My feet leave the ground.
With sickening force, I’m jerked backwards, the leaves tearing at my jumpsuit. I can hardly see Vael still fighting, a blur of red scales growimg smaller and smaller by the second.
I thrash against the restraint, but something pricks the side of my neck.
Heaviness floods me. The jungle blurs, the metallic screech of the monster fades to a dull hum, and everything goes completely dark.
Cold stone presses against my cheek, and the ambient aroma is giving "dumpster behind a seafood restaurant in mid-August."
I blink, wiping a smear of mystery slime off my forehead.
Above me, the rock ceiling is a jagged dome stretching hundreds of feet up, ending in a giant, circular hole that lets in a vertical beam of actual sunlight.
My woozy brain tries to find the word for this thing, and it takes me far longer than it should. A cenote. Terrific. I am trapped in an underground pit on a reality TV show turned death trap, and everything echoes with the aggressiveslosh-sloshof a subterranean pool.
I look toward the water, my brain glitching at what I see.
Fins. Pale silver, too large fins are slicing through the dark surface. I peer at the water as one surfaces, my heart picking up speed.
They look like sharks, if a shark had four separate sets of dead, unblinking eyes and a total disregard for any evolutionary rules I’m familiar with. Which, to be fair, aren’t many.
Why are there sharks inside a cave?
Did the producers run out of budget for land monsters? It makes no sense, but the immediate terror is a solid ten.
I sit up, my head pounding from whatever cosmic roofie I was hit with.
Oh, shit. That’s right. Something took me here.
Fresh fear rushes through me, cold and terrible. I scoot backward, trying to figure out where whatever took me is—when I see it.
A few feet away, my kidnapper is spread across the rocks.
And by spread, I mean smeared.
The absolute unit of an alien insect completely obliterated itself. I narrow my eyes. It didn't get taken out by some epic apex predator, either. From the looks of the skid marks near the skylight, Mister Human Centipede Sr. literally tripped over its own stupid tentacles at the edge of the drop, lost its footing, and pulled a full Wile E. Coyote straight down into the cavern.
It fell two hundred feet and exploded like a watermelon.
My lip curls in disgust, he is everywhere. Bug protein shake is splattered all over the walls, and chunks of its translucent noodle arms float in the pool like oversized boba, getting actively vacuumed up by the four-eyed space sharks.
How the fuck did I survive the drop?
Slowly, I turn, because I don’t want to know and need to know all at once.
“Oh, fuck me sideways,” I mutter, pulling a chunk of bug off my suit.
Yup. Nasty ass bug boy broke my fall. I retch, then make myself stop somehow. I can’t afford to dehydrate.
Scrambling onto my feet, my boots slide in a puddle of bug grease. I am a total disaster… but I am alive. God, I hope my friends are.
I hope Vael is. My throat starts to close up, and I shake my head.
"Okay, Poppy, stop," I say out loud, my voice bouncing off the damp stone, sounding incredibly pathetic. "Get it together, girliepop. Standing in a puddle of exploded bug juice crying is not hot girl behavior. This is so dumb. You have a law degree and passed the damn bar in four states. Figure it the fuck out."
I have shelter, thanks to the cenote’s architecture. I need water, and food, and… well, fuck it. I have that too. Even if it gives me the ick.
I march over to the bug’s severed head. It’s foul, but adrenaline is a hell of a thing. A flexible tendon sticks out of its mangled neck like a bungee cord. I grab it and yank, throwing my whole weight into it until it snaps free with a sickening pop.
