Chapter 16
“Let’s meet the other team. I believe the ancestors will be okay with it,” Malia said.
She’d made the call to cross the line—so we did. We stepped into the narrow throat where the stream poured, making our way carefully into a stretch of passage whose walls gleamed with tiny streams of water. Protrusions of lava required squeezing past—and stalactites required ducking.
And suddenly the ceiling lifted and opened.
Our beams flashed around a chamber where the sound of water filled everything as the stream tumbled into a large pool.
Malia went first around the edge with her flashlight, then me, then Keone, single file along a floor that was tilted and slick under our feet.
The ti leaf offering was behind us at the entrance and Malia’s pule was still somewhere around us; I held onto that, because every step was taking us deeper into a place where the living were not meant to walk.
We made our way another ten feet past the pool—and then the floor ended.
Malia’s beam shot out into nothing as a pit opened across almost the whole width of the cave—a black gash maybe fifteen feet across.
I crept to the edge and peered in with my headlamp; the light couldn’t find the bottom. But along the right-hand wall, a narrow shoulder of stone ran partway down the drop. The ledge was maybe two feet wide and crumbling at the edge.
“There,” Keone said. His hand closed tight on my shoulder, turning me. “Point your light across.”
On the far side of the pit, another beam was coming toward us, jerking and swinging. A voice came with it, threadbare with distance and echo. “Peahi! That you?”
“Texeira!” Malia’s relief cracked through the name. “We’re at the pit—you’re across from us.”
Our beams found each other across the gap, and in the bounce and scatter of the doubled light I could see that both Lei and Pali had a coil of rope over their shoulders. Pali carried a rack of climbing hardware clipped at his waist that caught the light in small bright winks.
“I see Chang down there,” Lei called, after her beam had tipped down into the pit. “On a ledge. Maybe twenty-five feet from the lip.”
I edged out onto the narrow shoulder, Keone’s fist knotted in the back of my vest, and peered down.
Far below, where Lei’s light pooled on a shelf of rock above the deeper dark, lay Victor Chang. The man was crumpled on his side, one arm flung wide. His pale clothing gleamed with wet, and dark patches that were mud—or blood.
He wasn’t moving. His headlamp was smashed, though still on his head. And under him, half-hidden by his weight, was a large rectangular shape I couldn’t make out—something he’d landed on that had broken the meeting of his body and the stone.
“Is he—“ My voice was too faint; I raised it. “Can you see if he’s alive?”
“Can’t tell from here,” Lei called. “No movement, though. Pali’s going down.”
“Yes, I am,” Pali said, already checking through his gear and discarding what he wouldn’t need. He began feeding rope through his hands and making a loop with it, using the unhurried economy of a man who knew his way around caves—and cliffs.
I flashed to Elle and her many talents—she would appreciate this highly competent aspect of Pali Moku.
Pali found an anchor, a thick tooth of lava, on his side of the pit. He wrapped it with the rope, testing his knots with his full weight.
And then he was over the lip and descending into the dark, his headlamp dropping away from us foot by foot, his voice floating up steady and calm. “Talk to me from up there, Lei. Keep your light on him.”
We watched from our side as Pali lowered himself down, moving in short bursts, using his legs to mitigate the swing of his body toward the rock face.
My heart beat hard in my throat; Keone’s grip on my back never loosened as I watched the drama unfold.
Pali’s headlight reached the ledge at last. The small bright disc of illumination moved over Victor Chang—across his back, his throat, his face.
Then our view was cut off as Pali bent over the man, putting fingers to his throat.
“He’s breathing,” Pali called up, and I heard Keone exhale beside me.
“Out cold. Pulse is there. Bleeding from the head, and his leg’s wrong.
Broken, maybe his hip, too. He came down hard.
” A pause, the light dipping. “He landed on this . . .” A moment of investigation.
“He landed on a satchel. It’s an old, oiled leather satchel.
It’s what broke his fall. Saved his fool life. ”
Something went still and alert in me. “A satchel,” I called down. “Pali—what’s in it?”
A long moment. His light had stopped moving. When his voice came back up it had changed—lower, softer, the calm gone tight.
“Papers,” he said. “Oilcloth wrapping, parchment document sleeves.” Another pause. “It’s the archive. Hannah’s archive. It’s been down here the whole time.” The light moved again, decisive now. “I’ve got it. I’m putting it in my pack.”
I watched the disc of his headlamp bounce as he worked to ease the wide dark shape out from under Victor Chang’s slack weight.
Pali Moku, Keone’s oldest friend, the man who’d guided us through this whole tangle, was securing priceless documents the sensible way—getting them out of a damp pit and into a drypack before anyone hauled a stretcher down that cliff.
That was all. That had to be the plan.
“Air ambulance is rolling,” Lei called across the pit; she’d had her radio up the whole time, working it low to bring in help while I’d been fixed on Pali and Chang.
“I called it the second we verified he’s alive.
They’ll set down on the north—our side’s the way out.
We’ll guide the first responders in, rig him up, and have him flown straight to the hospital. ”
“Copy that,” Malia said.
“Pali, package him up for the EMTs. Do you think we can bring him to the rim with your gear?”
“Better not to,” Pali said. “He’s got broken bones, and I can’t tell what they are yet.” Pali had removed one of those silver space-age blankets from his pack; he tucked it around the man.
“Okay, we’ll wait for the ambulance team,” Lei said. “Hopefully they have a winch to hoist him out.”
Eventually what followed was a half hour I’d remember for the rest of my life: watching relayed shouts and swinging lights as Pali, alone on a ledge determined to be too narrow to hold anyone else, padded Chang’s head as best he could, then worked a rescue harness around an unconscious man with broken bones, moved him onto a metal frame, and clipped the frame to a line connected to a small portable winch.
Keone, who knew ropes, murmured interpretations of the technical jargon he was hearing into my ear, so I’d understand it: a “mechanical advantage,” a “haul system off the spur anchor.”
Victor Chang rose out of the pit like a caged mummy wrapped in aluminum foil, an elaborate baker’s joke.
“He’s up,” Lei called. “He’s up and he’s stable as we can make him. Let’s get him to the hospital, folks.” The EMTs converted the basket that held Chang to a gurney, and they pushed it, slowly and with difficulty, over the rough terrain, heading out of sight with a clatter of wheels.
But relief didn’t run through our side of the pit like a loosened knot until Pali came up the rope, hand over hand, easy as climbing a ladder. We only breathed easy when he stood safely on the far lip beside Lei.
Pali settled his pack on his back; it was thick and bulky with the archive in it.
Malia’s flashlight caught him adjusting his straps.
“The satchel in your backpack, Moku.” Malia’s voice was even but hard. “That’s evidence. Hand it over to Lei. It goes into custody with everything else from the case.”
Pali settled the pack higher on his shoulders.
“No,” he said. “No.” The word dropped into the pit, and darkness poured around it.
“This archive documents the ownership of Awawakapu,” Pali went on.
His voice held that steadiness, that inexorable quality that was such a part of his personality.
“Hannah Chang’s brother hid the archive here so it could be used, if need be, to right a wrong done to the people of this valley.
It has big repercussions and deserves to be protected with the highest standards of archaeology—not thrown into an evidence locker in Kahului where it sits in a box for three years while lawyers hassle with and extend a case involving big-dollar defendants like Chang and Santos.
” He paused to draw breath. “I’m a descendant of this valley, and I’m claiming it for safekeeping on behalf of our people. ”
Silence fell and echoed around the dimly lit, chilly space.
I could feel Malia’s inner conflict—she too, was a descendant. Lei was also part Hawaiian. They had skin in this game—so did Keone. I alone was an outsider.
Lei shook her head as she stood beside Pali; both of them were filthy and exhausted. “Pali . . .”
“Lei.” He turned to face her, his hands on the backpack straps.
“You’ve got a wanted man with multiple broken bones on his way to a helicopter.
You’ve got another suspect in custody on the other side—and meanwhile, this archive isn’t safe.
” Pali’s tone gentled, but he didn’t bend.
“Fight me about a bag of old papers later. Right now you’ve got bigger fish to fry, and you know it. ”
Malia’s jaw worked as she stared at Lei. Lei gazed after the gurney and then over at Malia. Something passed between the two women across the dark.
Lei said flatly, “We’ll deal with the chain of custody and this evidence when everyone’s out of here alive. Let’s go.”
Should I say something more? Argue with Lei about her decision?
I stared at Pali standing there with the archive on his back. He was Keone’s oldest friend, a man of integrity who’d helped us through all of this case. He’d spent his whole life trying to protect this valley. Of course he wanted the papers to be preserved and kept in the right hands.
Or so I hoped.
“Go,” Malia called. “We’ll bring Madison out the south side and meet you at Hana Police Department.”
“We’ve got it,” Lei called back. “Go carefully, Peahi. Get your people out unharmed.”
“Copy that, and right back atcha,” Malia said.
We left Lei and Pali behind us to make their way after Victor Chang and the medical team as we made our way back from the pit and retraced our careful steps: Malia, then me, then Keone.
We did the slow crawl back along the narrow shoulder and passed the pool and began through the rocky stream tunnel, heading toward the second chamber.
The return out felt longer than the way in as my adrenaline crashed, but that’s always how things go on a high-stakes operation.
We made our way up through the outer chamber toward the gray smudge of daylight at the cave mouth. The air warmed by degrees, and the green smell of the living valley floated in to meet us.
We were almost to the boulders at the entrance when I heard a woman’s voice coming from outside, where Souza held Madison. The tone was pitched low, unhurried and reasonable, the way you’d talk to an animal you didn’t want to bolt.
I stopped in my tracks. Keone bumped into my back.
That wasn’t a voice we’d left; it didn’t belong. I couldn’t make out the words, only the tone—and a cold finger traced down my spine, because there was no one up that slope who should have been talking to a handcuffed prisoner in that coaxing voice.
And Souza wasn’t answering. I couldn’t hear Souza at all.
Malia’s hand went to her weapon. “Who is that?” she breathed.
I didn’t have an answer, but I knew, with a cold certainty that came from beneath the thinking part of me, that something had gone very wrong in the bright world above while we’d been down in the dark.