The entrance had collapsed almost to a slug-width crack, daylight slivering faintly through wet stone. Harper pounded at it from the inside. “It’s sealed. We’re cut off,” she called, her voice trembling with the effort of both hope and fear.
Cole crawled forward and pressed his forehead to the cold rock, listening to the wind batter the outside. He and Ethan shared a grim look. They’d given everything to shove their friends to safety—and now the mountain had claimed them as well.
He flexed his scraped, bleeding hands. Pain flared, a reminder he was alive, still thinking, still responsible. He clicked on his belt-mounted LED. The narrow chamber was no more than eight feet across. Behind them, the cave opened into deeper darkness; ahead, rubble packed solid as granite.
The others would find another way out—he knew Harper’s grit better than anyone. They’d come back for them. But between the storm and the mountain’s fury, nothing was certain.
He switched off the flashlight. Darkness closed in. All he could do now was wait, and hope the group remembered exactly wherethey had watched them vanish into the void. Because until they dug him and Ethan back into the light, this narrow tomb might very well be the end of their story.
Chapter 20 - Cole
The blackness inside the cave was absolute—a kind of blindness so complete and suffocating that Cole lost all sense of direction, self, even time. Cole could smell blood, coppery and bright, leaking from the raw gash on his knuckle where he’d slammed it into the stone. Each inhale dragged in air thick with wet stone, decaying leaves, and the cold torn earth.
He didn’t move at first. He counted his own pulse in the darkness—thump, thump, thump—a solitary drum that threatened to outpace the clock. Then, from somewhere to his right, he heard the desperate rattle of breath, a shuddering inhale followed by a groan. Cole’s body snapped into motion. He fumbled sideways, crawling toward the sound.
“Ethan? Say something. Talk to me.” The echo of his own voice bounced back, small and helpless.
He crawled until his fingers grazed flesh—bare forearm, slick with sweat or water, Cole couldn’t tell. Ethan was curled, knees to chest, shivering hard. “You okay?” Cole tried again.
Ethan curled tighter, knees to his chest. His shirt was torn, shoulder wet with rainwater. Cole grabbed for Ethan’s wrist,squeezed, and felt the frantic flutter of his pulse. He patted down Ethan’s body, searching for breaks, cuts, anything that spelled disaster. There was a lump at his temple, sticky with blood but not gushing. “You’re bleeding,” Cole said, his mouth working on autopilot while his brain replayed the fall on a loop.
“So are you,” Ethan managed, voice warped by pain but still, somehow, dryly amused. “Looks like we match.”
Cole pressed his forehead to Ethan’s and held them both very still, listening for anything outside—the storm, the shouts of rescue, even just the hiss of wind above. Nothing. They were buried alive, and nobody would find them until the rain let up. If it let up.
“Can you move?” Cole asked, pulling back to brush the matted hair from Ethan’s face.
“My legs work, at least. You?”
“I’m good.” Cole lied, ignoring the red trickle running down his wrist and the tremor in his shoulders. He shifted, maneuvering both of them against the cave wall, arranging Ethan so that his back was braced, head upright.
Ethan whispered, “It’s okay, you know. If you’re scared.”
“Not scared.” The words were automatic, a leftover from a million tough-guy performances. But it wasn’t true. He was scared—a deep, swallowing kind of fear that never left his chest.
They sat for a minute, breathing together, the rhythm of their lungs syncing.
The darkness pressed tighter, as though the cave itself was trying to crush them. Cole pictured the rocks above, tons of earth, all waiting for one more tremor to finish the job.
“It’s my fault,” Cole said, the admission leaking out in a whisper. “I should’ve stopped it. I saw the clouds coming in, heard the thunder. I should’ve called it.”
Ethan’s fingers found his, squeezed until the knuckles bled. “You did everything you could. All of us saw it, but nobody wanted to be the one to turn back.”
“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be—” Cole stopped, the word “leader” sticking in his throat, too big and false. “If I’d said the word, they’d have listened. But I didn’t and now look at all the trouble I have caused.” He could taste panic now, bitter and upwelling.
Ethan shifted, leaning his head to Cole’s shoulder. “You didn’t freeze. You ran toward Riley when the boulder came down. You got us in here. That’s not freezing, that’s—” He trailed off, breath hitching. “That’s you saving everyone’s asses.”
Cole clenched his jaw so tight it ached. He tried to picture daylight, or the sight of the group back at the Basin, everyone’s skin a little red from sun and laughter. He forced himself to move, to act, because that’s what you did when you were scared out of your mind, you calculated, you rationed, you made a plan. He groped for the wall again, traced the rough, mineral ridges, and measured the size of the chamber by touch. No more than six feet across. Maybe three feet to the ceiling. At the far end, the rockfall at the entrance sloped upward—he could feel the faintest breath of moving air leaking through a seam at the very top, but it wasn’t much.
“How much air do you think we have?” Ethan asked, his voice no longer playful, just weary.
Cole did the math, ran through the numbers in his head. “A few hours if we’re lucky.”
They went quiet again. Cole drew in a deep, steadying breath and pulled Ethan closer, so close he could feel the jackhammer panic beneath Ethan’s skin. He wanted to say something to make it better, to fix the one problem in his life he hadn’t already ruined, but nothing came.
It hit him then, with the power of the first time he’d ever seen Ethan smile: this was it. The endgame. Whether they made it out or not, everything Cole had ever wanted was right here, in this dark and merciless hole, where there was nothing left to protect and nothing left to lose.
He pressed his lips to Ethan’s temple, careful not to touch the wound. He felt the tremor run through them both, a single current neither could control.
