Chapter 11 #3
“Wrong hole. It’s collapsed at about eighty feet.” Time to climb back up and try the next promising shaft. At least he hadn’t wasted too much time. Just twenty minutes. “Coming back up.”
He tugged the rope and signaled his ascender to engage.
Nothing happened.
He tugged again. Harder this time.
Nothing.
The Petzl ascender should have locked onto the rope. But the cam wasn’t engaging. Wasn’t moving at all.
He tried one more time and put more pressure on it.
Still nothing.
“Ascender’s not catching.” Teague examined it with his headlamp, and his stomach dropped. The cam was locked in the open position with teeth not touching the rope. Frozen. “Looks like it got jammed with grit or debris. Must have happened when I was scraping through that narrow section.”
Embarrassing.
Teague was meticulous about his gear. But the wet rock, the hurry, the narrow passage—something had fouled the mechanism.
And now he was stuck eighty feet down a dead-end shaft with no way to climb back up using his ascender.
“Can you free-climb?” Eden asked, her voice tight and controlled.
Teague shone his light up the shaft and assessed the walls. Smooth limestone, slick with moisture, barely any handholds. “Not easily. The walls are too smooth and wet. I could maybe do it if I had to, but—”
“Okay. Listen. Can you see the ascender mechanism clearly?”
“Yeah.”
“The grit is probably in the spring mechanism. You need to create an alternate friction hitch above the ascender to take your weight, then you can work on clearing the jam.”
Teague blinked and stared at the radio like it might explain where this knowledge was coming from. “Where’d you learn that?”
“I read.” Her tone was clipped and professional. “Do you have a prusik loop in your gear?”
“Yeah.” Teague pulled the thin cord from his harness—bright red against his dark gear. His mind was still catching up to the fact that Eden was walking him through an advanced climbing rescue technique. “Eden—”
“Focus, Teague. Loop the prusik around the rope above your ascender. Three wraps, then tie it off with a friction knot. You know how to tie a prusik knot?”
“Yes.” He did and wrapped the cord around the main rope with practiced movements. “But—”
“Clip a carabiner to the prusik loop and attach it to your harness. That’s your temporary ascender. It’ll hold your weight while you work on the jammed one.”
Teague followed her instructions, the prusik knot gripping the rope as designed. He transferred his weight to it carefully—it held.
Good.
Now he could work on the Petzl.
“Got it. Weight’s on the prusik.” He examined the ascender’s cam mechanism more closely. “I can see grit packed into the spring housing. If I can clear it—”
“Use your knife to scrape it out, but be gentle. You don’t want to damage the spring.” Eden paused. “And Teague? When you get out of there, you’re going to listen to me about waiting for backup next time.”
Despite everything—eighty feet down, stuck in the dark, Noah and Meg still trapped somewhere—Teague smiled. “When I get out of here, you’re going to tell me where you really learned all this. Because it wasn’t from reading manuals.”
Silence on the radio. Then: “Just fix your gear and get back up to the top.”
Teague worked the knife tip into the ascender’s mechanism and carefully scraped away compacted dirt and grit. Slow work. But gradually the spring began moving again—first sluggishly, then with increasing freedom. He tested it and worked the cam open and closed—smooth now.
“Got it. Ascender’s working.” He unclipped the prusik and let the Petzl take his weight again. It held firm. “Coming up.”
The climb back was slower than the descent, his arms burning with each pull. When he finally pulled himself over the lip of the shaft and collapsed on the wet ground, his hands were shaking.
Fatigue. Or adrenaline crash. Hard to tell which.
Eden’s voice came immediately. “You’re up?”
“Yeah.” Teague lay there for a moment, caught his breath, and stared at the gray sky. Rain was beginning to fall again. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”
Another pause. “Just doing my job.”
“Your job is dispatch, not rescue.” Teague sat up, his chest still heaving. “But we’ll talk about that later.”
He could hear Eden’s exhale over the radio—half frustration, half something else.
“Liam’s thirty minutes out. Please. Wait for him this time.”
Teague pushed himself to his feet and searched the plateau spreading before him. Two more shafts from his initial survey showed promise—both deep, both with good airflow. Each potentially the right one. Each potentially another dead end.
But which one?
He’d been so sure about the first shaft. Absolutely certain.
And he’d been wrong.
Thirty minutes wasted. Thirty minutes Noah and Meg didn’t have.
“Thirty minutes might be twenty-nine minutes too long.” He moved toward the nearest promising shaft. “But I’ll be more careful this time. Promise.”
“Your promises don’t mean much when you’re climbing down holes alone.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to keep talking me through it.
” Teague stood at the edge of the shaft and shone his headlamp down.
Deep. Maybe deeper than the first. The beam was swallowed by darkness after twenty feet.
“Besides, seems like you’re pretty good at the technical rescue thing.
Maybe you should be out here instead of behind a desk. ”
“Maybe you should focus on picking the right shaft this time.”
“Fair point.” He approached the southern shaft and played his light over the entrance. Narrower than he’d like—maybe two feet across at the widest point. But natural rock formations around the edges suggested it might have been a natural fissure the miners had widened.
He dropped a glow stick and watched it tumble. It fell for a long time. Kept falling.
“How deep?” Eden asked.
“Can’t tell. Lost sight of the glow stick.” The draft from this shaft was cold and steady—not the intermittent puffs of a dead end, but the consistent flow of air moving through a connected system. “This one feels different.”
“Feels different isn’t a technical assessment, Teague.”
“No, but it’s all I’ve got right now.” And something was better than nothing, right?
His radio crackled. “Teague? What are you thinking?”
What was he thinking?
That Noah and Meg were somewhere below him, possibly dying.
That Meg was trapped in the dark she feared and doing impossible things with insufficient resources.
That Noah was probably injured, definitely exhausted, and refusing to give up because that’s who he was.
And that every minute Teague spent standing here debating was another minute they didn’t have.
“I’m thinking,” Teague said slowly, rain running down his neck and soaking into his collar, “that I need to pick the right shaft this time. And I’m thinking that with your knowledge, you should be out here with me and not behind a desk.”
Silence.
Then, “I know enough to tell you that rushing in got you stuck once already. Don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Please wait for Liam.”
There was a desperation in her voice that hadn’t been there before. Something raw and painful. The sound of someone who’d lost people before, who knew what it felt like to have names added to the list of the dead because someone made the wrong call.
Something he couldn’t say no to.
“I’ll wait. But I might as well get the anchors set for the next descent.
” Teague stared at the two shafts, his gut warring with logic and instinct battling caution.
Rain was falling harder now and turning the limestone slick and treacherous.
“Talk me through it, Eden. If you were standing here, which one would you pick?”
She’d done it.
Meg stared at Alex’s foot and watched the color slowly return to his toes—from that terrifying gray-blue back to a healthier pink.
Life seeping back into the dying tissue, one capillary at a time.
Her hands were shaking so badly she had to press them against her thighs to still them.
The fabric of her pants was stiff with dried blood—Alex’s blood, mixed with cave grit and her own sweat.
Done.
She’d released the pressure and wrapped it as best she could with the limited supplies they had. White gauze was already seeping through with blood, but clean blood. Flowing blood. Living blood.
Alex hadn’t woken through any of it. Mercy. That type of burning pain, no one wanted to remember.
Meg sat back on her heels, her breath coming hard and adrenaline still coursing through her system.
Blood stained her hands—not a lot, but enough to make everything feel viscerally real.
Dark under her fingernails. Dried in the creases of her palms. The metallic smell mixed with the cave’s mineral scent.
A fasciotomy. In a cave. With improvised instruments and no backup.
And it had worked.
But underneath the adrenaline was something else—something that felt almost like pride, sharp and unexpected. Like finding a muscle she didn’t know she had and discovering it was strong.
She’d done it. When it mattered, she hadn’t frozen.
“Hey.” Noah’s voice was soft beside her. “You okay?”
She looked up at him, and a laugh bubbled out of her—slightly manic, edged with hysteria, but real. “I think so. Yeah.”
The laugh echoed off the limestone walls and came back distorted.
“You were amazing.” His brown eyes held something that made her chest warm. Something that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the man sitting beside her in the dark. “Seriously, Meg. That was—I don’t even have words for what that was.”
She wiped her hands on a relatively clean section of her pants—which wasn’t saying much at this point—and tried to process what had just happened, tried to reconcile the shaking, terrified woman who’d held that scalpel with the doctor who’d made those incisions. “You kept me calm. Without you—”
“You would have been fine. You are stronger than you know.”