Chapter 9 #2
“Not that night. He waited a few days, let me think everything was fine. Then it was ‘Maybe you need to get your life together first,’ and ‘We can try again when you’re more stable.’” She mimicked his voice, dripping with condescension.
“So when the opportunity to work at the canyon came available, I took the job.”
“Meg—”
“Didn’t have a panic attack for two whole years.” She looked at him, her gaze direct. Her eyes were bright in the lamplight. “Two years of perfect control.”
“What changed?”
“Last month when you walked in with blood on your shirt, that day after the rescue. It wasn’t your blood but seeing someone I lo—care about with blood all over them that seemed to trigger them again. And now I’m right back where I—”
Noah’s boot squelched as he shifted his weight. He glanced down.
Water covered the floor where he was standing, ankle deep. It didn’t just fill the pool by the entrance anymore. Now it was spreading across the uneven stone and advancing slowly but steadily toward where Meg knelt with Alex.
The explosion must have shifted the path of the spring.
And now the water had nowhere to go. The explosion had sealed the only outlet. And the cave was getting more water from the fissures in the ceiling.
And it was rising. Measurably rising.
“Meg.” His voice came out sharp and urgent. “We need to move. Now.”
She followed his gaze to the water lapping less than a foot away from Alex’s boots. Even in the dim light, her face went notably pale.
“We’re in too deep. We have to get to higher ground.
” Noah was already pulling equipment from his pack, his hands moving fast. “The best place would be down the tunnel that seems to have collapsed”—he motioned to their left with his chin, where another pile of rubble blocked what had once been a passage—“so I guess we’ll see if this one leads to anything.
” He gestured to a dark opening on the opposite side of the chamber, black and uninviting, but slightly above the waterline… for now.
“We can’t move him.” Meg’s hand was still on Alex’s wrist. “Moving him could make a spinal injury worse. Maybe I can wait here with him while you—”
“No.” Noah met her eyes. He saw the determination, the set of her jaw.
This was the Meg who’d walked into the cave despite her terror. The Meg who’d covered Alex’s body with her own when the explosion hit. The doctor who’d chosen to run toward the hard things instead of away from them. She was tough but she didn’t understand.
“I won’t leave you behind.”
Not ever. Not in a million years.
Eden Garrison had been staring at the same incident report for the last twenty minutes, the words blurring together. She tried to focus, but her gaze kept darting to the satellite image of the storm on her monitor.
The dispatch office at the North Rim ranger station was quiet this afternoon.
Too quiet.
The kind of silence that made her upper back tense and knotted.
Who was she kidding?
She’d done this drill hundreds of times and had coordinated countless emergencies. There was one reason and one reason alone that she was so jumpy.
Her friends were out there in this storm and they hadn’t checked in.
Okay, one friend in particular.
But she refused to think about that.
The radio crackled to life.
She jumped.
“Eden, this is Teague. We have an emergency at Tapeats Cave.”
Eden’s hand was on the mic before her brain fully processed the words. Her heart was already accelerating. “Copy, Teague. What’s your status?”
Static filled the pause.
And in that half second of silence, Eden’s mind catalogued every terrible possibility—collapsed lungs, crushed limbs, buried bodies.
“There’s been an explosion. Another cave-in. Liam is hiking out four from the cave that were safely evacuated, but—”
His voice cut out. Then it returned and was clearer. “One hiker is still inside, along with Noah and Meg. We need immediate assistance.”
Eden’s hands froze on the keyboard. “They were inside when the cave collapsed?”
“Yes.”
One word said it all, flat and final—the crushing weight of the fact that his friend was either dead or would soon be, trapped under tons of rock. And Teague couldn’t do a thing about it.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. She pulled up the incident log and typed in rapid-fire, making errors she had to backspace.
Now was not the time to evaluate why her heart was pounding so hard at the sound of his voice, why relief was flooding through her veins just because he was alive and talking.
Those were questions for later, for quiet moments alone when she could afford to examine feelings she’d been carefully not examining for months.
Not since her late-fiancé Landon, with his easy smile and reckless streak. Not since she’d sworn off adrenaline junkies who couldn’t see past the next rush, the next risk, the next time they could prove they were invincible.
Because everyone was invincible…until they weren’t.
Until they fell.
“Eden.” Teague’s voice came through, the single word heavy and broken. Then another pause stretched longer.
Eden’s stomach twisted.
“I have to get them out. Can you help me?”
“Can you reach them on radio?”
“Negative. But it could be that there is too much rock between us and them. Signal won’t penetrate.” Teague’s voice was steady and measured and controlled now.
But Eden had worked with him long enough to hear what he wasn’t saying. The slight tension in his words. The careful way he was choosing them.
“Have you tried making physical contact? Getting close to the collapse?”
“I’m looking at it now.” A pause. “Eden, the passage is completely sealed. Tons of rubble. And the whole thing is unstable. Could come down again any second.”
“Don’t—” The word came out sharper than she intended. “Teague, don’t even think about climbing into that rubble.”
“I need to try to make contact—”
“You need to stay alive.” Eden’s hand tightened on the mic. Her other hand pressed flat against the desk to keep from shaking.
This was exactly what Landon used to do, that same reckless certainty—rush in without thinking, without considering the consequences, without caring that other people needed him to come home in one piece.
“If that collapse is unstable, going in there is suicide.”
“They could be dying in there.”
“And you dying won’t help them.” Eden took a breath and forced her voice to steady. “Can you hear anything? Any voices, movement, anything that suggests they’re alive?”
Silence on the other end. Long enough that Eden’s chest tightened.
“No,” Teague finally said. “Nothing. But the rock is thick, and there’s water running—I can hear it trickling through the rubble. They might be alive and I just can’t hear them.”
They might be alive.
Or they might already be dead.
Eden pushed the thought away.
She couldn’t think like that. Not about Noah and Meg, her friends. Not about Teague, who sounded far too calm, that dangerous calm, far too ready to do something reckless.
“I don’t think we can dig them out. Not safely. Not fast enough.”
Not fast enough.
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
Eden stood abruptly. Her chair rolled backward and hit the wall with a dull thud.
She crossed to the large topographical maps pinned to the opposite wall—maps she’d studied and memorized during her training.
Her fingers found Tapeats Cave and traced the marked entrance.
The known chambers. “Those caves run under the Kaibab Plateau.” More to herself than to Teague.
“It’s all Tapeats Sandstone—it’s where they get their name—highly porous, lots of natural karst features. ”
“English, Eden.” But there was something like hope in his voice now.
“Shafts.” Eden grabbed a pencil from her desk and marked potential points on the map with small x’s.
“These cave systems are known for having vertical shafts that lead up through the rock. Some were naturally carved out by water over thousands of years. Others were dug by miners. They sank exploratory shafts all over this area looking for gold. If Noah and Meg can find one of these shafts inside the cave system, they might be able to climb out.”
“If they’re still alive,” Teague said quietly. “If they’re not injured. If they can even find a shaft in the dark without a map. Not to mention we are two thousand feet down in the canyon.”
“You don’t have to. There is a mini-plateau of sorts that’s less than a hundred feet above the caves. There could be a shaft—”
“I need to get up there and start looking. If I can find the right shaft, I can rappel—”
“But any shaft that has any hope of reaching them would need to be at least that deep,” Eden interrupted. “Probably deeper given the irregular terrain. We need to coordinate with additional SAR teams first. Get proper equipment staged, bring in structural engineers to assess—”
“We don’t have time for that.” Teague’s voice was firm now, with steel underneath. “If they’re alive, they could be injured, running out of air, dealing with rising water from the rain. Every minute we spend planning is a minute they might not have.”
“And every minute you spend rushing in without a plan is a minute closer to me having to coordinate your rescue too.” Eden’s voice cracked slightly. She cleared her throat and swallowed hard, angry at herself for the slip.
“Teague, please. Think about this.”
“I am thinking. I’m thinking about Noah and Meg trapped in the dark, alone. I’m thinking about how I’d feel if we sat here planning while they died because we were too slow, too cautious.” A pause. “I’m not giving up on them, Eden. Not while there’s still hope.”
Of course he wasn’t.
Because Teague didn’t know how to give up. Didn’t know how to step back, to calculate acceptable risks. Didn’t know how to weigh his own life against the people he was trying to save. He was a “jump first, consider consequences second” type of guy.
It was what made him an exceptional backcountry ranger.
It was also what was going to get him killed one day.