Honest. I respect that.
She sits up slowly, wincing. Her palms are scraped raw from when I pulled her through. Blood on her torn pants. That ankle still bothering her, though she won’t admit it.
She’s holding it together by a thread, and I’m the reason she’s in this position.
Should have checked the structural integrity before we entered that passage. Should have anticipated the instability. Should have—
“Luke.” Her voice cuts through my analysis. “Tell me there’s another way out.”
I force myself to think past the self-recrimination. To assess. To do what I’ve always done: turn crisis into strategy.
The chamber is solid. High ceiling—good for air. The floor is level and dry.
Not the worst place to be trapped.
I check the walls again, running my hands over the stone. Searching for temperature differentials. Airflow. Anything.
“You already checked,” Ember says.
“Checking again.”
“Why?”
“Because I might have missed something.”
“Luke, stop.”
Her hand catches my wrist. Pulls me around to face her.
In the weak torchlight, exhaustion shows in every line of her face. But her eyes are steady. Determined. The same look she had when she refused to leave the helicopter. When she kept moving despite her injured ankle. When Mara died and the world fell apart.
“We’re stuck here,” she says. “Aren’t we?”
The words hang between us; honest, brutal.
“Until the structure stabilizes.” I pull free of her grip and sit down, leaving careful space between us. “The vibrations are still too frequent. Trying to clear that passage now risks bringing the ceiling down.”
“So we wait?”
“We wait.”
She sinks to the floor, wraps her arms around her knees, making herself small. The gesture does something to my chest that I don’t examine too closely.
“How long?”
“Few hours. Maybe more.”
“And if the ceiling doesn’t stabilize?”
“Then we find another way.”
“There is no other way.”
“There’s always another way.”
She looks at me like I’m insane. Maybe I am. But the alternative—accepting that we’re going to die down here—isn’t an option.
Especially not with her.
