The climb back was slower than the descent, his arms burning with each pull.When he finally pulled himself over the lip of the shaft and collapsed on the wet ground, his hands were shaking.
Fatigue.Or adrenaline crash.Hard to tell which.
Eden’s voice came immediately.“You’re up?”
“Yeah.”Teague lay there for a moment, caught his breath, and stared at the gray sky.Rain was beginning to fall again.“Thanks for getting me out of there.”
Another pause.“Just doing my job.”
“Your job is dispatch, not rescue.”Teague sat up, his chest still heaving.“But we’ll talk about that later.”
He could hear Eden’s exhale over the radio—half frustration, half something else.
“Liam’s thirty minutes out.Please.Wait for him this time.”
Teague pushed himself to his feet and searched the plateau spreading before him.Two more shafts from his initial survey showed promise—both deep, both with good airflow.Each potentially the right one.Each potentially another dead end.
But which one?
He’d been so sure about the first shaft.Absolutely certain.
And he’d been wrong.
Thirty minutes wasted.Thirty minutes Noah and Meg didn’t have.
“Thirty minutes might be twenty-nine minutes too long.”He moved toward the nearest promising shaft.“But I’ll be more careful this time.Promise.”
“Your promises don’t mean much when you’re climbing down holes alone.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to keep talking me through it.”Teague stood at the edge of the shaft and shone his headlamp down.Deep.Maybe deeper than the first.The beam was swallowed by darkness after twenty feet.“Besides, seems like you’re pretty good at the technical rescue thing.Maybe you should be out here instead of behind a desk.”
“Maybe you should focus on picking the right shaft this time.”
“Fair point.”He approached the southern shaft and played his light over the entrance.Narrower than he’d like—maybe two feet across at the widest point.But natural rock formations around the edges suggested it might have been a natural fissure the miners had widened.
He dropped a glow stick and watched it tumble.It fell for a long time.Kept falling.
“How deep?”Eden asked.
“Can’t tell.Lost sight of the glow stick.”The draft from this shaft was cold and steady—not the intermittent puffs of a dead end, but the consistent flow of air moving through a connected system.“This one feels different.”
“Feels differentisn’t a technical assessment, Teague.”
“No, but it’s all I’ve got right now.”And something was better than nothing, right?
His radio crackled.“Teague?What are you thinking?”
What was he thinking?
That Noah and Meg were somewhere below him, possibly dying.That Meg was trapped in the dark she feared and doing impossible things with insufficient resources.That Noah was probably injured, definitely exhausted, and refusing to give up because that’s who he was.And that every minute Teague spent standing here debating was another minute they didn’t have.
“I’m thinking,” Teague said slowly, rain running down his neck and soaking into his collar, “that I need to pick the right shaft this time.And I’m thinking that with your knowledge, you should be out here with me and not behind a desk.”
Silence.
Then, “I know enough to tell you that rushing in got you stuck once already.Don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
