“Hurry, Commander,” Storm says. “The rope is fraying.”
I whip my head up. Sure enough, the rope is unraveling where it rubs up against the opposite edge. We’ll be lucky if it holds much longer.
One of Hector’s ankles slips, and the rope sways wildly, scraping hard at the edge of the pit. He swings his leg back into place and keeps going, hand over hand, dragging himself along as the rope unravels, and I can’t stop muttering, “Please, God, please, please, please.”
He reaches the edge. The rope snaps.
Hector’s head drops out of sight as Belén and I lunge forward to grab him, and miss. My chest feels like it’s turning inside out, until I see Hector’s fingertips, gripping the edge so tight they’ve gone white.
We grab his wrists, then his arms. My fingers dig into his flesh, and my shoulder sockets burn as I pull with all my might. He gets an arm over the edge, then a leg. I grab the back of his pants and help him to solid ground.
He lays there panting, staring at the ceiling. “That was close,” he says.
I stick a finger in his chest. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
Before I can blink he grabs me, pulls me atop him, and right in front of everyone, kisses me soundly. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he says, his lips still against mine. “To watch someone you love almost die?”
I rest my forehead against his. “Once this is all over, I say we stop doing that to each other.”
He grins. “Agreed.”
I get to my feet, pulling him with me. “Can you travel?”
“Like the wind.”
I turn to find everyone else staring at us without bothering to disguise their amusement. Except Red, who wrinkles her nose at me. “That was gross,” she says.
29
THREE or four days later, we reach a crossroads. Waterfall crouches to read the runes and says, “This way.” And we follow her into a different tunnel, even narrower than the last, with a ceiling so low that everyone save Red and me must stoop to pass.
When instinct says it’s time to halt for the day, I decide to keep going, for the tunnel is so narrow that we would have to lay out our bedrolls single file to camp. No one complains. We push on and on, until we reach a spot where the ceiling is so low we must get on our hands and knees and crawl through. The walls press tight around us. The rock above me feels heavier than ever. Surely it will give way any moment, tumbling around us, crushing us to death. In this tight space, it would be impossible to run from danger.
In front of me, Mara whimpers. I reach up and squeeze her leg.
At last the tunnel opens into a wide natural cavern, with a high ceiling thick with stalactites that sparkle like icicles, and we tumble into it as fast as we can. It’s such a relief to stand up straight, to stretch our arms high. Waterfall stands in the center and holds out her torch, revealing water-smoothed rock and a sandy floor. Dark blots of shadow mar the walls, indicating branching tunnels.
“This place floods regularly,” Hector observes, bending down. He grabs a handful of sand and rubs it around in his palm. “No moisture. It’s been dry for a while.”
“Maybe in the spring?” Belén says.
“Or when winter comes early, after the first thaw,” Waterfall says.
Oh, God. What if the sun is shining outside? What if it’s melting all that snow?
“Maybe we shouldn’t camp here,” I say. “Maybe we should keep going.” But my legs quiver. If I were to guess, I’d say we’ve been walking or crawling for a day and a half.
“Rest for a bit,” Waterfall says, with uncharacteristic softness in her voice. “Sleep if you can. I need time to figure out which of these tunnels to take anyway.”
It’s as good a plan as any. We unshoulder our packs and look for a place to lie down. Hector finds a flat bit of rock and stretches out on his side. I stretch out behind him, wrapping my arm around his chest and burying my nose in his back. His hand comes up to trap my arm.
I should savor this moment, with my body pressed against his, breathing in the familiar scents of leather oil and the soap he uses to shave. But suddenly all I can think about is Waterfall. I hope we were right to trust her. We’ve come so far, taken so many turns, that without her, we would be lost down here forever.
Scritch-scritch-scritch. Something echoes in the dark. I blink to clear fuzzy vision and shake off sleep, wishing for the thousandth time that we could manage more light in this awful place. I roll away from Hector as it sounds again. Scritch-scritch-scritch.
I shake him awake, and he lurches to a sitting position. I put a finger to my lips. “Listen,” I whisper.
The others breathe softly around us. Waterfall is nowhere to be seen. One of the branching tunnels glows. She must have taken a torch to investigate it.
Scritch-scritch-scritch.
“An animal,” Hector says. “Something small. With claws.”
“Small is good,” I say in a weak voice. My mind tumbles through its brief catalog of small animals with claws that might live deep in a cave. Rats, maybe. Or bats. Do bat wings sound like claws?
The tunnel brightens. The light is steady and sure, blue-white rather than orange.
“Hector? That—”
“Get the others up,” he says. “Now!”
We run around shouting, shaking everyone awake. Storm’s bleary eyes turn sharp almost at once. “Where is my sister?” he demands.
“We don’t know. Be ready. Something is coming down that tunnel toward us.”
The scratching is steadier now, louder. It doesn’t sound like a small creature with claws anymore. It sounds like thousands of them.
Storm pulls his amulet from beneath his shift. Mara strings her bow, her fingers flying. Belén and I draw our daggers, Hector his short sword. Red grabs a burning piece of wood from the fire and stands beside Mara.
The walls of the tunnels pulse with light. Something scuttles over the lip of the tunnel entrance toward us. Fist sized, glowing. A deathstalker.
Then others pour out after it, a whole flood of them. Red screams as our cavern fills with soft light.
“Get ready to stomp!” Hector yells. He grabs another chunk of wood from the fire. Sparks fly as he flings it at the deathstalkers. It lands near the entrance to the tunnel, and the scorpions part to make way for it, like water rushing around a boulder. “They’re afraid of fire!”
The nearest have reached us. Mara and Belén stomp furiously, knees kicking high. Several crawl up Mara’s legs, up her back, into her hair.
I anchor myself to the ground, call the zafira, and spring up a barrier between us and the tunnel. They pile up against it, scrambling over one another’s bodies in a frenzy.
It slows the onslaught, but too many are already upon us. My barrier wavers as I shoot fire into their swarming midst, bolt after bolt. When the fire hits, they turn brown and shrivel, but it’s not enough, and I can’t maintain both fire and barrier much longer.
Red screams and stomps; Hector hacks uselessly with his sword. Then more bolts join mine as Storm enters the fray.
Mara is covered in scorpions now, but she grabs her pack, rummages inside, and comes up with a bottle of lamp oil. She flings it into the thickest part of the swarm. I aim a bolt where the bottle landed. Fire whooshes to life, and wind plasters my clothes against my body. Scorpions die by the hundreds.
Do I imagine that the trickle coming from the tunnel is thinning? But so is my barrier. A few deathstalkers scuttle through. Then a hundred. Something pierces my ankle; the sting shoots up my leg. I cry out, dropping the barrier entirely.
“Mara, drop to the ground and roll!” Belén bellows. I wince at the crunch of carapaces, even as I continue to fling fire toward the tunnel.