Chapter 13
Thirteen
Liam had gone up with Alex, and Teague had come back for Meg.
He clipped the rope to Meg’s harness, his hands moving with muscle memory from hundreds of rescues. She was still pressed against the cave wall, her breathing ragged and shallow and her chest hitching with each inhale. Her eyes were unfocused.
He’d seen it before in rescuers who’d hit their breaking point. That thousand-yard stare. The way the body kept functioning while the mind checked out.
“I’m going to haul you up.”
He wrapped her unresponsive fingers—cold and limp—around the rope.
“You don’t have to climb. Just hold on.”
Her hands were still covered in Noah’s blood—dark against her pale skin, dried in the creases of her palms. Still shaking.
But he got them positioned on the ascender—thumbs wrapped around, fingers curled over—and hoped muscle memory would kick in once she was moving.
“Hold on, Meg. Just hold on.”
Teague signaled up the shaft. The rope went taut with a sharp jerk, and Meg rose off the ground, her body lifting like a rag doll.
He guided her toward the opening and made sure she didn’t catch on the rough stone—one hand on her shoulder, one steadying her boots—then watched her disappear into the vertical darkness above and get swallowed by the shaft.
Thirty seconds.
She should clear the shaft in thirty seconds. Maybe less if Liam was hauling fast.
“She’s up!” Liam’s voice echoed down from above. “Teague, you’re clear!”
Teague clipped into the rope, his ascender catching with a familiar click. Solid. Reliable. He started climbing, his movements automatic after years of vertical rescue work. Thousands of ascents. His muscles knew what to do without conscious thought.
Hand over hand.
Legs pushed against the rough stone.
The ascender slid up the rope with each movement. Metal teeth bit and held.
The shaft walls slid past in the beam of his headlamp. Limestone striations. Old pick marks from the miners. The geology of eons compressed into vertical feet.
Twenty feet.
Forty.
The rough stone scraped his pack and his shoulders, gouging his skin. That’d sting tomorrow. There was a reason climbers didn’t do this without a shirt, but his was wrapped around the knife at Noah’s side.
He winced as another rock dug into his shoulder, but he didn’t let it slow him. His breathing was steady and controlled.
Sixty feet.
Almost there. Almost to fresh air and open sky and safety.
His hand reached up and found Liam’s. Liam gripped hard as he hauled him over the lip of the shaft. Teague rolled onto solid ground, small rocks digging into his flesh, and breathed hard—sucking in clean air that didn’t taste of minerals and blood—and immediately the sound hit him.
The thunderous roar of helicopter rotors cutting through the air. Two distinct beats. Two birds.
Two medical helicopters sat on the plateau with their rotors spinning at full rpm. Paramedics were loading Alex into the first bird—strapping him down and hooking up monitors—their movements quick and efficient. Teague could see Noah already secured in the same aircraft. Still. Too still.
The second helicopter’s crew was already helping Liam guide Meg toward their aircraft and half carrying her. Her legs barely worked.
Teague pushed to his feet, his legs trembling slightly from the climb, from adrenaline.
They were out.
All of them.
Alive.
He slid off his pack and grabbed the spray paint from the side pocket—bright orange, the kind used for marking landing zones. The bomb squad needed to know exactly where the charges were if they didn’t go off. Without precise coordinates, they’d have to evacuate a mile radius.
Maybe more.
“Teague!” Liam was at the second helicopter and practically carried Meg now. Her head lolled against his shoulder. “We need to go!”
“Thirty seconds!” Teague called back, already spraying a large orange X on the ground near the shaft opening. The paint hissed. Chemical smell cut through the aviation fuel and dust.
His hands moved fast. He paced off twelve feet—long strides—and marked another X. He calculated the depth based on the shaft measurements and spray-painted the number in large digits.
He just needed to—
The ground trembled and shifted beneath his boots. Subtle at first. As if the world were clearing its throat.
Then stronger.
“Teague!” Liam’s voice was raw with panic. “Now!”
Teague dropped the paint can—heard it clatter on stone—and broke into a sprint toward the chopper, not even pausing to grab his pack.
Forty feet away.
The roar started deep underground—a bass note that vibrated through his bones, through his teeth, through the rocky ground beneath him. The sound of the earth’s foundation failing. Of millions of tons of rock losing the battle with gravity.
Thirty feet.
The sound of structural failure on a massive scale—amplified and catastrophic. His boots pounded the rocky ground, the dust from the chopper sandblasting his skin. Lungs burned.
Twenty feet.
The first helicopter was already lifting off with Noah and Alex and banked hard away from the plateau. Nose dipping. Gaining speed and altitude. Getting clear.
The second helicopter’s rotors increased pitch—that distinctive whine of maximum power. The skids lifted off the ground. One foot. Two.
He was just ten feet away.
Behind him, the rumble became a roar. Not sound anymore.
Force. The earth was collapsing and falling into the void below.
The vibrations shook the ground—rattled up through his boots, his legs, his spine.
The defining sound of cracking rock and stone filled the air.
Ancient limestone gave way. Centuries-old formations failed in seconds.
The helicopter was rising.
Three feet off the ground.
Four.
Liam was hanging out the open door with both hands extended and his face stark white. Eyes wide. Mouth moving. But Teague couldn’t hear the words over the roar.
“JUMP!”
The word cut through somehow—clear and desperate.
Teague launched himself forward as the ground beneath his last step disappeared and literally fell away. Just gone.
Empty air where solid rock had been.
His hands found the skid—cold metal, solid, real—and his fingers locked around it as his body swung wildly beneath the rising helicopter. His full weight suddenly hung from his grip. The pilot banked hard and gained altitude fast, and Teague’s legs kicked at empty air.
Below him, the shaft opening had disappeared, swallowed by the sinkhole now expanding in a perfect circle—geometry born from destruction.
Fifty feet across, seventy-five, a hundred.
Rock and brush and ancient stone tumbled into the void and cascaded down.
The roar was deafening and overwhelming. The sound of apocalypse.
The sound of the earth consuming itself.
Liam’s hands clamped around Teague’s wrist, his grip like a vise and his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. Another set of hands—a paramedic in a flight suit—grabbed Teague’s other arm. They hauled together and dragged him up as his boots scraped against the skid. His shoulders screamed.
The sinkhole was still growing.
A hundred and fifty feet across now.
Two hundred.
The spray-painted X’s he’d marked were gone, swallowed into the crater. Evidence erased. Coordinates lost along with his favorite pack.
Teague’s chest hit the cold helicopter floor—hard enough to knock the wind out of him—and he rolled inside and gasped. Liam grabbed his leg and hauled him fully into the cabin just as the pilot banked harder and put distance between them and the collapsing plateau. G-forces pressed them sideways.
“You good?”
Liam’s face was sheet white, his hands still gripping Teague’s shoulders and trembling. The adrenaline crash already started.
Teague pushed himself up on his elbows and looked out the open door.
The wind buffeted his face. Where the plateau had been thirty seconds ago—where he’d been standing, marking coordinates, doing his job—there was now a massive crater.
Dust and debris billowed up in enormous clouds and obscured the destruction.
But he could see the edges—nearly three hundred feet across and still crumbling at the perimeter.
Chunks of limestone the size of cars tumbled into the growing crater.
“Yeah,” Teague managed, his voice rough. “I’m good.”
“You’re insane.” Liam laughed, but it seemed less in humor and more a rush of adrenaline. That hysterical edge. The sound people made when they’d almost watched someone die. “Completely insane.”
“Calculated risk.” Teague sat up fully with his back against the cabin wall. Cold metal against his bare back. His hands still trembled. Heart hammered.
He’d calculated that one very wrong. The margin for error had been about three seconds. Three seconds between escape and being buried under half a mountain along with his pack. Man, he’d miss that pack.
He turned to Meg, who was strapped into the jump seat across from him and stared at the other chopper through the window. The first helicopter was ahead of them and banked toward Flagstaff. Toward the hospital. Her head leaned against the glass with her hands limp in her lap.
He reached out and squeezed her shoulder to offer comfort. Connection. Something. “He’s going to be okay.”
She didn’t look at him. Just stared out with an empty expression—hollow, like someone had scooped out everything essential and left only the shell.
Teague didn’t know how to help her. Didn’t know what to say or what to do. And he was afraid that that experience—Noah bleeding out in her hands, Ryan’s gun, the knife, the explosions—may have broken something in her permanently.
Something that couldn’t be fixed with time or therapy or anything else.
He knew better than anyone that some breaks didn’t heal.
Pain woke him.
Not the sharp, immediate kind that demanded attention—the kind that screamed injury and danger—but a dull, pervasive ache that spread through his entire body as if he’d been run over by a truck.
Noah’s eyes cracked open to fluorescent lights—too bright, too sterile.
Hospital.