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The charge that had a habit of rising in the air between them surged with an answering spike of her pulse, and Meg knew: She was looking at him in the exact same way.
She scrambled to her feet, nearly sending her pack careening off the rock.
“Meg—”
She didn’t wait for him to finish. Just grabbed her shoes and retreated down to a flatter ledge, where she could yank her boots back onto her feet. Silas hopped down lithely, at her side before she could untangle even one lace.
“That day last spring,” he said softly, palms outstretched, like when he approached the family of deer that grazed on the lodge lawn. “We talked about plans, and about making choices.”
“Silas, don’t.”
“Just answer me this.” He leaned forward. “Do you ever feel boxed in? Pushed down a path you don’t want to go?”
“You mean before this afternoon?” she shot back. Silas bit his lip, and this tell of uncharacteristic uncertainty had her yielding. “I’m sorry.” And then, more quietly, in the direction of her feet, she added, “You know I do.”
“Listen,” he said. But then he seemed to struggle for direction, picking his way forward word by word. “You don’t have to decide what you wantforever. Not right now. No one knows what they want forever.”
Meg looked at him miserably. “I think Danny does.”
Silas’s eyes bored straight into hers, reflecting all that misery back to her. His face was only inches from hers, the tanned plane of his jaw in reach, and for an instant she was on a precipice, teetering before the descent, ready to pick up speed. And then she managed to shove herself off the rock, untied shoes be damned, before she could careen down the other side.
He let her go, and Meg scrambled up the embankment and over the crest of another small ridge overlooking the meadow. The slope boredownward at at least a 30-degree angle on the other side, and she skidded gracelessly with each step, her brain screamingWhat’s wrong with you?in time with the cascade of shale and rock under her feet. Guilt squeezed tight, souring the scent of Silas’s sunbaked skin, the feel of his breath brushing her cheek. Choking out the longing that had tugged like gravity. She needed to put some space between them, just needed to be gone. The low shadow of the ridge crept steadily up her back as she descended, blocking the sun, and for that moment it was a relief to be out of Silas’s line of sight.
In her haste to retreat, she almost stumbled directly upon the second mine shaft. At first she mistook the sunken ground for just an odd dip in the steep terrain, but as her weight shifted she heard a creak and a sudden splintering, and then her foot had slid into a lateral tunnel. She flailed a bit for balance, and once she had scrambled away her boots had uncovered enough soil to reveal the thick beam of a side support braced against the mountain.
She must have called out when she slid, because only seconds later she looked up to see Silas’s silhouette on the ridge, and then he, too, ran down the hill. “Are you okay?” he called, and she raised one hand up to block the sun, watching him descend.
“Yeah,” she called back. “Careful!” He skidded to a stop next to her, and she pointed down at the narrow hole in the slope. “But look what I found.”
Silas bent to study the evidence of this other mine shaft and then began brushing away the dirt around the beam. It connected to a vertical support and then to another beam on the other side, and with Meg joining the effort they had the entire frame of the entrance exposed within minutes. This mine shaft looked roughly the same height as the lower one, but this one had been sealed with a thick plank of plywood hammered into the beams.
“Oh, wow,” Silas breathed.
He began to feel along the seam of the plank, finally getting his fingers wedged around the back side of the wood so he could pull.
“Wait. If this is a sealed mine, shouldn’t we leave it?” Meg asked. “The Forest Service probably closed this one.”
Silas halted his efforts long enough to look at her, eyebrows raised.
“Right,” she said, and then the thrill of discovery took hold in her, too, and together they wrestled with the makeshift covering. Within three pulls it cracked, and within four the rusted nails slipped out of the beams and she and Silas fell back into the dirt, plank and all.
They peered curiously into the mine shaft. At first it looked just the same as the other. Stagnant water pooled in several places, and while it lacked the hum of insects thanks to its plywood seal, Meg assumed it was only a matter of time until the pests discovered this new paradise as well. Silas took a step inside, then another, and just as Meg was about to urge him back, he bent down and picked something up. “Whoa, check this out,” he called back to her.
“Ohhh!” The dirt floor of the tunnel was littered with what looked like shiny black chunks of glass. She picked one up; it was jagged enough to prick her finger, and she shifted it in her palm more carefully. “Obsidian.” She smiled.
Silas’s eyes shone as he nodded, and Meg registered a jolt of pleasure to have pleased him. “But isn’t it unusual here?” he asked. “Obsidian’s usually found in volcanic soil.”
Meg shrugged, still studying the sleek surface of the stone. “It must have been unearthed in here at some point.” She pocketed the rock, then made her way back out into the afternoon light. Silas followed close behind her, and after a somewhat pointless exchange about whether they should try to reseal the entrance—it wasn’t as though they’d brought a hammer—they left it wide open and climbed the slope together, dropping back down the other side into the meadow where they’d left their packs. Silas took a minute to fiddle with his compass and his map; lacking a pen, he carefully poked a hole in the thin paperto mark the location of this second, unmarked and now unsealed mine shaft.
And then, the flurry of their find behind them, they looked at one another, neither of them knowing what to say. Meg had just decided it was hopeless, that the Silas she knew so well might as well be a thousand miles away, instead of the space of about a foot, when he said, “You hear that?”
She smiled, grateful to him for closing the distance that had spanned between them with one of his jokes. “Very funny.”
“No, I’m serious.” And Silas did appear to be, looking now in the direction of the brush behind them. “I thought I heard something.”
“Like what, a bat we rudely disrupted from sleep?”
Silas shook his head silently, still looking and listening. After a moment, he said, “Guess it was nothing.”
