XX
The tunnel constricted around us, the mountain pressing in until stone nearly brushed my shoulders. Heaton moved just ahead, his jacket skimming my arm with every step. The air tasted of rust and wet rock. Somewhere deeper in the dark, water dripped in a slow, relentless rhythm.
My boot skidded.
The world lurched.
Heaton’s hand caught my wrist before I could go down, his grip locking hard enough to stop the fall cold. He held me there, thumb hovering over my pulse as if he didn’t trust it.
“Focus.”
He was close enough now that his cold had weight.
A loose strand of hair fell across my face. Before I could fix it, his fingers moved—quick and precise—tucking it behind my ear with a gentleness that didn’t belong beside the iron clamp of his other hand.
“I’m not carrying you out of here.”
I let out a breath that was half laugh, half disbelief. “Are you expecting calm right now?”
His thumb pressed once against the inside of my wrist.
“I’m expecting you to keep up.”
Then he let go, but the cold of his touch stayed behind.
I glared at his back as he moved on. “I’m an honors student, Heaton. Not a mountain goat. Some of us have to obey the laws of gravity.”
“Then use that honors-level brain to watch your footing, October.”
I scowled, wishing—for just a second—that I could trip him.
But he moved as if the dark were a paved road, effortless and infuriating.
I adjusted my pack and followed.
“You don’t even need a light,” I said, watching his silhouette navigate another turn without slowing. “You know these tunnels?”
“I know them by the way the air moves.” He didn’t look back. “The dark has a different weight when you’ve spent enough time in it.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. How could I? I had always believed darkness was only the absence of light, not something with weight.
A drop of icy water hit my neck, making me shiver as I scanned the rough ceiling, imagining the miles of rock pressing down on us.
“What happened here?” I asked. “To the town?”
He slowed just enough for me to draw even with him.
“Still chasing your extra credit?”
“I’m chasing any explanation for why masked men are hunting me through a dead town, Heaton.”
That earned me the barest tilt of his head. He ran his fingers along a groove in the tunnel wall as we passed.
“It wasn’t always a graveyard. A century ago, this was the heart of the county. Families. A school. Boys playing baseball in the field above us.”
He paused, voice dropping.
“Then one morning, on the first of May, the mountain took it all back.”
“An explosion?”
“One of the worst disasters the country had ever seen,” he said, voice flat. “Two hundred men and boys. Gone in a heartbeat. Most of them are still down here, sealed behind the cave-ins.”
My hand rose as if drawn by his, fingertips grazing a pickaxe mark etched into the stone like a fossil.
It didn’t feel like a mine anymore.
It felt like a headstone.
“They say it hollowed the place,” he continued. “Like the town itself stopped breathing.”
“It’s called a vacuum,” I said, rubbing the chill from my arms, though my voice lacked its usual bite. “Air pressure changes when you seal off miles of tunnels. It’s not a ghost story. It’s physics.”
Heaton didn’t turn, but I could hear the almost-smile in his voice.
“Physics. Right. I forgot I was traveling with a world-class skeptic.”
“You keep calling me that.”
“Your father is one of the most infamous ghost hunters alive. Made a fortune with his stories. And his own daughter doesn’t believe in the supernatural.” He shook his head, a quiet, pitying gesture. “It would be funny if it weren’t so damn tragic.”
The tunnel narrowed again.
My voice came out smaller in it.
“I believe in what I can prove.”
“Do you?” A low huff left him—almost a laugh. “Let me guess. Seeing is believing?”
“Proof would make it easier,” I admitted.
“For what?”
The truth pressed against my ribs, sharp as glass.
I looked into the black and heard myself answer before I meant to.
“Because if my dad is right,” I said, “if ghosts are real . . . then my mother didn’t just die.”
My voice dropped to a whisper, a confession I had never spoken aloud.
“It means she could have come back for me. For the blank parts. For all of it.”
I looked away.
“And she didn’t. So, I need her to be gone, because the alternative is that she was here . . . ”
My voice cracked.
“And left me anyway.”
Heaton stopped.
For a heartbeat, something softer moved behind his eyes. He stepped closer, his shadow stretching long against the damp wall.
“Believing isn’t the cruel part, Madeline,” he said.
I looked up at him. “Then what is?”
“Finding out,” he said quietly, “that the choice was never theirs to make.”
He didn’t reach for me.
Didn’t offer comfort.
He only turned and kept walking.
I followed him in a daze, his words moving through me like cold water.
A pale wash of light bled around the last bend. The tunnel spat us onto a narrow ledge cut into the rock face. Below us, the valley dropped away, and farther down the service road, my car flashed green in the distance.
Heaton ignored the view. He stepped to the edge and looked toward the ridge, as if listening to something the rest of the world couldn’t hear.
“Five minutes,” he said. “They’re at the last trailhead. If you move now, you’ll beat them to the road.”
“You’re not coming?”
The question jumped out before I could catch it.
I reached for his sleeve, but my hand stalled in the dead-cold air radiating off his jacket.
I let my arm drop.
“Heaton, you really shouldn’t stay out here with those psychopaths roaming around.”
He turned his head slowly, gaze drifting from the ridge to my face.
“You worried about me, October?”
He didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile.
He watched me with still curiosity.
“Go to your car. I have some cleanup to do, and I don’t think you have the stomach for it.”
“Cleanup?” I stared at him. “Heaton, there are people out here with knives—”
“There isn’t a thing in this canyon that can touch me. Not anymore.”
He leaned in, the silver in his eyes churning like a storm caught in glass.
“But you?”
His thumb skimmed the line of my jaw, a touch so cold it felt like a burn.
“You’re still skin and bone. You still have a pulse I can feel under my hand. You still bleed.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
He took a deliberate step back, putting a foot of space between us.
“Get in the car. Lock the doors. Don’t stop for anything.”
My chest tightened, frustration and something darker twisting in my throat.
I wanted a reason to stay—an explanation for how he knew exactly where Julian would be and why he looked so calm about whatever came next.
But the silver in his eyes had gone cold.
Shale slid under my boots as I turned and tore down the ridge. My arms shot out once to catch my balance as the mountain tried to throw me. The air came thin, cutting all the way down.
I didn’t stop until the car filled my vision.
My hands shook so badly the key scraped the ignition before finding home. The engine coughed, caught, then settled into a weak, uneven purr.
I shoved the wagon into gear and tore onto the road, gravel spitting behind me.
At the first bend, I looked in the mirror.
High on the ridge, where the tunnel opened into shadow, one dark figure stood perfectly still.
A blade of black against the pale rock.
For one impossible second, the air around him bent and shimmered like a mirage, as if the light itself couldn’t decide what shape to make of him.
Then I blinked.
And the ridge was empty.