THE NEXT CHUNK OF ROCK THAT CRASHED DOWN SENT MY BODY
sprawling over Mari’s. The force knocked my vertebrae against one other as I curved, prone on top of her, shielding her while she screamed, and that roar of shaking, crumbling, violent stone continued everywhere. The fragments, the dust that painted my tongue—it was all the
tunnels, undulating and caving in. Burying us.
And the disorienting, insidious, leaden darkness that we had been marinating in for minutes, or hours, I wasn’t sure.
I couldn’t hear myself beg Mari to quiet down. To stop screaming. To please, stop screaming.
“Holy Stones, we’re going to die.”
“No.” I heaved. I still couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe—
“I don’t know any spells for being entombed.” She thrashed underneath me, my body still bent over hers. My lighte didn’t sense any blood, any snapped bones, any internal bleeding—
I rolled off her and strained to breathe slowly. Like Kane said. To sip the
air.
“We’re going to suffocate and die. Or be crushed to death. Or both.”
Mari did not know how to talk to people who were deathly afraid of enclosed spaces. “We’re going to decay, and rot in here, and one day someone will find our skeletons along with all this treasure.”
“Mari,” I snapped at her, breathing slower than felt natural. “That is not going to happen.”
“Why did you lie to him? He was almost inside!”
“He wasn’t, and he was going to die trying to get to us. You and I just have to focus. There has to be another way out.”
“I need my grimoires.”
But I didn’t. I sucked in the stuffy air around me, pointed my hands where I thought Kane had been cutting through—a mere guess in the stifling blackness—and tried to summon my lighte. A spark, a beam of glittering power, a single ember, anything.
Come on, come on—
My hands cramped from flexing and I ignored the tendrils of dread that unfurled inside me. What had Dagan said back in Azurine? I couldn’t remember now. My mind had been filled with such silent roaring back then. I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t remember—
Earthly wind rattled thin metal and pages of ancient books around us. “What spell are you doing?” I called in the darkness. She was on the
other side of the room now. “The luster!”
Good. The room was pitch-black without the candles. We’d need—
My eye caught a sliver of light dancing across the mountains of golden treasure, still shaking with the tremors.
“Stop!” I cried. “There’s light, coming from somewhere. Over there . . .” I traced my hand along the engraved walls, feeling around in the darkness. I could hear Mari doing the same. We had a wealth of knowledge and determination between the two of us. We didn’t need lighte or magic. We could find our way out the old-fashioned way.
“Wait, come here—” Mari called from the other side of the room.
I pawed my way to her voice, grasping at candlesticks and pointed crowns, banging my hip into a suit of armor and wincing as pain bloomed along my side.
“What is it?” I asked over the earsplitting noise. “I think I feel . . .”
Knocking into her shoulder with my knee, I squeezed past her frame and reached my hand down over hers where the light was slipping through. My
pulse thrummed with hope. “Hinges.” “It’s some kind of false wall.”
I examined the crevice with my fingers until I felt a spiked knob at the base of the hidden door and rotated it with all my strength. As the rusted stakes slid through the flesh of my hand, the door groaned and shifted.
Despite the shrieking pain in my palm, I turned the knob, and then turned it again.
With a low reverberation, barely audible over the shaking and falling of sediment around us, the door opened enough that Mari and I could crawl through.
The corridor was chilling. The roaring, silenced.
Preternaturally still, lit with iron candlesticks that glowed with that same abnormal fire, the kind that didn’t flicker with the wind. A dim, unwelcoming passage to our left, a slightly lighter passage to our right lit with more of those candles as far as my eye could see, and whittled stone at our feet that became stairs guiding us down, down, down—like the cave was inviting us to stay, a volatile and easily offended host.
“Which way?” Mari asked me.
We halted before that darkness, that deathly crypt below us—likely taking us so far beneath the jungle floor the air would become too heavy to breathe. Air that had probably been trapped down there since the Stones birthed the continent.
The thought made me sick. But the other paths again felt too easy. And the cave had the spirit of a trickster. A cheat. A fraud—
But if we descended those fatal, nightmarish stairs, would we spend eternity down here? Had the others—
I couldn’t let my mind drift to Kane or Griffin or Fedrik . . . if they, too, had been deceived by Reaper’s Cavern. Or simply crushed. If I would never see them again . . .
Mari loosed a sigh.
I tried to do the same. “I think we have to try. You wait here, and I’ll call for you if it—”
“Arwen!”
My eyes were still adjusting, but I heard it, too. The clunky, disjointed tremors. The earsplitting reverberation, like the roar before a wave pulls you under the sea. An avalanche of rocks tumbling toward us from the lefthand passage.
“Bleeding Stones,” I breathed.
Mari grabbed my hand and hurtled us down the musty, depthless stairs and into an even darker, danker corridor. We ran through the stone, like the old corn mazes of my youth, sliding and skittering against the dirt beneath our feet. Tearing through—left, right, right again, sharp left, dead end. Doubling back to go right, not left, and then left again.
“Why the stairs?” I called, doubting our choice, ice sluicing through my blood with regret.
“It seemed so wrong . . . it had to be right?”
The avalanche grew louder, rumbling and reverberating through my ankles, my shins. I could hear Mari whispering behind me, trying to cast some kind of spell, but nothing materialized. It was slowing us down. We had to keep running, keep moving, despite the never-ending twists and turns the cave presented us with.
I was faster than her and was starting to drag her behind me like a rag doll. But we couldn’t stop. Didn’t dare to face the crush behind us. The way our bodies would be buried under the earth for centuries.
True fear—genuine and harrowing and poison black—assaulted me.
Worse than the panic. Worse than the vacant nothing, the numbness.
I did not want to be entombed in solid rock. I did not want to die.
We had to get out.
Out—
The world, the cave, the avalanche yawned away but for that single word. We just had to get out.
Our path stemmed narrower, forcing me to propel Mari forward. My legs were tired. I just needed one break, one spot to breathe, to think, to formulate some kind of—
“Arwen, look out!”
We screeched to a halt, nearly falling on top of each other as the last corner we rounded deposited us in front of another unexpected fork lit by those same ancient candelabras, the ones I knew in my bones had been here long before any of us were even thoughts.
We careened left, Mari’s hand clammy and slipping in mine, tears burning at my eyes, blood in my lungs, I was sure of it, and—
There.
Light.
Blessed, beautiful light.
Reflecting from an archway on the far left of the passage. Light that could only be from the sun. My knees could have buckled with relief were it not for the propulsion, the raw horror driving us inexorably forward.
We were so close now—
So close to fresh air—any air. To being out of here—
But the roaring had only intensified. Louder, and more violent. As if the cavern were a living, thinking creature, and saw hope in our eyes.
I made the unforgivable mistake of looking behind Mari’s wind-swept curls.
That wave of crumbled rock crushed through the tangled maze behind us, faster now, gaining and gaining speed, like a flood in a storm. A goliath boulder, greater than both our heads, dislodged from the landslide and shot toward us.
No, no, no—
The sphere of lighte I had flowered around Leigh and me weeks ago in Siren’s Bay blossomed around me and Mari, rippling, shimmering, and protecting us from the projectile. Mari screamed—I couldn’t tell if that was from relief or dread—and the shimmering, flexible orb grew thicker, as if bolstered by my need to defend her. More sharp daggers and pellets of stone rained down and bounced right off the domed top of my lighte.
Thank the ever-loving Stones. We were close enough now.
The light of a lush, green day beckoned to us, the smell of moss and rain . . .
And I knew we’d never slow our inertia in time.
That we would be crushed before I cut a hard enough turn to allow us both into the passageway.
Demolished.
Reduced to limbs and hair among a sea of speeding rock. There was only one way out of this.
We flew past the open corridor, and for a heartbeat that sunlight spilled through, across my face, the exit summoning me—
And I used every ounce of strength to push Mari inside the narrow passageway with all my strength without breaking my stride.
I could just barely hear her agonized scream of protest, make out her crestfallen face—unruly hair backlit by beams of sun and verdant leaves— as I kept running, deeper into the cavern’s suffocating corridor, tailed by that roaring wave of debris.
There were no corners to duck behind, no turns to make. The narrow passage was endless, growing darker and darker, thinner and thinner, and all the while the avalanche behind me echoed.
And my legs were getting heavy. So heavy. If the flickering iridescent bulb around me was any indication, my lighte was already dwindling. I couldn’t keep the shield up much longer.
And I was so, so tired.
This was as good a time as any to give up. I had saved Mari. I couldn’t outrun the crush forever . . . My feet slackened—
Only to see the slightest sliver of light, like a crescent moon, glowing in the distance.
And maybe it was the pain I feared. The pain of being flattened by a thousand tons of solid rock. Or maybe a slice of hope was all I needed to try
—to fight to live. But whatever it was that spurred me, I threw everything I had into my final steps, and prayed the light was indeed an exit.
And then I got closer, and saw what it was. A cliff.
The tunnel led out to a protruding cliff. A chute for all the stones behind me to flush out any of the cavern’s unwanted visitors.
I didn’t have time to think. I raced with all my strength, out into the blinding, pure white sunlight. The air was hot and thick and fresh in my lungs, and before I realized I had come to the cliff’s edge, I threw myself off, the tumbling rock behind me falling down as well, just barely missing my head.
For a single, unbearable moment—suspended in midair, arms flailing, legs wheeling with inertia—I felt an inexplicable itching at my shoulder blades. Like needles buried under my skin, rising to the surface, impatient to stab through.
But then I fell, down, down, down, past the palms, past a soaring parrot, and into a deep pool of green water, the rockslide splashing into the lagoon behind me. The cold rush of water pulled me under, and consciousness slipped away.
