Page 10

She stayed where she was for a long moment, clinging to the rock and listening to her heart pound. That wasn’t a rock falling, and it wasn’t the current. The current was a good two meters below her. There was no way the water had reached up here and pried a broken chunk of stone off the ledge and carried it away. Someone had done this. Someone had looked at the same crack she had seen and decided to fix it.

And the only person in this cavern was supposed to be her.

She made it to the top of the climb without falling, which felt like a small miracle. The path was clear here, too. Yesterday there had been a scatter of stones at the top of the slope, just the right size to roll under her boots. She remembered them because she had almost slipped on one. Now there was nothing but bare rock. And when she knelt and looked at the grit along the edges of the path, she found the same faint, curving lines she had seen at the bottom.

She sat back on her heels and looked out into the dark.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice sounded thin and strange in the enormous space, and it came back to her in soft, overlapping echoes. “Hello? Is someone there?”

The falls roared behind her. The stream murmured past. Nothing else answered.

She swallowed hard and tried again. “If you’re friendly, now would be a great time to say so.”

Nothing.

“And if you’re not friendly,” she added, more loudly, “I’m very bony and I taste terrible. I’ve been living on protein bars. You’d be very disappointed.”

Her voice echoed away into the dark. She sat there feeling slightly foolish and more than slightly scared, and she waited for something to happen. Nothing did.

What am I doing?

She was an engineer. She didn’t believe in ghosts or cave monsters or any of the stories the miners told each other in the bars in Iron Ridge. There was a rational explanation for this. There had to be.

Maybe there was another survivor. Maybe some miner or prospector had wandered into the lava tubes before the survey team arrived and had been living down here ever since. Maybe it was someone from GenCon, some secret team she didn’t know about, checking up on the anomaly. Maybe it was Ethan and the others, looking for her and trying to help without being able to reach her.

None of those explanations made any sense. The slab had been moved during the night, silently, without any light that she had seen. The crack had been fixed with a precision she would have admired on any job site. Whoever had done this knew the cavern and knew the rock and could move through the dark without making a sound.

And they had cleared the path she was going to take. Before she had taken it.

She thought about the low, rolling sound she had heard her first night, the one she had told herself was only water. She hadn’t heard it again. But she had dreamed about it, she realized suddenly. She had dreamed about a voice singing in the dark.

She got slowly to her feet and hitched her pack higher on her shoulders.

“Okay,” she told the darkness. “I’m going to keep going downstream. If you want to keep helping, I won’t complain. But I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t eat me.”

The stream grew wider as she followed it. The walls of the cavern drew closer on either side, until she was walking along a broad, curving passage. The water flowed swiftly beside her, and the ceiling hung low enough to see. The glowing lichen was thicker here, and in some places it grew in long, rippling bands along the walls, soft blue and pale green. There was enough light from it that she could switch off her lamp for long stretches and walk by the glow alone.

She did that as much as she could. The lamp was fading. She had noticed it that morning, a faint yellowish tinge to the beam that hadn’t been there the day before. It was a good lamp, but it had been designed for a few hours of work at a time, not for days of constant use, and her spare battery pack wasn’t going to last forever either.

So she walked in the half-dark, one hand trailing along the wall, and she listened.

She didn’t hear anything but the water. But twice she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched. Once she turned around so quickly that she nearly lost her balance, and she saw nothing behind her but the empty passage and the glowing walls. The second time she didn’t turn. She just kept walking, with the skin on the back of her neck prickling, and after a while the feeling faded away.

It was late in what she had started thinking of as the afternoon when she found the basin. It sat at the base of the wall where the passage curved sharply to the left, a shallow bowl in the rock about the size of a washtub. The long, pale vines she had seen near the falls grew thickly here, hanging down from a crack in the ceiling, their broad leaves dripped steadily into the bowl. It was full almost to the brim with clear, still water.

She stopped and looked at it.

It could have been natural. There were plenty of hollows in the rock that collected water. But this one had a smooth, rounded rim, as if it had been worn by hands. There was a narrow channel cut into the stone beside it that carried the overflow neatly away to the stream. And sitting on the edge of the basin, balanced carefully on the rim, was a leaf.

It was one of the big pale leaves from the vines above, but someone had rolled it into a cone and pinched the bottom closed to make a cup. She stared at it. Then she knelt down beside the basin and picked it up.

The leaf was cool and slightly waxy under her fingers. It had been folded with care, the edges overlapping neatly, the tip twisted tight so that it wouldn’t leak. It had been left where she would see it, and it had been left for her. Her throat tightened unexpectedly.

She tested the water first, because she wasn’t stupid. It was cleaner than the stream, clearer and softer, with barely a trace of the iron she had tasted before. She filled her bottle from the basin. Then, after a moment of hesitation, she dipped the leaf cup into the water and drank from it. It was cold and sweet, and it was the kindest gesture anyone had made towards her in years.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She didn’t know if anyone was there to hear. She said it anyway.

She found the stacked stones an hour later.