The sun reflects off the moving surface, throwing a rippling pattern of gold against the walls. Interwoven lines of light shimmer and glow like a golden spiderweb. I crane my neck and twist in place, both hands wedged tight between rocks that fell with such force, they feel like they have always been here.
Like they will never move again.
The ceiling overhead is broken open to the ground, and above it, a clear blue sky. Tall grass clings to a strip of dirt that hangs into the gap above our heads, like a torn hide in the roof of a hut.
This same gap that lets in the sky lets in the creek. Water splashes over the lip, filling our room of stone.
I lie facedown, my weight on my wrists and elbows, as cold water creeps up to my chest and over my shoulders. I struggle, trying to stay calm. Trying and failing as I thrash harder and faster in the deepening water.
But nothing moves. The more the water rises, the heavier the weight against my wrists. The surface licks at my chin, and Kol calls out my name. “Mya!”
I glance up and I see his face has gone the gray of ash left in the hearth long after the flame has burned away. His eyes are red and sunken, his cheeks gaunt. I’ve never seen so much fear on his face. Fear for me, because even though he is caught just as firmly as I am, his head is much higher above the surface.
For now, at least. Who knows how long it will take for the water to be over my head and threatening his?
“Can you get your legs under you?”
“I’m trying,” I say, but the words are drowned out by the gurgling of the water and the breath that wheezes out of me. “I can’t get a foothold.” I gulp in a few more quick breaths and my head swims like I’m on a rocking boat out on the sea.
I need to stay calm. I need to think.
My right hand is pinned beneath my left, and I can straighten and stretch the fingers of that hand. I do, and beneath the rock, space opens up at the ends of my fingertips. They wiggle, pressed on by swirling water, but nothing else. Despite the voice in my head screaming at me to pull my wrists up, I fight against my instincts and push them deeper into the rocks.
And something gives. My right arm slides forward, and I splash through the surface, landing on my elbow. My face plunges under the water.
Don’t panic, I tell myself. Remember who you are. You are Olen’s daughter. You are Chev’s sister. The Olen High Elder. You are in control.
And my heart, pounding like a burial drum, calms just a bit. I slide my arm forward again, sliding even farther into the rising flood. My shoulders submerge, and I think I hear Kol’s voice shout my name again, but I can’t be sure.
My eyes open into murky blackness, but through the blackness I see Kol’s legs. I see his hands. He reaches beyond the rocks that hold his ankles firm, stretching his open hands toward me, trying to pull me up.
His fingers graze my left forearm. He comes closer, stirring the water, and his fingers wrap around my sleeve. He grabs hold and he pulls.
My right wrist twists between the rocks, and something gives. A stone shifts; another slides down to take its place.
And a small space opens. My wrists gain some freedom of motion and I know this is it. The best chance I’ll get. Maybe the only chance I’ll get.
I pull and Kol pulls, and I twist and he twists, and my wrists slide out from the rocks. I fly up and out of the water and gasp. My chest burns, even as it aches with cold. But I am free.
Kol lets out a sound, something like a cry of pain, but when I turn my gaze to his face, he’s smiling. The sound comes again. This time it’s clearly a cry of joy, so sharp and strong I feel it push against me; I feel it pierce my skin. It cuts through my red and bleeding arms, flowing into my veins.
His smile softens. He leans back against the wall of rock behind him, half sitting, half lying, and he smiles at me the way he did the day we became betrothed—the day he placed the honey in my hands. The look in his eyes is like pure sunlight, though at this point there is no sunlight left in our little room. The gap above our heads no longer lets in a piece of the sky, a vent to the air. Water fills the gap now, pouring in at every angle, from every side. It spills along the walls and splashes onto Kol’s head as he leans against rock.
The top of his head is not far from the gap where the water pours in. Maybe just the width of two hands separates him from the way out.
Yet how can that matter? It might as well be the width of a thousand hands; Kol is pinned so firmly to the floor. The only way to get him out is to free him, the way we freed me.
I return his smile. I want to say something—I can think of so many things I want to say—but I won’t say them now. Save them for later, I tell myself. There will be plenty of time after today.
But then Kol starts to speak. He leans forward, and I think he is saying that I should climb—try to make it up through the gap before . . .
But the rest is lost to me. His voice is drowned out by the hum of water as I dive back under to the place where his legs are pinned below.
I trace his left leg to the floor. His foot is wedged in a gap between two large shoulders of rock. My hands run over the surface of each one—they are broad and wide, like the backs of two short-faced bears lying side by side. This is a different kind of trap—different from the smaller rocks that held my wrists in place. Moving the boulders that pin his legs to the floor will take all the strength I have.
Even that may not be enough.
Liquid cold tears at my skin like the claws of a saber-toothed cat. It holds me in its grasp. It peels away my warmth like a sharpened blade slicing meat from bone. The bare skin of my hands and face, the covered skin of my arms and chest—every piece of me aches, every piece of me burns with cold.
Every pulse is like a scream, every heartbeat an order to swim up to the surface and breathe. But I won’t yield. As the water runs in, time runs out. And Kol is no closer to escape than he was when I dove down.
My hands thread between the rocks, wedge around his legs, seeking any knob or notch to grab hold of. Nothing. Smooth stone wraps all the way around, as far as I can reach. I work my fingers around his ankles, down to the soles of his boots. Pushing . . . pulling . . . I manage the smallest of movements. His left leg slides up the width of one of my clawing fingers. His right leg slides out from under his left about twice as far. A victory so small, so insignificant, but it’s enough for me to allow myself a moment at the surface to breathe.
The moment I break through to the air I hear Kol’s voice shouting at me. I think I may have heard it under the surface as well, but the desperate screams of my body and mind overwhelmed it. Now it can’t be ignored. His words ring against the rippling surface that climbs ever higher. They shiver against the close walls. The room shudders with his words—foolish, and too late, and save yourself.
I cough, spitting water and silt from my lips. I don’t dare answer his shouted demands. I don’t dare take time to argue. Instead I try to give him the kind of smile he gave me, and I soak in the image of his face one more time.
Then I swim back down, fast.
My hands go right to his legs, squeezing around them and easing into the gap between the rocks. I lean hard, wedging my arm as far into the dark space as I can. I claw at the stone, fighting to stay down, leveraging all my strength, holding myself underwater as I fight to lift this impossibly heavy boulder up and away.
And the effort is answered by the tiniest shifting of weight.
The rock on my left slides ever so slightly farther to the left. Kol’s ankle writhes under the pressure of my hand. I feel a tiny shiver of movement, the smallest advance toward our goal. Kol pulls his knee just a hair toward his chest.
My heart gallops. I feel the weight of a hundred running mammoths. They stampede by, breaking my selfish will against these rocks as they pass. My will to save myself, my will to escape at any cost. Those things are torn and broken, splintering into pieces that sink to the bottom and disappear.
I let go of it all. I let go of the fear, I let go of the instinct to save myself, to scramble up through the hole overhead and say that I tried my best. I open my clenched heart, and let go of everything that won’t help us both get out of here alive.
I see Kol’s legs pinned against the rocks, and I know that I am pinned here too. I feel his bruised and broken knee, and I know that I am bruised and broken too. I turn over and slide my leg under his leg, wedging myself in as tightly as I can, pushing the heel of my foot against the rock that pushes on his.
Because I know this is the end, one way or another.
I wriggle my leg deeper into the chasm, and my face angles upward toward the surface. I see his chin, his mouth, the back of his tilting head, already under the water. My leg wedges deeper still into the rock, and I twist my knee, driving it into the boulder until I feel like it will shatter into dust.
A heavy weight crushes down on my chest. The water around me grows a little bit darker. Not breathing becomes a little bit easier.
And then the boulder gives.
It rocks away, tilting and tumbling, sending a wave through the water that forces us both up, bobbing away from the floor and up to the surface.
For the first few moments, air fills my gaping mouth and dim light fills my eyes. But then a choke rises in my throat. My chest refuses to rise. My vision fills with a murky smudge of silt, growing darker as I sink farther down.
My eyes sweep the cave floor. Bubbles rise from the shifting rocks, but Kol is gone. He made it out.
Now I need to make it out, too.
The floor of the cave comes up as I sink, and I feel my shoulders, my back, my head settle against the stones. I stare up at the surface, at the small circle of light that floats just above me, when all at once I see Kol’s face come into view.
An arm wraps around my waist, a hand slides down my back, and I am rising. My face warms, my chest aches, and my knee throbs as Kol pushes me up through falling water into the open air. Someone grabs me under the arms and hauls me onto the grass.
I roll onto my side and gag, water pouring from my mouth and my nose. I tremble all down my body, my eyes pressed closed, when someone touches my hand.
A second shudder runs from head to foot, and the hand tightens around mine. A third, and an icy, wet arm sweeps me into an icy, wet embrace.
I open my eyes. The harsh sun is cold and bright at the edges of my vision, but then my gaze warms. Everything about Kol is warm, but his eyes burn. The sun sets a fire in each of them, and I can feel their heat.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he says. His lips are close to my ear and his breath heats my skin. I turn my face toward him and bring my lips to his.
At first his kiss is soft, but like the light in his eyes, it’s filled with its own warmth. Heat runs down my spine. With each beat of my heart it spreads—into my chest, down my arms, over my legs, all the way down to my toes.
Fighting against my will one more time, I pull back from him and tip my head to look him in the eyes. “I will do it again—”
“That was foolish, Mya. You could have died—”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“I do thank you,” he says. “But—”
“Whatever you intend to say, please don’t say it.” I pull back a little more. “You smiled at me—just after we got me free—”
“I was happy. I knew you were safe.”
“Yet you would deny me the same happiness? You would deny me the satisfaction—the joy of saving you? No. That’s something you can’t take from me.” I kiss him once more, and his lips are already dry and hot with fever. Fear flickers back to life at my core, where I had almost extinguished it. I’m reminded that I haven’t saved him at all.
Not yet.
I roll onto my side and find Pek and Seeri kneeling beside us. Behind them, the creek splashes in and around newly exposed rocks, following a fresh-cut course across the ground.
Pek’s eyes sweep over Kol. “I’m going to give you my tunic,” he says. “You’re too sick to be wearing wet clothes—”
“Pek—”
“Yours will dry quickly on me, once we’re moving again.”
Kol doesn’t offer another word of protest. He knows his brother is right. Pek pulls his tunic over his head while I tug Kol’s up over his shoulders. The skin across his chest is bright red with cold.
Pek squats beside me and I’m suddenly in the way. Reluctantly, I leave Kol in Pek’s hands and climb to my feet. Seeri jumps up with me and pulls me into an embrace. “If I’d lost you, too . . . ,” she whispers into my ear. But then she pulls back, shivering with cold. “Your skin feels like ice.”
“I’ll warm up,” I say. “Like Pek said—as soon as we’re moving again—”
“Kol won’t be able to walk on his own,” Pek says, still squatting beside his brother. “We’ll have to carry him.”
Seeri’s eyes drop to the ground. They sweep over Kol and she covers her mouth with her hand. I drop my eyes to his face and all at once I see him the way she sees him.
How can those bone-white lips be the lips I just kissed? How can those dim eyes be the eyes that just warmed me to my toes?
“He’s getting worse,” Seeri says, and something in her words flares up anger in me that I have to tamp back down. It’s not an accusation, I tell myself. She is not saying that you failed. I want to scream, to defend myself, to shriek that I am doing everything that I can. But I know better. I know I can’t let this be about me. Defensiveness is just a distraction, and I can’t indulge in even the smallest distraction right now.
Seeri drops to her knees and picks up Kol’s hand. “If only we had a fire . . .” Her eyes scan the ground, as if searching for firewood, but then she looks up and meets my gaze.
And there it is. I find in her eyes what I was dreading to find there. Fear. A fear that matches my own. A fear that tells me that my panic is justified—the panic that at this moment runs over my skin like a thousand tiny spiders.
“We need to go,” I say as Seeri scrambles to her feet. “Even if we have to carry Kol, we need to get out of the open.” I look around, realizing that I’m not sure where we are. “Lees and Noni said we would come out near the beach,” I say.
“We’re not far,” Seeri answers. “I think just beyond this cliff is the sea.”
The sea.
Of course. My mind has been a jumble since Kol and I climbed out of the water, but I remember now the purpose of crawling through the rock. It was a passage to the sea.
Not far from where Seeri and I stand I see Morsk, Lees, and Noni. Their backs are to us, and they are watching Black Dog. I stop and watch him, too. He is running along the edge of the cliff.
And I know that below that cliff is a beach. A beach that holds our tent, our food, and just a bit farther away, on the beach facing east . . .
Boats.