Chapter 22
Between the Cracks
Oz
The golf cart lurches over the rutted road, and I compress myself lower in the seat beside Maisie. The wind carries dust and diesel and the sharp mineral scent of the ridge. Mrs. Pritchett drives with white-knuckled focus, the orange flag snapping above us like a distress signal.
The mine entrance appears through the dusk. Headlights from parked trucks cut harsh beams across the scrub, illuminating faces that turn toward us as we approach.
The town has gathered in silence, their shadows long and strange against the rock. I can feel their heartbeats from here. A cluster of elevated rhythms. Fear, thick and sour, radiating from the crowd.
Mrs. Pritchett stops the cart. I step out, and the crowd parts without a word. I sense it, their wariness. Their disbelief. Their desperate hope they’re afraid to name.
The shaft entrance yawns ahead. Jagged timber frames a hole torn into the earth, the wood splintered and old. Darkness pools beyond the threshold, absolute and waiting.
I pause at the entrance. The air rising from below carries the smell of fractured stone, old iron, and something fainter. Blood, still fresh.
I give Maisie a long look. She nods, and I descend.
The darkness swallows me within feet. My body compresses through cracks that would trap a human. I feel the stone ahead. The tiny vibrations of settling earth. I taste the air, sorting particles. Dust. Copper. The mineral tang of blood, stronger now.
The mine groans around me. Timber supports that should hold weight have softened with decades of moisture. Stone shifts in places where the structural integrity has become a suggestion rather than a guarantee.
I move carefully, testing each passage before committing my mass.
Sound reaches me. Ragged breathing. Two patterns, one shallow and quick, one slower and labored. I follow them deeper.
The passage narrows. I compress further and slide through a gap where the ceiling has buckled. Beyond it, the tunnel opens into a small pocket of stable rock.
Gary is wedged against a fallen beam. His leg bends at an unnatural angle, and blood has soaked through his torn jeans where the bone has pushed against the skin without breaking it.
His arm is wrapped around a small boy curled against his chest. Bobby. The boy who approached me at the diner, asking what I was made out of.
He hadn’t feared me then, and he doesn’t fear me now. His eyes widen with hope, and he says, “It’s Oz, the slime!”
Gary shifts his position slightly, his voice strained with pain. “Settle, Bobby. One wrong move and this whole cavern could collapse.”
Gary’s right; things could go wrong, fast, and from the creaking above me, I don’t think we have time to wait for a rescue crew.
“I’m going to find a stable path out of here,” I begin. “Stay still.”
I then press through the gap I entered through, testing its edges. The stone is tight here, tight enough that I had to thin myself considerably. A human body would wedge at the shoulders.
I extend another tendril left, through a crack where the ceiling has buckled against the wall. It narrows to nothing three feet in.
On the right, a slope of rubble that might’ve been a secondary passage before the collapse. I sink into it, flowing between the chunks of sandstone and timber, and find solid rock eight feet down.
I try every direction, but each route ends the same way. Stone, stone, and more stone.
The first pulse of genuine fear moves through me.
I could flow back the way I came in minutes. But Gary and Bobby…
I return to the pocket. Gary’s breathing has grown shallower, and sweat gleams on his forehead despite the cool air rising from below. Bobby watches me with those wide, trusting eyes.
“Oz?” Bobby says, and I notice him looking past my shoulder.
A pale green luminescence, faint but unmistakable, is flickering in the tunnel beyond the rubble.
The light moves closer, until a figure emerges from the crack in the wall, and the pale green luminescence catches on gaunt limbs.
The Ridge Walker. His body is lean, angular, folded into shapes that suggest he’s spent decades learning to fit through spaces that shouldn’t accommodate him.
His eyes reflect my glow, and I see him catalog me the same way I’ve been cataloging him. Another creature without a place on the surface.
He freezes at the edge of the pocket. Every line of him pulls taut, ready to snap back behind the rock.
“I know a way out.” The Ridge Walker’s voice is a dry scrape, like stone sliding against stone. “A passage through the rock. Stable.”
I hold still. Any sudden movement could send him retreating into the dark, and we can’t afford that. Behind me, Gary’s breathing has grown ragged, and Bobby’s small fingers grip Gary’s shirt.
“Show us,” I say.
The Ridge Walker steps closer, and his long fingers reach for Bobby.
“I can carry the small one. You carry the big one.”
Gary tenses. His arm tightens around the boy, and pain flares through his damaged leg, sharp and acrid. Bobby whimpers at the pressure.
The Ridge Walker crouches at the edge of the pocket. His angular form folds into something smaller, less threatening. Bobby watches him with wide eyes, and something shifts in the boy’s expression. Wonder, not fear.
“Like a glow bug,” Bobby whispers.
The Ridge Walker extends his hand. Long, gaunt fingers, the skin rough with mineral deposits.
Bobby looks up at Gary and says, “It’s okay.”
Gary’s breath catches. His arm loosens.
The Ridge Walker takes Bobby’s hand gently, his grip careful around the small fingers. The boy steps across the rubble, steady and unafraid, and the two of them move toward the gap in the wall where the Ridge Walker appeared.
I turn to Gary. “Can you stand?”
“Been better.” He braces against the fallen beam and pushes himself up. His face goes gray with pain, and his pulse spikes hard enough that I feel it ripple through the air between us.
I shift my shape. I flow behind him and spread my body into a broad, curved surface that cups his back like a stretcher.
I firm my outer layer into something solid and supportive, molding myself to the contours of his spine and shoulders while keeping my inner surface soft against him. Two thick extensions anchor me to the ground and will carry us both.
“Lean back,” I tell him. “I’ve got you.”
He hesitates, then lets his weight settle against me. I hold firm beneath him, cradling his weight. His damaged leg hangs at an angle that makes his pulse stutter every time it moves.
“Hold on,” I tell him.
The Ridge Walker leads us through a path I missed. The gap is barely visible and must’ve been hidden behind a slab of sandstone that he pulled aside before making his presence known.
I follow with Gary braced against me, my anchored extensions finding purchase on the uneven floor, adjusting constantly to the shifting grade.
The Ridge Walker pauses ahead, turning his angular head to listen. Then he shifts left, into a fissure I would’ve dismissed as a shadow.
“This way,” he says.
The Ridge Walker moves faster now, surer of the terrain. The passage opens into what must’ve been a drainage channel, the floor smooth with decades of water flow. The air changes. Cleaner. Carrying the faint clean scent of the open sky.
We round a final bend, and the purple dusk appears ahead. A narrow opening in the hillside, half-hidden by a curtain of dead brush.
The Ridge Walker stops at the threshold. Bobby lifts his head, and the boy’s face transforms with something that makes the whole descent worthwhile.
“Look! There’s everyone!”
The crowd has gathered at the base of the slope below the ventilation shaft. Headlights cut up from the road, and figures stand in clusters, their attention fixed on the hillside.
The Ridge Walker steps through the opening first, Bobby still in his arms, and a sound moves through the assembled people. A sharp intake, dozens of breaths catching at once. The creature from the ridge, holding a child.
Bobby waves. “I’m okay! Gary’s okay too!”
The sound that follows is something else entirely. A woman’s voice, breaking into a sob. The scrape of boots on gravel, people surging forward. Hands reach for Bobby, and the Ridge Walker goes rigid.
I move behind him with Gary against my body, and the crowd’s attention splits. Faces I recognize from the diner, from the supply store, from Deborah Pritchett’s Neighborhood Watch group.
Their expressions shift by degrees. The shock lingers, but something else is rising through it, something that rewrites the scene they’re witnessing.
Gary, injured but alive. Bobby, waving and grinning. The Ridge Walker shrinking back against the rock. And me, carrying a man who couldn’t walk, my form solid and steady beneath him.
Maisie pushes through from somewhere in the crowd. Her face is streaked with dust, her eyes red, and when she sees me, her whole body sags with relief.
Then Gary’s voice rises above the murmurs. “They got us out. Both of them. They got us out.”
The crowd moves from shock toward recognition. Two men step forward from the crowd, both of them moving with the purposeful stride of people accustomed to physical labor. They reach for Gary, and I feel the moment his weight shifts from my surface into their hands.
Gary groans through clenched teeth as they lift him, his damaged leg dangling, and I maintain my shape beneath him until I’m certain their grip is secure.
They carry him toward the road, where headlights illuminate the open bed of a pickup truck. Someone has already laid out a blanket. A woman I recognize from the supply store hurries alongside with a first-aid kit clutched against her chest.
Bobby has been swallowed by the crowd. I catch glimpses of him between bodies, pressed against someone’s chest, arms wrapped tight around his neck. His grandmother, perhaps. Her shoulders shake with the kind of relief that looks indistinguishable from grief.
Hands find me. A palm against my shoulder, warm and brief. A squeeze to my upper arm. Someone says my name, and I turn to see grateful faces.
“Thank you,” one woman says. “Thank you.”
I have no frame of reference for this. Decades of careful navigation around human spaces, and now hands are reaching for me with gratitude. The sensation is overwhelming. A pressure in my body that I can’t categorize.
Maisie presses close against my side. Her hand finds the small of my back, and I feel her heartbeat through the contact, rapid but settling. She says nothing. She doesn’t need to.
Behind us, the Ridge Walker has pressed himself flat against the rock, his angular form folding into the shadows as though trying to disappear into the stone itself.
The crowd’s attention has moved on, but he can’t know that. He only knows the noise, the lights, the press of bodies, and every instinct he’s developed over decades of hiding must be screaming at him to flee.
Then Gram steps forward.
She moves through the crowd with the unhurried confidence of a woman who has walked this desert for fifty years.
People part around her without seeming to notice they’re doing it. She crosses to where the Ridge Walker shrinks against the hillside, and she stops an arm’s length away.
I can’t hear what she says. Maisie and I are too far back, caught in the slow dispersal of the crowd. But I watch Gram’s hand extend. Watch her weathered fingers reach toward that gaunt form.
The Ridge Walker flinches. His whole body pulls inward, and for a moment I think he’ll vanish into the rock.
He doesn’t.
Gram’s hand finds his. Her fingers close around his, and the rigid terror drains from his posture. He stands there in the half-dark, holding Gram’s hand like a rope thrown to a drowning man, and the silence around them spreads outward until the nearest onlookers have stopped talking entirely.
Maisie’s grip on me tightens. I feel the tremor in her hands, and I know she’s seeing what I’m seeing.
Two people separated by decades, standing in the dust, their fingers intertwined.
Gram says something else. The Ridge Walker inclines his head. And then, with a final squeeze of his hand, Gram releases him and turns back toward the crowd.
The Ridge Walker lingers for a moment at the edge of the light. His pale green glow pulses once more, and then he steps into the gathering dark and is gone.
The crowd begins to break apart. Truck doors open and close. Headlights swing across the scrub as vehicles turn toward the road. Someone claps my shoulder again as they pass, and this time I manage something that might be a nod in return.
Maisie turns to face me and wraps her arms around me, pressing her face against my chest, and I feel the shudder that moves through her body.
I hold her. My body shifts to cradle her, and I feel the rapid flutter of her heartbeat slowing against my surface.
“They accepted me,” I say quietly. “Nobody looked at me with fear or disgust.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her palm presses flat against my chest, and gold threads bloom beneath her touch.
“Why would they?” she says. “You’re a hero.”
“No,” I say. “You are. You’ve given me courage I never thought I could have.”
Her heartbeat pulses against me, and something shifts in my chest, a pressure that has been building for days, for weeks, since the moment she touched me in that crate and chose to stay.
“Maisie.” Her name comes out low, almost a reverberation.
She tilts her head up. Her eyes are bright in the last light of the headlamps, and I can feel the warmth of her breath, the quickening of her pulse.
“I love you.”
The words leave me before I can organize them, before I can find a better way to say what I mean. But there is no better way. Eighty years of existence, and I have never said those words to anyone. I have never had anyone to say them to.
Maisie’s breath catches. Her fingers press deeper into my surface, and gold blooms beneath her touch, spreading across my chest in waves.
“You—” She stops. Swallows. Her eyes glisten, and I feel the tremor move through her whole body. “You love me.”
“I do.”
She laughs, a watery sound, and frames my face with her hands, her thumbs tracing the contours I have shaped for her.
“I love you too,” she whispers. “I love you, Oz.”
I hold her tighter. Around us, the last of the crowd drifts toward their trucks, their voices fading into the desert dark.