Going at him like this is the first thing in this cave that’s felt alive. It’s also gotten me exactly nothing.
My stomach growls, loud in the quiet. His head turns.
“I’m hungry,” I say. “It’s not a trick. The shelf’s empty. I finished the crackers this morning, and the jerky’s been gone since yesterday.”
He looks at the shelf. He can see I’m right.
“Then I’ll go down for more,” he says. He doesn’t get up to do it.
“So go.”
He stays where he is, and I watch him not want to. His eyes move from me to the entrance and back, and I understand the problem: going means leaving me, and leaving me means the boulder is the only thing standing between me and the slope.
“You’re working out whether you can leave me here,” I say. “You can. There’s a rock the size of a truck across the only way out. I watched you roll it. I couldn’t move it an inch with both hands.”
“You’ll try anyway.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t.” Flat, like he’s doing me a favor. “The boulder’s seated. Even if you got past it, you don’t know this country. It’s two hours of dangerous terrain to anything in any direction. You’d go over an edge in the first hundred yards, and then you’d be lying out there with a broken leg, easier to find than you are right now. Sit tight. Save yourself the skin.”
“Noted,” I say, and mean none of it.
He hears that I mean none of it. Something tired crosses his face, the closest thing to a reaction I’ve gotten out of him all day.
He crosses to the entrance and runs his hand down the line where the boulder meets the rock, slow, checking the fit. He doesn’t look at me while he does it.
He just told me not to try, and he’s checking the seal anyway.
He doesn’t believe his own warning will hold me.
Smart man.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
He sets his hand to the boulder and rolls it back. Cold air pours through the gap—fir and ice. He’s out in the few seconds it takes the gap to open. Then the boulder rolls home and takes the daylight with it.
I count to one hundred. Then I move.
The boulder first. I dig my fingers into the seam on both sides and push until my legs shake. It doesn’t give. I knew it wouldn’t. I had to be sure.
I take the lantern back through the passage to the pool and go over the chamber properly this time, every foot of wall, the rock face behind the falling water, my boot pressing along the bottom for anything that shifts. Solid stone everywhere I put my hands. A dead end with a pretty floor.
Back at the mouth. When he rolled the boulder home, I caught something: a thread of gray light, high on the left, gone almost before I knew I’d seen it. I hold the lantern up and look for it now.
The groove the boulder sits in is worked smooth, but the rock face above the groove on the left side is unlevel. It’s raw and knobbed, and the boulder’s curve doesn’t sit flush against it. There’s a gap. Two inches at its widest. Less than that most of the way.
Too small. Almost certainly too small.
I stand there with my fingers in the cold air coming through it, and I think about my sister.
I have to get out of here.
I go to the pegs where I saw the gear hanging. There’s a small, flat spade among it. Heavy metal. Sturdy. I take it. I climb the rough face beside the boulder—it gives me handholds the smooth rock never would—and wedge the head of the spade into the gap. It doesn’t move. I put my back into it. Still nothing. Finally, I set my feet against the wall, grip the handle as hard as Ican, and put my whole body weight into it. For a second, there’s nothing. And then a tiny scraping sound.
It’s moving!
I push some more, gritting my teeth and straining until sweat is dripping down between my shoulder blades. Fraction by fraction, the gap opens wider, until I’m pretty sure I can get my head through if I turn it the right angle.
