“Go.”
She didn’t wait.
She took off down the tunnel, and I stayed right behind her, boots sending up rooster-tail sprays of filthy water with every stride. The flashlight beam bounced wildly off the curved walls.
The sound built as we ran.
It was there beneath everything else—beneath our boots, beneath our breathing, beneath the rain drumming down through the grates. A low hum. Then a rumble.
“Libby—”
“I know!” she called back, breathless, not slowing. “Hurry!”
The water rose past our ankles. Cold—shockingly cold. And fast. The current found our legs and shoved, insistent, trying to steer us somewhere we didn’t want to go.
Something bumped against my shin, heavy, soft. I kept my eyes forward.
We rounded a corner. Libby slammed against the wall to catch herself as her boots lost traction on the slick stone, her body pitching hard to the side. She caught it, pushed off, and kept moving without breaking stride.
The roar grew louder, closer, vibrating through the walls now, through the ground, through the water pressing against our legs.
“Almost there!” she shouted.
I saw it.
The ladder.
Relief sparked—
Then died.
The sound hit before the water did. A pressure change, first—something vast displacing air ahead of it—and then a roar that climbed fast from the base of the skull to the top of it, filling the tunnel completely, leaving no room for anything else.
I turned.
The flashlight beam caught it.
A wall of water.
A solid, roaring mass of black water tearing through the tunnel toward us, filling the space from floor to ceiling, churning with everything it had collected on its way—wooden planks, chunks of broken concrete, a trash can spinning end over end.And tangled in the center of it, tumbling with the debris, a body spun past.
Three seconds. Maybe less.
“Climb!” Libby screamed.
She launched herself at the ladder, hands locking onto the rungs, hauling herself upward with a strength pulled entirely from terror.
I lunged after her.
My hands found a rung—
The water hit.
It slammed into my legs, instantly ripping both feet from the ground. My body swung hard to the side as the full weight of the current tried to peel me off the ladder and drag me into the dark. My fingers clawed against the metal, and my shoulders wrenched in their sockets. Something massive struck my hip, sending pain radiating through my side and up into my ribs.
I held on.
I locked my grip until the metal bit into my palms and broke the skin, blood welling up and washing away before it could even form. I held on.
