I craned my neck, anxiety spiking. “What is it?”
She lifted a hand for silence. “Listen.”
We froze, barely daring to breathe. At first I thought she meant the water drops. Then I caught it: voices. Not close, but not far either, echoing in that strange way only underground sound can. At least two—no, three or more—muffled, deliberate, too quiet to make out words, but unmistakably human.
“They’re close,” Miranda whispered. “Thirty feet, maybe less.”
Nico shifted uneasily behind me. “What do we do now?”
My own heartbeat quickened, the space feeling suddenly tighter. The thought of meeting those odd strangers—here, in the tunnel, no immediate escape behind or ahead—felt more uncomfortable now we were inside. I gripped Jessie’s sleeve without thinking.
“Let’s not all go ahead,” I whispered, turning to Robert, Rosalie, Jessie, and Nico, who huddled behind me in thetunnel’s gloom. My voice barely carried. “You four stay here… Keep an ear out.”
Their faces were pale in the reflected glow of Miranda’s flashlight, but none of them argued. Miranda met my gaze, eyes wide and a little wild, but she just nodded and tightened her grip on the flashlight.
We crept ahead. Every footstep sounded impossibly loud. The voices ahead shifted and merged, mostly male, but still too muffled to make out. I felt my skin prickle with the knowledge that we were close, so close, to something we might not be meant to see.
“Light off,” I whispered.
Miranda snapped the beam off. Darkness rushed in, so thick it pressed at my eyes and ears. For a moment, I could only sense her nervous breathing beside me—then, slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I saw a faint, flickering orange glow ahead. Firelight, maybe. Or candles.
We crept forward, silent as ghosts. The tunnel widened under our feet, and the light grew stronger, spilling from a rough passage off to the right. I pressed myself flat to the stone wall and edged forward, pulse pounding. The voices had stopped. Either we’d been heard, or the group was simply focused on something else.
I risked a glance around the corner, heart thudding. The passage opened into a wide chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow. Candles—at least a dozen—flickered along the jagged walls, their glow illuminating part of the space. I made out a heap of black boxes stacked in one corner, and, near the middle of the cavern, eight figures in black, hunched on makeshift stools of rock and wood. They sat with their backs to us, bent over something on the ground I couldn’t see.
I leaned in further, desperate for a clearer look. What I thought was solid ground beneath my boots shifted. My footslipped on loose gravel, sending a cascade of stones skittering into the chamber. The sound cracked through the quiet like a gunshot.
“Tani!” Miranda hissed and grabbed for me, but I was already off-balance, lurching past the mouth of the tunnel and landing hard, barely ten feet from the black-clad group.
Every head snapped toward me. For a split second, all I saw were eyes. Wide, startled, hostile, ringed by candlelight. And then my gaze locked with the closest one—a face I knew, unmistakable even half-shrouded by shadows.
“Hayden?”I choked out.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“What are you doing here?!”we both demanded at once, voices echoing through the cavern.
For a split second, something incredulous—close to darkly amused—passed over Hayden’s face. “I think my question takes priority,” he said, his voice steady, but there was steel underneath.
I didn’t back down. “I disagree. Why are you crawling around in caves in the middle of the night, now, Hayden?” My gaze flicked to the hooded figures behind him, their faces lost in shadow.
One of them, a tall man with a rough voice, broke the silence. “You know her?” Suspicion cut through every word.
Hayden’s intensely blue eyes stayed locked on mine, but his jaw flexed. “Yeah, I know her,” he replied, grudging, maybe a touch defensive. For a second, no one moved.
“Why is she here?” a woman demanded, her voice tight, wary.
I squared my shoulders, pulse racing. “Because my friends and I saw a group of people sneaking through the cliffs,and we wanted to know what the hell was going on. Wouldn’t you?” My question hung in the candlelit gloom, daring someone to answer.
The chamber was still for a heartbeat—just the constant drip of water echoing from the stone.
“How many people?” Hayden asked sharply, his gaze darting to Miranda, who had stepped fully into the circle of light.
As if on cue, the rest of my friends shuffled into view. Nico and Robert appeared first, breathless, Jessie and Rosalie right behind. I saw Hayden’s shoulders tense at the sudden influx, the flicker of calculation in his eyes as he assessed them.
“These are my friends. Robert, Nico, Jessie, and Rosalie,” I said, nodding to each. “You may have seen them around. They’re from my island. Except Miranda,” I added, motioning to her. “She and I worked together once in the furnaces.”
Hayden’s face didn’t betray much, just a tightening around the mouth, a quick scan of each face. He edged closer to me, dropping his voice to his deep baritone. “You trust them? All of them?”
