Chapter 10
Ten
Noah lowered Alex as gently as he could manage, his muscles quivering. His back screamed in protest.
They’d been moving for what felt like hours but was probably closer to forty minutes. They’d navigated through passages that twisted and narrowed, squeezing through gaps, and sometimes Noah had been forced to his knees while Meg guided Alex’s dangling head away from the rock walls.
This chamber was smaller than the one they’d left behind. Barely ten feet across. But the ceiling rose higher—maybe fifteen feet—and most important, it was about ten to fifteen feet higher in elevation.
Dry.
For now.
“Here.” Meg was already spreading out Noah’s jacket on the ground and smoothing the fabric. “Let me check him.”
Noah carefully maneuvered Alex off his shoulders, every movement deliberate and every muscle trembling with fatigue.
The boy was still unconscious, his face slack. His breathing was shallow but steady.
Meg immediately went to work. She checked his pulse at throat and wrist, his pupils with a penlight, and the makeshift cervical collar that had shifted during the journey.
Noah sank against the wall and slid down. His legs refused to hold him upright anymore. His muscles felt like they were on fire. The rope had dug grooves into his skin even through his shirt.
He watched Meg work. Her movements were efficient and practiced. But he could see the worry etched in the lines around her mouth.
“How is he?”
“The same.” Meg sat back on her heels. Her voice was tight and controlled. “Which is good, I guess. He’s not worse. But, Noah…” She looked up at him, her blue eyes catching his headlamp.
He saw what she was trying not to say written plainly on her face. “Say it.”
“He can’t go any farther.” The words tumbled out in a rush. “Even if he wakes up, he won’t be able to climb. And you can’t carry him indefinitely. I saw you stumbling back there, nearly falling. You’re exhausted.”
“I can manage—”
“No, you can’t.” Meg’s voice was firm now with steel underneath. “You need to scout ahead. Find a way out while you still have the strength to do it. Then come back for us.”
Noah’s jaw tightened. “I told you, I’m not leaving you here.”
“And I’m telling you that if you don’t, we all die.
” Meg moved closer and crossed the small space.
Her hand found his arm, her grip warm through the wet fabric.
“Noah, listen to me. If there’s a climbable shaft somewhere ahead, you need to find it.
You need to get out and bring help. That’s our only chance. ”
“What if I can’t find my way back?” The words tasted like failure. “What if the water—”
“Then at least you tried.” Her fingers tightened on his arm. “And at least you’re alive to bring help back. Staying here because you’re afraid to leave us isn’t noble, it’s just…it’s just all of us dying together.”
Noah stared at her and saw the terror she was working so hard to hide.
She was asking him to leave her in the dark, alone, with a seriously injured boy and water rising somewhere behind them.
She was asking him to trust that he could find his way back through the maze.
She was asking him to do the one thing every instinct in his body was screaming against.
“No.” The word came out raw. “Don’t you understand?” His hands moved to her shoulders and gripped tightly enough to bruise. “I can’t leave you. I love you.”
The words hung between them in the darkness, finally spoken after all the weeks of careful distance, of measured politeness, of pretending he didn’t feel what he felt every time she looked at him.
Meg’s eyes widened. Her lips parted on a sharp inhale. “Noah—”
“I know what I said before. I know I told you to go to Pennsylvania. I know you deserve someone without so much baggage, without all this grief.” His voice cracked.
“But heaven help me, I do love you. I love your heart. The way you can’t leave a patient untended even if you met them thirty minutes ago.
I love that you see me, know me, and still care for me despite it all.
I love that you’ve seen Star Wars more than fifty times but would watch it again in a heartbeat.
I love the way you laugh and the way you taught me to laugh again. And I can’t lose you.”
“Then don’t.” Her hands came up to cup his face, her palms against his stubbled jaw. “You have to trust that I can keep myself alive until you come back.”
“What if I can’t find a way out? What if—”
She pulled him down and pressed her lips to his.
It wasn’t the tentative kiss like that first one in the canyon.
It was desperate and fierce and tasted like fear and dust and the certainty that this might be the only chance they’d ever have.
Her fingers curled into his hair, and the feel of her hands on him—solid, steady, alive—nearly undid him. Every word he’d never been brave enough to say clawed its way up his throat, trapped behind the desperate press of his mouth against hers. She held him close and pulled him to her.
He wrapped his arms around her and crushed her against him. He was holding on too tight, but he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t loosen his grip. Like if he just refused to let go, he could somehow keep the world from trying to take her again. Like he could make her safe through sheer stubborn will alone.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, Meg kept her forehead pressed against his.
“If you really love me,” she whispered, her breath warm against his lips, “then you have to do this. You have to go and find us a way out.”
Noah’s hands slid from her back to frame her face, his thumbs on her cheekbones. He brushed away the tears on her cheeks. “Meg—”
“Promise me.” Her voice was steady now and stronger. “Promise me you won’t give up out there, no matter what happens. Because I’m going to be here waiting, and I need you to come back to me. Do you understand?”
He leaned in and kissed her again. Softer this time but no less intense.
All of his love and desire burning beneath the tenderness.
He tried to tell her everything he didn’t know how to say—that she’d changed him, that she’d made him want to survive when he’d been ready to give up, that the thought of her waiting was the only thing that might be strong enough to pull him back from whatever darkness waited out there.
When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against hers for one more moment with his eyes closed.
“I promise.” His voice was rough. “I’ll come back.”
She nodded. Her hands slid down to squeeze his before letting go.
The loss of her touch felt like losing something vital.
He forced himself to step back and start thinking like a ranger instead of a man watching the woman he loved prepare to be left behind in the dark.
He pulled supplies from his pack and sorted quickly.
“The water should stop rising once the rain stops. But if the storm picks up, you may need to move to higher ground.”
“There is no higher ground in here.” Meg gestured at the smooth walls. “This is it, Noah. This is as high as we can get without you.”
The weight of that statement settled on his chest like a physical thing.
He was their only chance. Their only hope.
If he failed, if he got lost or couldn’t find a way out…
Meg stood and crossed to him. She wrapped her arms around him and held tight. She pressed her face against his chest.
He breathed in the scent of her hair beneath the dust and fear—something clean and uniquely her that he wanted to memorize.
Just in case.
“I’ll be back.” He pulled away, then cupped her face in his hands. “I promise.”
It was a promise he had no right to make.
But he made it anyway.
The passage Noah chose angled upward. Promising. He moved quickly, his headlamp cutting through the absolute darkness. His hands trailed along the walls to keep his bearings.
Every twenty yards, he tied a strip of fabric torn from his undershirt to a rock protrusion or wedged it into a crack.
Breadcrumbs leading back to Meg. A trail home.
The tunnel twisted and narrowed, then opened into another small chamber.
Three passages led away from it—left, right, center.
Noah chose the middle path, marked it carefully with fabric, and pressed on.
His watch told him he’d been gone fifteen minutes when he spotted a pale gray light filtering down from above.
Noah’s heart leaped.
He moved faster. His boots slipped on the wet stone as the tunnel angled sharply upward, nearly forty-five degrees.
The light grew brighter.
He stepped below the source and craned his neck. A vertical shaft, maybe six feet wide and irregular, cut up through the rock at a steep angle.
Not quite straight up, but close.
Sixty-five degrees. Maybe steeper.
Daylight poured down from somewhere far above. Fresh air.
Noah shone his headlamp up its length.
The walls were rough sandstone, pitted and pocked with handholds and narrow ledges.
Climbable.
For him? Definitely. He’d climbed worse.
But Meg?
He tried to picture her scaling this shaft, her arms shaking, reaching for holds she could barely see.
Possible, maybe, if he could help from above.
But Alex? Unconscious and deadweight? Impossible.
No way to haul an unconscious body up a shaft this steep without some serious gear he didn’t have.
Noah’s brief surge of hope deflated.
This wasn’t their salvation.
It was his salvation. His escape.
He could climb out alone, get help, and bring equipment—ropes, pulleys, medics.
But how long would that take? An hour to climb up? Another hour to get rescue equipment and personnel back here?
If the storm picked up again, the water could reach them before he could get back.
Noah stared up the shaft and calculated odds.
He had one flare in his pack—the aerial kind, meant to be seen for miles. If he could get high enough in this shaft, he could send it up.
Someone might see it—Teague, Liam, a passing ranger. Anyone.
It was a long shot. The rain would reduce visibility. The flare might get caught in the shaft. Burn out against wet rock. Or worse—start a fire in the brush above.
But it might be their only hope.