 6 students — the youngest, the smallest, the ones most at risk in the water — there would be people to grab them at the other end.
Vikram had rigged the rope to the tow hook with a series of knots that he described as "hitching knots, I learned them in the scouts, they'll hold." She had no reason to doubt him. She fed the rope out toward the road section — the thirty centimetres of running water that crossed between the bus's position and the path up to the flat area. The rope's six metres would not cross the whole distance. It would give them a safety line for the worst part — the water crossing — and for the first section of the slope.
