Chapter 42
She found air.
With her fingertips, Allie felt a narrow cavity in the limestone overhead—barely enough space to inhale. It tasted musty,
sour, like bathroom drain mold. She didn’t care. It was the best damn air she’d ever breathed in her life.
The low ceiling scraped her forehead and glistened with rows of symmetrical ridges, eerily organic-looking, like a rib cage.
She couldn’t turn her body around. She could barely move her legs and arms. Traversing the shoulder-width tube felt like belly-crawling
down the long stomach of a python, neck-deep in stomach acid. Cold water lapped at the curved ceiling, just a few inches of
breathable air.
This was beyond claustrophobic. Whatever this was, words hadn’t been invented for it. If she survived this she’d never even
begin to describe this enveloping full-body horror, the weight and pressure and strangling visceral closeness on all sides—
A gurgle of displaced water rose behind her. A gasping voice inhaled.
Tess.
Allie twisted her neck to look back. “You lied.”
The woman wasn’t listening. Too much wild-eyed adrenaline. She coughed on dirty water, her hair plastered to her face in black
tendrils.
“You lied to me,” Allie repeated. “It was right, not left.”
“I . . . read the map wrong.”
“You went right.”
“I was following you.”
Lies, lies, lies. All of it. Everything Tess said was too dangerous to trust. Allie knew she’d been a single wrong choice from a nightmarish
death, from frigid water racing down her throat to fill her lungs as her fingernails clawed against rock.
For decades, no human had dared to explore Worse Than Death. The survey maps were all incomplete—hundreds of feet underground,
below the Drainpipe and Razor Alley and the Chimney and everything else, a human body lost in an unmapped dead end would likely
never be found, let alone recovered. A complete search of such a cramped and intricate tunnel system was impossible, and Tess
surely knew it.
She needs me to die down here.
Her spine chilled.
Someplace they’ll never find my body.
She needed that map, somehow, but it was physically impossible to fight here. The single-file tunnel wouldn’t allow it. And
even though Tess had the knife, she couldn’t attack from behind, either—if she slashed the arteries in Allie’s ankles, her
body would block the passage and trap her, too. Guaranteed death.
Tess coughed. “I still smell exhaust.”
“It’s following us.” Allie spat water. “Through cracks in the rock.”
Time was running out.
Ahead, the crawlspace submerged again into dark water. Another blind plunge. Another life-and-death gamble that there was
another pocket of air deeper inside, that it could be swim-crawled to fast enough. All of it, all over again. Allie’s heart
sank.
“Pass me the map”—she reached back—“so I know what’s next.”
“I’ll describe it to you.”
“Fuck you. Give me the map.”
“It . . . splits into three tunnels,” Tess described. “A left, a right, and a middle. We have to go down the middle—”
“You’re lying again.”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t.”
Wedged on her back in the flooded tunnel, Allie felt crushed from all sides. Relentless pressure. Carbon monoxide penetrating
the porous bedrock behind them, their shared air dwindling, their body temperatures dropping. Tess’s knife carried inches
behind her unprotected feet. So many deaths in pursuit. She took a shivering breath.
I can do this.
“Trust me,” Tess repeated. “What choice do you have?”
Okay, sesame seed.
Maybe I was a little harsh.
About aborting you on Monday, I mean. If I was, well, I’m sorry. I know you’re just a clump of cells, but I shouldn’t be glib
about it. Humor has always been my way of avoiding things I’d rather not deal with. I’ll even admit that you and I have a
few things in common, although you probably look like a tadpole right now.
We both have a heartbeat (according to that stupid chart).
We both require oxygen.
We’re also both—let’s not sugarcoat it—in extreme fucking danger.
We’re hundreds of feet underground and wedged inside a flooded trench the diameter of an air duct, and the only thing more dangerous than this cave is the woman we’re trapped with.
We’re crossing a narrow bridge with the devil, all right, and it’ll only get narrower.
She holds the map. She can’t fight us physically, so she’s fighting psychologically, using the cave against us. But your mama won’t go quietly.
I’ll find a way to beat her.
I swear.
If it’s any consolation, sesame seed, I promise: no one kills you but me.
As she swam through the murky water, Allie’s glowstick revealed artifacts littering the cramped tunnel. She had to push them
aside.
Rust-eaten tools and chisels.
Pulleys.
Decayed ropes.
Like wreckage on the ocean floor, this was the epicenter of an unsuccessful rescue operation more than a century ago. This
was where it happened. Every item was left exactly where it had been discarded, the men who carried them all long forgotten.
Her chest ached with building pressure. She’d been submerged for too long already and she was in danger of losing consciousness—but
finally, the crawlspace widened a few inches into the three-way split Tess had described, and this time she couldn’t afford
to second-guess herself. There were three routes. Two led to death. She had a one-in-three chance.
The middle, Tess had said. But she was lying.
Left or right, then?
Fifty-fifty. Better odds, but still not good. Stars pierced her vision like fireworks now. She couldn’t hold her breath for
any longer. She needed to make another blind choice, another all-or-nothing coin toss. In her hypoxic thoughts she saw that
penny twirling, slapping down on Ethan’s forearm as it led them closer and closer to their first date at the cemetery, the
cemetery of all places. Heads or tails?
Left or right?
Left or right?
Left or—
Allie ignored both and swam straight down the middle.
Left and right were both wrong. She knew Tess’s tricks, the subtle ways she played the room, how when the changeling suspected the group’s suspicions were turning against her, she didn’t get flustered or try to argue. She smoothly changed her tactics.
Reverse psychology.
This time, Allie guessed Tess had told the truth—the middle—and staked two lives on it.