An arm made of steel wrapped around my waist, pulling me upward.
Through the dark water.
Until our heads broke the surface, and I gasped and coughed, and gasped some more while light danced and concerned voices shouted. The knotted rope was being lowered.
“You’re all right,” a rough voice was saying in my ear as we bobbed in the water. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you...”
I coughed up water and turned my head to see Seb’s blue eyes blinking down at me as he held me against him.
Like I was a precious thing.
The most important thing in the world.
Chapter 8
We barely made it back up the rope. It took all my remaining strength to climb, even with Seb’s help. By the time I made it to where the gang could haul me up, my hands were stinging, and my ankle was giving out.
“Don’t move!” Jazmine commanded when we were both safely in the back cavern, dripping wet and exhausted. “Are you hurt?”
Seb shook his head as he caught his breath, gesturing loosely toward my leg. “Check her ankle.”
My shoe was still mostly intact. The rubber sole was breaking away from the shoe, which was streaked with green algae and mud. My ankle was red and scraped up, hurting, but I hadn’t broken it.
“I’m okay,” I told Jazmine grumpily when she tried to remove my wet shoe. “Just leave it.”
“Holy shit,” Lulu said, holding her face in her hands. “I can’t believe you guys went down there. You’re both nuts. You almost died!”
She wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t stop coughing.
Wet clothes sticking to every line of his body, Seb lay on his back on the cave floor, sprawling, with one arm draped over his face as he huffed out hard breaths. “Wags... not for... the faint of heart, Lulu.”
“Jesus, Paige. You all right?” Benny asked, squatting over me as I wrung out my hair. “I seriously thought you were going to drown. You were down there for well over a minute before Seb went in—I checked the time on my phone.”
I’d always had good lungs. “Yeah, that was dumb, huh?” I glanced at Seb. “Can’t believe you came down after me.”
“Red Cross lifeguard certification finally paid off,” he joked.
I’d forgotten he had that. I shook my head, feeling stunned.
“Never again,” Jazmine said. “You really scared me, Paige. This treasure hunt is officially not happening. We end it today. No one is going back down, you hear me?”
“Don’t need to.” I summoned the strength to fish the skeleton key out of my pocket and held it up. “Found this... at the bottom.”
“A key?” Benny asked, big eyes blinking. “Wonder what it unlocks.”
Everyone stared at it for a moment before Seb snatched it up. The key itself was dark and rusted, but it was strung on a single ring next to an oval brass tag. That must’ve been what glinted in the water.
Seb polished the tag on the bottom of his shirt and inspected it closely. “Fuuuck,” he said in awe. “We’ve got more code, folks.”
“Are you kidding?” Jazmine squinted at Seb’s hands.
I leaned closer. “Seb? What does it say? Is it more numbers that we need to decipher with the ‘Prison Poem’ text?”
He squinted at it, moving his lips in silence. “Letters, not numbers. Starts with ‘N.’” Seb continued calling out letters as he interpreted the dots and dashes. “‘N... O... S... E... S.’”
“Noses?” Benny squatted down to look at it in the light.
Seb polished the brass tag once more, then flipped it over.“‘U... N... D... E... R... T...’ Wait, there’s spacing here. ‘Under’ is one word. Then, ‘T... H... E... I... R.’”
