Chapter 1
Tess DeWater stopped to hold her apartment door behind her, hesitant to let it click shut. She worried she’d forgotten something
important.
A car horn bleated down on the street, but she ignored it. Since she was young, it had always been difficult to leave her
house—she had to verify everything and obsessively check every lock, every faucet, every potential fire hazard. Some people say Jesus is their copilot. Tess
was stuck with an asshole named generalized anxiety disorder.
She held the door open, just inches now.
What am I forgetting?
Today was going to be dangerous, but her nerves would keep her sharp. Tess reminded herself that she’d accounted for everything
that might go wrong, that all possibilities are finite, and that only so many things can happen—especially in a controlled
environment like a cave. She pulled the door with her fingertips, just millimeters now, until the lock engaged.
Then she lifted her hand from the doorknob and made herself walk away, trying not to look back and second-guess, third-guess,
as the unease lingered like moth wings inside her chest: Something unexpected will always happen. What haven’t I thought of?
Too late now.
The apartment door was already behind her, going, going, gone, and Tess hurried down the front staircase that always smelled like urine, past the row of locked tenant mailboxes in the lobby, out the security doors, to the weedy parking lot where her best friend, Allie Merritt, idled her black Subaru Outback.
A newly added bumper sticker read: No Baby on Board, Feel Free to Crash into Me.
Allie rolled down a window. “Get in, loser.”
Tess slid into the passenger seat, and Allie floored the gas before she’d even settled. The final chorus of My Chemical Romance’s
“Helena” howled through brand-new speakers as Tess’s safe little life vanished behind her—her bed, her laptop, her books—the
brick apartment complex shrinking in Allie’s rearview mirror.
It’ll go fine, Tess told herself. It’ll go fine.
Buckling her seat belt, she asked, “How often do people die in caves?”
“I guarantee more people die in cars.”
“More people ride in cars. Most people don’t go into caves.”
Allie smirked as she accelerated through a yellow traffic light. “And today, Tess, you’ll get to do both.”
The morning sky was bloodred. Tess watched the fiery clouds from the passenger seat and remembered an old rhyme from elementary
school. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.
“How much rain does it take to flood a cave?”
“It won’t rain.” Allie tapped her phone. “Not until tomorrow.”
Tess had never seen herself as the kind of person to go spelunking.
As Saturday outings go, strapping on a helmet and a headlamp to scuttle down a damp, smelly tunnel wasn’t exactly wine tasting.
She didn’t dislike the idea—it was the kind of adventure she’d resolved to seek more of in her otherwise sedentary life—but it’s always hardest to get up and do the thing the morning of.
At six a.m. on a weekend, your bed is always softest, your coffee warmest, your half-read novel the most enticing. Safety is cozy.
Allie, who had already died once before, glanced at her. “Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m not.”
“I can literally hear your teeth grinding from here.”
Next song up: the haunting piano intro of “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Tess reclined the passenger seat and tried to relax,
watching Allie’s speedometer hover at eighty. Once you’ve driven on the autobahn, apparently nothing else is fast enough.
“Positive thoughts, Tess.”
“Spelunking Accident will look cool on my headstone.”
“Only dorks call it spelunking. We’re going caving.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Cavers rescue spelunkers.”
“It’s a dick-measuring thing,” Tess said. “Got it.”
“Maybe some history on the Devil’s Staircase will gird your loins.”
“Leave my loins out of this.”
“Imagine it’s 1920.” Allie swerved to change lanes, and Tess gripped the door handle with her fingernails. “And there’s this
prospector panning for gold in the mountains. He’s had a lousy year. Nothing in the creeks but dust, fourteen hours of backbreaking
work for less than a dollar a day. He’s at the local bar, probably drinking his last ten cents, when he hears rumor of a newly
found cave system up in the pass. Caves are formed by water, and if there’s water, there’s sediment. And if there’s placer
gold down there, he’d be the first to find it, right? So he grabs his gear and hikes up there, and soon he’s wriggled far
down into the earth, deeper into the Devil’s Staircase than any human had ever explored. And now for some theater of the mind.
Close your eyes.” Allie glanced over. “Are they closed?”
“Not with your driving.”
“Well, imagine you’re this guy. You’re slithering through a cramped two-foot tunnel on your hands and knees, sweeping your
carbide lamp side to side, searching the sediment for that telltale glimmer. You didn’t even notice that the crawlspace is
slowly starting to tilt downward. The rock walls are smooth around you, too slippery to hold. You lose your grip, and suddenly
you’re sliding, uncontrolled, headfirst down a pitch-black tube—until it narrows to a width of ten inches and you stop hard.” Allie smacked the steering wheel. “Your lamp shatters. Everything goes dark. And you’re stuck.”
Tess detected a subtle glee in her best friend’s voice. Allie had always been a natural storyteller, and the best storytellers
have a mean streak.
“You’re wedged upside down in this tight space. You can’t move. Your arms are extended down past your head, so you can’t push
yourself back up. You’re panicking now, your heart is racing, and you try to thrash free, but it’s solid rock on all sides.
Struggling is getting you nowhere. So you focus your thoughts, ignore the adrenaline, and try to reason your way out of this
dilemma—maybe, you decide, if you just calmly exhale and let the air out of your lungs, the width of your chest will contract
by a few centimeters, giving you space to wriggle free. Right?”
Despite herself, Tess felt her skin tingle with goose bumps.
“So you breathe out,” Allie said, “and you immediately recognize your mistake. Because you’re upside down, remember? Gravity
is your enemy. With your chest contracted, you slide a few inches farther down, deeper into the narrowing tube, and your arms are pinned, your legs are kicking uselessly somewhere above you, and now you
can’t even inhale a full breath because your ribs are squeezed by rock.”
Her voice lowered to a whisper.
“Hundreds of feet down. In the dark. Alone.”
For an uncomfortable moment the highway thrummed between them. “Welcome to the Black Parade” faded to silence, a gap in the
playlist. Tess felt a tightness in her chest and realized she’d been holding her breath. “Ever since you died, you’ve been
insufferable.”
“You should try it.”
“No thanks.”
“Generally, we humans have a pretty good handle on the earth.” Allie passed a flatbed truck with a burst of speed. “We’ve
Google Mapped every inch of every continent, taken a zillion pictures with crisscrossing satellites, named every last mountain
and waterfall on the planet. But underground? That’s a ghost world, still invisible to us. Unknown.”
She tapped the center console.
“And it’s right under our feet.”
Allie had visited dozens of caves around North America with her local caving group (which cutely called itself a grotto). She’d filmed hours of her own underground expeditions via helmet-mounted GoPro: abyssal canyons, forests of alien rock,
pools of impossibly blue water. In the tighter spaces, which required elbow-crawling through glistening tunnels, Tess had
observed more than once that the footage resembled a colonoscopy. For years—no, a decade now—Allie had tried to bring her
oldest childhood friend along, and finally one evening, sipping cocktails at Allie’s favorite rooftop bar, Tess had surprised
her and given in.
You could say you “caved in,” Allie had said with a boozy snort.
That was a few Saturdays ago, with two peach martinis swirling in Tess’s brain. Now she sipped her lukewarm drive-through
Starbucks coffee and listened to the bits and bobs of Allie’s caving gear clink together in the back seat. “You know, when
most people have free time they just watch TV.”
“TV is bad for you.”
“So is dying in a cave.”
“Nerd.”
“I should be studying.”
“You’re allowed to take a day off.”
This irked Tess, but she hid it. Allie was self-employed, and if she wanted a day off, she simply made it so. In the ten years
since high school, Allie’s travel blog had exploded from a weekend project into a six-figure enterprise. Last year she took
home two gold awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and was profiled by both NPR and HuffPost. Allie now hated the gimmicky wordplay of the original name—Keep Calm and Carry-On, a reference to airline carry-on luggage—but success can box you into a brand, and the best she could do was shorten it to
Keep Calm. Success as an influencer also brought a lot of admin work—trafficking ads, video editing, courting sponsors—and these were
all things Tess naturally excelled at. The arrangement was symbiotic: while Allie remained free to crisscross the globe to
write about the mossy lava fields of Iceland and the white-sand beaches of Morocco, Tess stayed home to run the office for
a (modest) part-time fee.
It’s normal to be jealous of your best friend. If you aren’t, congratulations on your success because your best friend is
jealous of you. And Tess wasn’t one to wallow. She was on her third year of part-time law school, on track to graduate next
year.
“The dangerous parts are closed, even to permit holders,” Allie clarified. “We’ll stay in the beginner-friendly section called
the Upper Vault. It’s easy, safe, and the scenery is spectacular. Perfect for a first cave.” She hesitated. “Still, it would’ve
been safer to bring Ethan.”
Tess bit her tongue. She’d agreed to this trip under one condition: that it would be a one-on-one outing, nobody else. Especially
not Allie’s boyfriend.
“He likes you, Tess.”
“I’m an acquired taste. Never trust someone who likes me.”
“He’s also afraid of you.”
“A best friend is part rottweiler.”
“And I appreciate that,” Allie said. “But remember, Ethan is more of a Chihuahua.”
Tess laughed.
Last year on Ethan’s first date with Allie, he’d suggested a spontaneous outing called a penny date. The rules were simple: you drive together without a destination, and at every intersection, you flip a penny. Heads means
you turn right, and tails is left. After twenty coin flips, you stop and have your date wherever you are. No exceptions.
When Tess had asked Allie where they’d ended up, she’d snort-laughed: A cemetery.
But Ethan had been committed to the rules, and so was she. They ate picnic sandwiches among the headstones and walked the
grounds. They read epitaphs. They argued about whether an afterlife existed. On the way out, they cleaned up some litter.
It was the stupidest way Allie had ever spent an afternoon, but in the same breath, she’d admitted it was one of her favorite
dates ever. She still had the penny.
Allie talked about Ethan often. Even today on a girls’ trip deep into the mountains, he was still with them, his territory marked.
His sunglasses in the console.
His receipts in the door.
His cologne in the seat.
“Remember,” Tess said, “Chihuahuas have a nasty bite.”
Allie smirked. “So do I.”
They were passing through the outskirts of Flour Gold now, a rusted-out skeleton of a mining town with more abandoned buildings than occupied ones.
Tess watched as they passed a gas station, its roof sagging and moss growing on the pumps, and finally asked, “That prospector. How long was he stuck for?”
Allie sipped her coffee. “He totally died.”
“Awesome.”
“No one knows exactly how. Rescuers worked nonstop for days, but he was too far down, almost impossible to reach. They tried
to lift him out with pulleys, but he couldn’t fit. Getting desperate, they decided to break both of his legs with hammers
to make him fit, but before they could try that, he’d slipped away.”
“Suffocation?”
“Or cardiac failure. From the sustained terror.”
“You’re really selling this.”
“Never go caving alone,” Allie said. “And always establish a surface watch, someone on standby to report you missing the minute
you’re overdue.”
“I’m guessing that’s Ethan?”
Allie grinned. “Chihuahuas were bred to be sentries.”
Then she swerved a hard left off the highway, and the transition from pavement to gravel rattled Tess’s teeth. As the Outback’s
suspension jostled over potholes, she tried to sip her coffee without splashing herself and considered all the ways a cave
might decide to kill you.
Crushed by rocks.
Suffocation.
Hypothermia.
Falling.
Drowning—
“We’ll be safe today,” Allie added. “I promise.”
The next My Chem song on her playlist came up—“Famous Last Words”—and Tess couldn’t help but laugh nervously.