Chapter 43
Allie had a plan.
Twice now, she’d survived by intuition and luck. She wouldn’t survive a third dive. “No more mind games, Tess.” She spat out
her glowstick and stopped in the neck-high water, letting her body block the narrow trench. “I’m not moving until you give
me the map.”
Behind her, only the lap of water.
She waited for Tess to respond, breathing through her teeth while they both lay wedged single file on their stomachs. Their
bodies crushed flat in the cold water. No space to turn around. She imagined millions of tons of earth suspended overhead,
like they were belly-crawling between the jaws of an industrial press. At any second, the slab of moon-gray rock could shift
a few inches and crushed like a bug wouldn’t even begin to describe the totality of it. One tremor and they’d both cease to exist.
Still, Tess said nothing.
Allie raised her voice and repeated, “Give me the map, or we both die—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“The paper’s soaked.” Tess’s voice quivered with fear. “It’s mush. I can’t read it.”
Allie’s heart dropped. She hadn’t considered this.
Please, God, no.
“Pass it to me anyway,” she said.
“I can’t reach your hand.”
“Then hold it up.” She craned her neck under the low ceiling—to look back in the cramped space, she had to submerge most of
her face. Icy water rushed up her nose.
Sure enough, the waterlogged map really was disintegrating. Tess had preserved only a corner of wet paper and pressed her
flashlight behind it like a slide projector. The maze of tunnels was blurred with running ink.
Allie squinted. “I think I see—”
The last of it melted away. Tess cried out and tried to scoop mushy pieces from the water, but they were unrecognizable.
The map was gone.
“It’s okay.” Allie spat water. “I saw enough.”
“What did you see?”
“There’s one more dive, maybe twenty feet ahead.” Allie shut her eyes and concentrated. “We’ll go down. Then left. Then up,
and we’re out.” Then on to the Upper Vault, and up a few hundred feet more of crawls and scrambles.
Tess repeated: “Down, left, up—”
Then, finally . . .
The surface. Open air. The sky.
“And then?”
“Then,” Allie said quietly, “I guess we’ll have our fight.”
“I won’t fight you.”
“You’re lying again.”
“If we make it out of this, I swear to God, I’m done.” Tess’s shivery voice rattled in the confined air. “I’ll give you the
knife. We’ll tell the police everything, together.”
More lies, Allie knew. More manipulation.
She felt a strange disappointment in her former best friend. Being lied to now, still, after everything, hurt in a soul-deep
way.
It was all gaslighting. Every word was designed to trick her into lowering her guard.
Then once they reached the surface, the truce would end and Tess would surprise attack with her boyfriend’s knife.
It could even come now, at any second, if Tess decided the tunnel’s dimensions allowed it.
Whenever the attack came, Allie knew she’d be at a disadvantage and unarmed.
Against a knife, without the element of surprise, she wouldn’t stand a chance.
In all outcomes, Allie’s death was near certain.
But she had a plan for that, too.
First, she’d need to walk with the devil a little longer.
The tunnel constricted around them as they crawled deeper, all rock surfaces tightening closer. Eighteen inches of width shrank
to a snug fifteen, and Allie had to contract her shoulders to fit. Her knees and elbows scraped on all sides. She felt the
weight press down against her, like something heavy was sitting on top of her. Then even tighter, tighter, until there wasn’t enough space to crawl with her limbs and she had to wriggle her entire body like a giant inchworm instead.
The ceiling forced her mouth underwater, and she gagged. To cram herself through the narrowing space ahead, she had to dig
out mud and gravel in shaky handfuls.
Some cavers call it the rapture. To Allie, it had always felt like a sort of sleep paralysis: a locked-in sensation so intense and unrelenting that your
entire body wants to turn itself violently inside out. She heard rapid breaths behind her—Tess was hyperventilating.
“Stay calm.”
“I can’t . . . I can’t breathe—”
“You’re wasting our air.” Allie braced an elbow and rotated her body to fit. “Roll over. Press your mouth to the ceiling.
We’ll scoot on our backs.”
The cracked gray ceiling lowered to ten inches now, flattening Allie’s nose.
Her eyelids fluttered against it. Water lapped at the edges of her mouth, and she had to purse her lips against cold rock to inhale—ceiling sucking, it was called.
She could feel the pressure on her chest, forcing her to take shallow breaths. Squeezes trigger a claustrophobic
get me out of here terror, but she understood the true danger was just ahead and out of view. It’s actually the turns, the unexpected changes
in direction, that get cavers stuck.
“Okay.” She felt with an outstretched hand. “I feel a sharp turn ahead.”
“How sharp?”
“Ninety degrees, at least.”
She couldn’t even say the worst part yet. This was the deadliest variation dreaded by the most experienced tunnel crawlers:
an S-bend. Two ninety-degree turns placed closely together, bending in opposite directions to form a deadly natural chokepoint.
The human body can hinge in only a few places—waist, elbows, knees—and survival can come down to the length of your shins.
She thought about the prospector, wedged so tightly in this place that the only way out was to have his legs broken with hammers.
To be sawed apart and excavated limb by limb—
A boulder shifted overhead with a sudden tectonic creak. The ceiling lowered an inch. Loose pebbles dropped into the water,
splashing in Allie’s eyes.
The tunnel was unstable.
Oh, God, please, she thought. Give me a fucking break.
Behind her, Tess gasped with new fear. “What was that?”
“Crawl slowly,” Allie murmured. “Be careful what you touch.”
Everything here could be precarious: millions of tons of heaped boulders still settling and finding equilibrium overhead.
All it could take was a little pressure in the wrong place.
She heard ancient, brittle groans and felt the vibration against her face.
More rocks splashed into the water around them, and with every splash, she knew the waterline was dangerously rising.
And to her horror she heard more frenzied movement behind her, Tess kicking and pushing in all directions in blind, straitjacketed panic: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God—”
“Stop thrashing. You’ll kill us.”
“I can’t . . .”
“Slow and steady, one inch at a time.”
“I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can.” Allie pressed her lips against rock, just barely above the lapping water. “Remember, fear is power.”
“Fear is power,” Tess echoed.
They kept saying it, back and forth, like a chant with squashed lungs. For a few minutes they could pretend to be friends
again, sisters in arms, navigating the S-bend with their bodies pretzeled together under mammoth bedrock.
Halfway through, Allie had to ask it. “Your mom never did those things to you, did she?”
A long silence behind her. Then: “No.”
“You lied about the bleach. All of it.”
“Yes.”
“So you could live with my family.”
“There’s . . . something wrong with me.” Tess’s whisper filled the inches between water and rock, breathy and shivering. “It’s
like a wire is connected wrong in my brain, or like I’m missing some important part everyone else has. I can’t explain it.”
Allie felt spidery fingers touch her left ankle.
The faint pressure moved across her skin, a gentle motion tracing three sides.
She remembered seeing Tess trace those nervous little triangles on tabletops at the dive bar on Sixth where they used to play trivia, on her Honda’s steering wheel before her driver’s exam, on her own thigh in algebra class. A thousand little snapshots.
“I know.” Allie swallowed. “I always felt sorry for you. Your moods, your anxieties, the way you pushed people away but still
couldn’t stand to be alone. You were this shy, broken little thing with scaly skin that came to live in my house, and I felt
like I could save you somehow.” She exhaled, feeling her own trapped breath. “I guess I was afraid to leave you behind because
that would mean I’d failed.”
“You should’ve cut me loose,” Tess said.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t strong enough,” Allie said, closing her eyes.
But now, I am.
Because she’d lied, too.
It was already done. Minutes ago, she’d described the map inaccurately—the way out was really to the right, not the left. Their hand-to-hand fight on the surface would never happen, and instead they’d quietly go their separate ways
on the final dive: Allie to the surface, and Tess to an unknown grave, her own cruel trick turned against her.
I’m sorry, Tess. But I can be cruel, too.
Her eyes stung with tears.
I learned it from you.
This was a goodbye, if not the goodbye Tess was expecting.
“I loved you,” Tess said.
“I loved you, too.”
“I peed in the water.”
“It’s okay,” Allie said. “I’m peeing right now.”
We’re almost there, sesame seed.
One more deep breath, one more plunge under cold water. Then Worse Than Death will be over and Tess will be gone. We’re so
close to seeing the sky again.
Did I ever mention that leaving a cave is the best part?
Well, it is.
Just wait for it.
When I was nine, my dad took me to my first cave in Kentucky. It took us hours to tour just a tiny fraction of Mammoth Cave’s
four hundred miles, and after everything I saw—the flowstone in Great Onyx, the glittering crystals in the Star Chamber—when
we finally returned to the surface I thought my eyes had been damaged somehow. The world looked wrong, colorless. All I could see were grays and blacks. The
sun had become this dirty white orb floating in cloudy gray, and it took me a few stunned seconds to realize it was actually nighttime. If you’re underground long enough, even the night sky can feel as bright as day. And just breathing this new air again—I
could taste pine needles and tree sap and bluegrass pollen and centipede musk and campfire smoke from a mile away—I almost
cried, just nine-year-old me crouched there under the moonlight gasping these juddering breaths, and my dad held my fingers
in his huge hand and told me, You can’t truly appreciate the light until you’ve spent time in the dark. And he was right, of course, but it was more than light and darkness. I think after hours in the tunnels my little mind was
comprehending just how big the world really is.
For the first time in my life I understood: there are no walls, no ceilings.
Just open air. You can go anywhere. Isn’t that wild?
Any mountain, any city, any ocean. It’s all there.
You can go see it, if you’re brave enough.
And even now I still get that feeling every time I leave a cave, like I’m that wide-eyed little girl again gazing up at a whole life made new because this world is huge, full of beauty and terror and mystery and everything that hasn’t happened yet, and I fucking love every inch of it.
That’s what’s up there. That’s where we’re going, sesame seed.
I can’t wait to show it to you.
And . . . I’m realizing I have another confession to make. I’ve been thinking about Monday, about the appointment I made.
About you.
About us.
And I want you to know I’ve changed my mind.
If we make it out, I’ll cancel my—
Her nose slammed into rock. Cartilage crunched, and she coughed out bubbles of air. She almost swallowed a mouthful of icy
water.
Disbelief flashed through her mind—then alarm.
This was wrong.
There wasn’t supposed to be a dead end here. With her fingertips she searched the black water to her right and found only
more hardness, more solid stone.
This is impossible, she told herself. I’m not lost.
I saw the map with my own eyes.
But Allie was alone now, stuck at the end of a submerged crawlspace with her lungs clenched and no space to turn around. Her
mind raced with buried-alive panic, the same repeating thought accelerating—I saw the map with my own eyes—and she’d memorized the tunnels, turned Tess’s own cruel trick against her, but somehow it was all for nothing. Allie was
trapped anyway inside a ten-inch sarcophagus with nowhere to go, water filling her ears, her nose, her mouth. She wanted to
scream underwater.
How was this possible?
She’d watched Tess press her flashlight to the wet paper map like a slide projector, every detail plain to see. No more mind
games. Paper doesn’t lie. Paper can’t lie. Not even cunning, sociopathic Tess could make the map say anything other than the truth.
Unless . . .
No.
A wave of horror fell over the drowning woman.
No, no, no—
Unless Tess had knowingly held the wet paper backward. Unless the map, soaked translucent against her flashlight, had been
reversed.
Then left would be right.
Right would be left.
And the way out would be a dead end.