Her Last Breath

Prologue

We’re losing her.

Detective Layla Washington feels helpless waiting for updates, and this latest text message is the most ominous yet.

A young woman is trapped in a remote cave system miles inside the Cascade Range. She’s injured, exhausted, and lapsing in

and out of consciousness. Rescuers have managed to extract little information from her—not even a name—and at this point,

questioning the victim is a waste of air and time. The team’s sole priority is rescuing her before she dies. As Washington

understands it, the woman is inside a limestone tunnel just a few feet high and eighteen inches wide. A cave-in sealed her

inside the crawlspace sometime last night, and now she’s pinned on her stomach by dense rockfall on all sides. One rescuer

compared it to being stuck inside a smaller-than-average coffin.

Slowly filling with rocks.

In pitch blackness.

Alone.

For the past eighteen hours.

It’ll be all over local televisions by six tonight.

The rescue operation is now dozens strong, mostly volunteers and local experts, and will double when reinforcements arrive from Portland.

The incident commander is an old fire chief from Salem, just a few years younger than Washington herself, and he runs an efficient show.

An underground manager and several specialized teams—medical, rigging, litter—are currently racing to clear rock debris, hand deliver oxygen bottles, and rig a pulley system down hundreds of feet of narrow, labyrinthine tunnels.

They’d found the trapped woman by the echo of her screams, but it took hours to trace her exact location and even longer to safely reach her.

Underground lifesaving operations are rare and uniquely difficult: part confined-space rescue, part firefighting, with a dash

of mountaineering thrown in for good measure. Much of this particular cave can only be traversed single file, risking bottlenecks

and traffic jams while equipment is passed from rescuer to rescuer like a human daisy chain. Phone and radio signals are unable

to penetrate rock, limiting communication to line of sight. Every inch of progress is incremental and dangerous. The primary

directive of any rescue is to not require rescuing yourself, and one team member has already been seriously injured.

Time is not on the woman’s side. Each of her physical needs is a ticking clock—air, hydration, energy, body temperature—and

one will inevitably run out. With every text message Washington receives, her stomach flutters with dread.

Three hours ago, there was modest hope in the old fire chief’s texts: Made contact with victim. TL can touch her fingers thru 4-inch gap in rock. Confirmed head trauma, dislocated/broken ankle, lacerations/bruising.

Two hours ago, worry started to creep in. Losing consciousness. Exhaustion.

Then, finally: We’re losing her.

And an hour of silence.

While she waits, the sixty-something detective has been doing what she does best: butt-in-chair research.

The cave system is a natural formation called the Devil’s Staircase, located on (and under) an isolated tract of logging forest miles from the nearest public road.

The region has numerous other, more popular caves, but the Devil’s Staircase seems to be the perfect carnivorous plant: remote enough to be dangerous, accessible enough to lure in amateurs.

With a moderate hike and a written permit from the lumber company that owns the land, local adventurers can see stalactites the size of tree trunks and gardens of impossible rock formations growing in fungal tendrils.

The photographs are undeniably striking.

However, more curious (and foolish) interlopers sometimes ignore the warning signage and explore deeper, where the lower tunnels

tighten into treacherous crawlspaces and the dangers multiply. Under millions of tons of earth, a single disturbed rock can

trigger a fatal collapse. Pockets of trapped carbon dioxide can become invisible death traps. Groundwater levels can rise

and fall without warning. Worst of all, some of the cave’s most cramped tunnel crawls—termed squeezes by enthusiasts—are as narrow as ten inches wide.

What would possess this unknown woman to venture to such a depth? The most inviolable rule of cave exploration is to never

go alone. Either she was incredibly reckless—or she was fleeing something even deadlier.

Detective Washington hopes the woman survives to tell her story. The mountains, seen from Washington’s second-floor desk in

the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office, look like sleeping giants cloaked in evergreens. On a drizzly afternoon like today she

can barely see them at all. Somewhere out there a young woman is locked inside a vault of rock, fighting for every breath.

Keep fighting.

She’s a tough gal, the incident commander had texted earlier. She’s got sisu.

Odd word choice.

Washington had to look it up—apparently sisu is a Finnish term for grit and determination in the face of hardship. There’s no English-language equivalent for it, because sisu isn’t derived from any single act of bravery. It’s tireless, sustained, long term.

Worryingly, recent rainfall has also flooded the trapped woman’s crawlspace with several feet of groundwater. By all estimates

she should have died of hypothermia yesterday, but apparently she’d managed to lift herself up onto stacked rocks and suspend

her body a few inches above the deadly cold. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but it kept her alive. She’d understood that

prolonged contact with the water meant death.

Sisu, Washington agreed. Whoever this woman is, she clearly has some survival skills. The detective can’t help but root for her.

Keep me updated, she’d texted back. She’s a POI in a homicide.

This was also no ordinary caving accident.

A body was discovered outside the Devil’s Staircase. By the time Washington herself had hitched a tooth-rattling ATV ride

up the mountain at six this morning, the site was already thoroughly contaminated by the rescue operation. It’ll be a miracle

if much physical evidence survives at all. But the violence of the death is unmistakable: the decedent suffered a fatal gunshot

wound and stained the rocks with several liters of blood.

And the trapped woman knows what happened. According to a few fragmented communications gathered hours earlier, she’d apparently

battled for her life against a killer, or even multiple killers. Maybe she’d defeated them. Maybe they’re still out there,

making preparations to strike again.

Keep fighting, girl. They’ve almost got you out.

But the rescuers are racing against uncaring physics. The woman is fading with exhaustion, her air is becoming unbreathable,

and the water is rising. Sisu buys only so much time.

Washington checks her phone. It’s already been seventy minutes since the last update.

Since: We’re losing her.

This young survivor has already defied the odds once. Hopefully she can do it a second time. And then, once the rockfall is

cleared and she’s hoisted inch by inch into the blinding daylight, when she’s stabilized in a hospital room, hydrated, rested,

bandaged, and ready to speak, she can sit with Detective Washington and tell her story from the day’s beginning. Every detail,

from the moment she left her front door.

Who are you?

And what happened to you?