The floor beneath the mercenary drops. Just drops. He disappears with a startled yell.
"What the—" the leader starts to shout.
Then the rest of the floor goes. The ground beneath me and Alaric tilts violently. It crumbles like dry bread. Gravity takes over.
I reach for Alaric. He reaches for me. Our fingers brush. And then we fall.
We fall into the dark. Down. Down. Away from the guns. Away from the snow. Into the belly of the mountain.
The sensation of falling is terrifying. The wind rushes past my ears. Debris rains down around us—rocks, dirt, snow. I scream, but the sound is swallowed by the void.
SPLASH.
The impact is brutal. Cold. Freezing. Liquid. Water. We fell into water.
I go under. The shock of the ice-cold water forces the air from my lungs. I am thrashing in the dark, disoriented. Which way is up? I kick out. My boots are heavy. My clothes are heavy. My injured arm screams in agony.
I break the surface, gasping for air. It is pitch black. I can't see anything. "Alaric!" I scream. My voice echoes. We are in a large cavern. An underground river.
"Alaric!"
Nothing. Just the sound of splashing water and falling rocks from the hole far, far above us. A faint circle of moonlight shines from the ceiling of the cavern, fifty feet up. I see the silhouette of the mercenary leader looking down. He fires a burst into the hole.Zip. Zip.Bullets hit the water near me.
I dive. I swim underwater, blindly, letting the current take me away from the light. I surface again, twenty yards downstream. "Alaric!" I whisper-shout, panic clawing at my throat.
Something bumps against me in the current. Something heavy. I grab it. Leather. It’s Alaric.
I pull his head above water. He isn't moving. He isn't breathing.
"No," I sob, kicking my legs, fighting the current, dragging his dead weight toward where I think the wall is. "No, you don't. You don't die in a hole."
My hand touches rock. A ledge. I haul him up. It takes everything I have left. I scream with the exertion, my muscles tearing, but I drag his upper body onto the rocky shelf. I climb up beside him. We are lying on a narrow strip of rock in the crushing dark. The water rushes past us, black and hungry.
I put my ear to his chest. Silence. No heartbeat. The shock of the cold water stopped his heart.
"Start," I command. "Start!" I stack my hands on his chest. I push.One. Two. Three. Four.CPR. Rhythm.Stayin' Alivetempo. Or Rachmaninoff.Push. Push. Push.
"Come back to me!" I scream, my voice echoing off the cavern walls. "Come back, you son of a bitch!"
I pinch his nose. I cover his mouth with mine. I breathe air into his lungs. I taste the blood. The river water. I pull back.Push. Push. Push.
"Please," I beg. "Alaric. Please."
A minute passes. Two minutes. My arms are burning. I am crying hysterically. He is gone. The duet is over.
Then... A shudder. A cough. Water erupts from his lungs. He retches, rolling onto his side, hacking violently. He sucks in a jagged, desperate breath.
"Oh, God," I sob, collapsing over him. "Oh, God."
He coughs for a long time, spitting out water and blood. Finally, he stops. He lies there, shivering uncontrollably. His hand—his freezing, wet hand—finds my knee. He squeezes.
"Still..." he wheezes. "Still... playing."
I laugh. It sounds like madness. "Yeah. Still playing."
We are trapped in an underground river system. We have no weapons (lost in the fall). We have no light. We are freezing. And the men with the guns know exactly where we dropped.
But we are alive.
