By the time the lunch bell rang over the loudspeakers at HyperHaus 312, Quinn Kowacki had assisted a dozen confused shoppers, re-shelved sixteen mini-fridges, unboxed the weekly shipment of microwave meals, and swept up a burst jumbo container of discount cat litter. She laughed as the deflating bag collapsed like a toddler learning to walk: “Buddy, you were born for the floor, weren’t you?”
They called her Wacky behind her back and to her face — manager, clown, problem-solver, diversion when the line at returns snaked through seasonal yard art. She knew what people said. Because she encouraged it. Better a jester than a shard of glass. Better absurdity than the tooth-grit of responsibility, which landed like a sack each morning onto her shoulders with her orange vest.
At lunch, she escaped with a Wonder Woman lunchbox and two half-baked plans: one to eat, the other to herd ducks.
The retention pond behind HyperHaus was an accidental jewel — both gross and pretty, a scummed mirror dotted with lily pads, where eight mallards (seven and a half, one with a ragged wing) drifted like possibly wise things. She had named them. She had to. How else to keep them organized? Sir Kevin, M’lady Wonk, Denim, Burnt Toast II (the original had flown to wetter wetlands), Peppercorn, Quacker, Webinar, and Ms. Ragged Wing.
They chased bread with the same ruthless glee as every hungry soul Quinn knew, ducks and humans alike. With a day-old loaf’s heel, she guided them away from teenage skateboarders whose boards clacked and spooked the flock. She trailed the crust, whistling a low trill learned at the dog park. Ducks could be herded — all posture and tone. She stood tall, voice light.
“There we go. Not for you, sir,” she told Sir Kevin, who had learned that flapping his wings at his neighbors created an opening for crumbs. “We respect the line.”
The skateboarders watched her like she was part of the show that came free with summer. One of them filmed, because why not. The world had decided to be watched at all times.
“Behold,” she announced softly, to the bread, to the pond, to the sun, to the bracing absurdity of life. “A structural intervention in avian pedestrianism.”
When the loaf was nearly gone, she sat on the low concrete lip with the lunchbox open beside her. Inside was lunch: a Tupperware of spinach and roasted chickpeas that Peggy had packed that morning, and another hobby: a nest of chamois cloth holding a polished sphere of dirt. The dorodango had taken her a weekend to make — mud rolled and rolled between palms until it behaved, coaxed into an orb, dried, then gently polished with cloth and spit and persistence until it shone. It looked like a wee planet. Peggy called it Quinn’s L’il World, chaos compressed to something worth a grin.
Wacky sat, ate, and admired the dorodango. Her breath flowed in. Her breath flowed out.
She examined her palms, still faintly stained with earth. Beneath the stain were the lines Peggy loved to pretend to read: This one is wisdom, this is love, this is your lifeline which is all loops, baby, no ends. Round and round, like your dorodango. Peggy, in her giant straw hat and kneepads, had said that yesterday when they mulched the front border. Peggy had knelt in the dirt, mind already set for the day’s work, and adjusted the sprinkler timer with the seriousness of a surgeon.
It should have been charming. Peggy and her garden. Her slow ritual of coaxing growth. But yesterday afternoon, Peggy had set a watering schedule for the tomatoes with such gravity it might as well have been a verdict, and Quinn’s throat had knotted with laughter and dread, a tangle she couldn’t swallow.
“Do you have to make it a ceremony?” Quinn had asked, snapping a carrot between her teeth, the crunch loud enough to mask the tremor in her voice.
Peggy had looked up, and beneath the brim of her gardening hat, her flannel-blue eyes were no longer soft but sharp, like a blade catching light. “Do you have to make it a gag?”
“I make it bearable,” Quinn said, her words quick, a shield thrown up before the ache could land.
“You make it a performance.” Each syllable deliberate, seeds of discord intended to take root.
“And you make it a funeral.” Quinn’s retort came too fast, too sharp, slicing through the air like a wire stretched to snap.
They had stopped there, because they had learned when to stop. Then this morning, between coffee and the forecast, they found their way back to last night’s pause and skidded on it like black ice. The spat bared its teeth. It clawed at finances, at too-quiet nights, at whether anyone could ever hold space for another’s stillness. Quinn had flung three jokes into the fray — two landed, brittle but clever. The third was so sharp it cut her own heart.
Peggy had gone quiet in the way that wasn’t withdrawal. It was defense. It was a small trowel scraping soil out of a root ball and setting it down carefully back in a pot.
Quinn had left with her vest, her lunch, and her dorodango, her latest, with all its flaws, unlike Peggy’s (Peggy’s were always more perfect. Never a smudge).
At the pond, she swallowed two forkfuls of roasted chickpeas tangled with spinach and tucked the dorodango back into its cloth nest. Her phone buzzed: a vendor complaint from her assistant manager, a friend asking about trivia night, and Peggy’s text: We’ll talk later? The question mark was the whole war.
She typed and erased, typed and erased. She left the message unsent. In her head she saw Peggy’s hands pressing soil around a tomato plant, firm-press-turn, the patient art of tamping down.
“You can’t tamp down everything,” Quinn told the pond and decided to take her break twice as long as she was allowed.
She drove out past the suburban grid to the ribbed hills thirty minutes inland, hills that the civic brochures labeled the White Ridge and her high school science teacher called karst country. The ridges rolled like someone had frozen cream and gouged it with a spoon. Juniper and scrub oak clung to them, sparse as decorative sprigs. There were caves everywhere if you knew where to look: sinkholes that had collapsed a century ago, a limestone fault where water once insisted.
Quinn parked at a dirt turnout beneath a hawk’s lazy spiral. She had a small community of cavers she occasionally joined, potholers like her but more careful, with ropes and checklists and quips. Today she didn’t text them. She wanted to be recklessly free. Her trunk held everything she needed for a short crawl in the dark: helmet, headlamp and kneepads, a spare lamp, extra batteries, some glowsticks, and a whistle. She tucked the dorodango’s cloth nest into her pack, a small dirt anchor to the world she’d shaped above the earth.
Following a deer trail through a ramble of skinny trees, she came to a low oval cut in the ridge. Illegible graffiti brocaded the rough rock above the entry as if a desperate sign warning of utter chaos within. She grinned at this jagged reminder of her life’s static, tightened her helmet’s chin strap, and knelt.
The first ten meters were a crawl. The limestone smelled like a hundred years of water, cool and mineral and the breath of some enormous sleeping animal. She felt her chest relax at the first touch of the cool. If there was a church she’d ever believed in, it had been built by rain through stone.
The cave opened into a room big enough to stand, scalloped walls reflecting her headlamp in matte whispers. The air breathed in and out with her. Her wristwatch ticked. Somewhere, drips counted seconds in a different denomination. Every time she came down here, the fizzing of the world dimmed to two channels: Her body on the rock. And the rock.
She advanced to a knee-high, horizontal crevice at the far wall and thought, ludicrously: If I just go deep enough, there will be a room where nobody will ask me to choose between jokes and tomatoes.
She crawled deeper.
She would learn the cave and ask forgiveness later: send a pin to her friends from the exit, text Peggy and tell her where she’d been, promise she’d come home with dirt under her nails and call that compromise.
The first fifty meters were familiar: a low belly crawl past dripstone, then a slot she slid through sideways. Beyond that was a passage she hadn’t explored much, a seam in the rock wall curved like a bird’s beak, descending to the floor where it expanded and continued sideways, still quite narrow. The map she had downloaded months ago called it the Shrike. It promised an alternate route back to daylight if you were prepared to squirm.
She paused and did what her careful self would do. She removed her pack, logged the time and the room number scratched into a rock by some ancient survey team, and placed neon tape on the wall — harmless to the stone, a beacon for her return.
She turned off her headlamp and counted. After thirty seconds of dark, her breath became the loudest thing in the world. After a minute, she felt the planet hold her.
“Wacky,” she confessed to the dark. “You are an idiot to do this alone.”
The dark said nothing.
She flicked the lamp back on, checked the spare, dipped her belly to the cold stone, and slid into the Shrike.
#
This fine morning, dreams and life clashed, and the kitchen table had become a battleground. Brien laid out brochures he had collected from three jewelers, and a pamphlet from a real estate agent for a ranch starter home with a yard. He did it with the focus of a man mending a net.
“You know I love you,” he began, which was the surest sentence to make her want to climb something tall. He touched the wedding ring photos like they were artifacts, sacred things. “We’re thirty-one. My mother asked if…”
“Stop,” she said gently, because she loved him and didn’t want to picture his mother. “Stop bringing your mother into our kitchen.”
“Someday we’re going to bring our kids into our kitchen.” He smiled, which was his armor. She had grown to love his optimism almost as much as her own. It wasn’t the same flavor. His was a plucky jacket he put on in storms. Hers was sunshine she made with her own arms outstretched. “You want that, don’t you?” he continued. “You always said you wanted to build a family that looks like a small village.”
“I want a village,” she said, and desire rose in her like a fever for community, for friends sitting at her table for decades, for children if they chose her as theirs. But family — that word was a bruise, pressed against memories of a mother who had gone dark, leaving Riley to perform cheerfulness like a role she couldn’t quit. “I don’t want a ring to be a rowboat.”
Brien’s smile faltered, puzzled. “A ring’s not a rowboat.”
“It is when it’s ferrying me to a place I’m not ready to go.” Her words were sharper than she meant. He had flinched at that, and she had reached for his hand across the brochures’ glossy promise. She didn’t want to hurt him when the thing she was guarding wasn’t herself but the part of herself that had built a repertoire of survival. Cheerfulness that had outlasted apartments with tinfoil on the windows. Cheerfulness that had outlasted a childhood of keys on lanyards and microwaved dinners and a mother who slept through days and suffered through nights when the sickness won. Riley’s optimism was an instrument she had welded from pain. She loved it the way a carpenter loves a tool that fits perfectly in the palm.
She reached for his hand across the table, her touch an apology. “Can we pause this?” she asked, her voice softer now, but raw. “I’m heading to the caverns.”
His smile vanished, replaced with adult worry. He didn’t share Smiley’s optimism about crawling into tight crevices deep underground – alone. “I’ll come with you.”
“It’s a solo set. Simple. Easy route. I need the quiet. Please don’t turn a cave into a kitchen.”
She kissed his forehead and left with her helmet and her packed bag, a notebook tucked inside where she sketched caves to steady her nerves. For most of the drive she let her optimism be a place and not a performance.
He followed, of course.
She had known he would when she saw his cautious sedan in the rearview making the same turns. Early on in their love he had made a vow to himself: If she did something he found frightening, he would at least be nearby to be frightened in chorus. In his defense, he had learned hang-gliding, rappelling, and scuba. And lately he had come to love caves. He could see their beauty, could fit his broad shoulders through squeezes most people would swear off. He could do it. He would do anything if she made it look like fun.
At the trailhead he parked two spots down, as if the distance would make his following a different act. She considered being furious. Then, she considered the tightness in Brien’s throat when he felt he was losing the chance to make his mother a grandmother, and she chose pity wrapped in irritation. That was the shape of love too.
“Please,” she said, before he could open his mouth. “Give me the lead.”
“I can do that,” he said, but his eyes asked how long.
“Until I am done.”
He nodded like he had been given a job with a deadline. He slung his bag, adjusted his helmet, and they walked in single file along a deer trail among slender trees. The path narrowed alongside the escarpment, and it was a relief not to try to argue while crunching along on gravel.
The cave they counted as theirs had a mouth like a grin, wide enough for them to crawl through together. The first rooms of the cavern were cathedral-large, their ceilings domed and scalloped, stalactites like chandeliers draped in calcite frost. Brien murmured a reverent phrase he had adopted six months into their relationship: “We go down to unearth our hearts.” She smiled. She’d shared it with him in this cavern, giddy at how their voices matched in echo.
Beyond the third room, the path tightened into a course of squeezes, flat stones polished by thousands of bodies that had rubbed flowstone smooth as melted candle wax. She went first. That was the agreement, and she needed the rock to remind her that there were decisions that had nothing to do with anyone who loved her.
When she got to the squeeze they called the Keyhole, she paused and put her cheek against the cold edge. This was the part that made her feel like she was being reborn through something more real than flesh.
“Rye?” Brien called, far back behind her. “Wait for me?”
“I’m just looking,” she lied. She wanted to be on the other side before he caught up. She pushed through, measuring the breath out of her lungs to make her chest smaller, slid, felt her ribs squeeze. She was on the far side. A room of shale, a click of water-drip hitting a shallow pool. She stood and looked back.
He had started through behind her, but the Keyhole did not reward impatience. His shoulders jammed. He tilted. A crumb of rock let go and fell, and that small sound was its own prophecy.
“Don’t,” she said, already moving to the mouth, dropping to her knees to get leverage. She reached for his hand. They had done this before. He had found the way to compress and slide. She had counterweighted him with her jacket for a rope, a caver trick that made physics your friend. She reached. They latched fingers. His eyes were wide, his helmet a white moon in her headlamp’s corona.
The cave chose that second to flex its back.
It wasn’t a giant collapse. It was a staccato shrug. It was the stone reminding them of their size. The lip above his shoulder shifted, and she heard it before she felt it: a tick-tick, like a heat crack in a fireplace. Then a bigger sound rolled through the earth. Muffled thunder. He flinched, she pulled, and another slab the size of a pizza tilted down and leaned against his pack. His face grimaced with fear.
“Stop moving,” she ordered, which was the only thing she could think to say.
“I’m…” he began, breath squeezed. “I’m okay.”
She let go of his fingers and flattened herself, shoving her arm into the space above his shoulder without concern for ground glass limestone or the bruising she would take. She found one of the straps of his pack. She braced her feet and pulled. He slid an inch. The slab above levered harder. She pulled again. The whole world inhaled their fear.
Something deeper in the cave gave way. A boom-hum. A roar like a river of air uncoiling. She felt its electricity on her tongue.
“Rye,” his voice. Not in her ear now. In the cave itself. “Stop. Don’t…”
“I’m not stopping.”
It all happened at once: a shock of sound, a sucker-punch of air. The squeeze behind him gave way, and he slid backward and down. His helmet light skittered, and then the beam vanished. His body had been part in, part out. Now he was neither. He was gone. And the Keyhole became door and wall in one.
“Brien!” she shouted. “Brien!”
She listened for answers and heard instead the flat reverberation of her own voice thrown back at her. She heard a hum. She smelled something metallic and clean, unfathomable beneath the cave’s mineral breath.
She had patience. She had optimism. She also had panic clawing her aorta. She beat it down, because it wouldn’t help him. She pressed her cheek to the stone and tried to speak into every crevice she could find. She tried to move the slab and could not. She tried to back out of herself.
When she could think, she slid to the right. The map in her head and on her phone agreed: There was a second route, a fissure to the right of the Keyhole, less a proper passage than a wicked worm-crevice, a seam so thin you could feel the planet’s pulse through it. The Shrike. Nobody used it for sport. It led to somewhere but not to anywhere you’d take a tour.
She took it. There was no other choice. She shouted for Brien and told him to hold on and told him any number of sentences meant to be ropes. She wriggled into the seam.
The fizz in the cave became a high whine like tinnitus. The air changed temperature. She slid, wincing as a sharp shale fin kissed her hipbone and pressure bloomed behind her eyes.
She thought, for a second, that her optimism was a mistake, that the fissure wasn’t a route but a terminus. Then the rock tilted its angle. Darkness deepened. Her headlamp flickered once, then steadied, but the shadows it made now were wrong, longer, darker. Stronger scent of ozone. Thunder, this time not like anything she had known before. It rolled through the fissure with a muted rumble as if a freight train existed inside the earth.
She tasted fear and copper.
She moved into the thunder.
#
In the Shrike, with her chest compressed and her elbows gathering bruises like stamps, Quinn felt the same wrong hum. It started as a pressure rooted in her teeth. It became a vibration in the stone that her rib cage misinterpreted as her own heartbeat upscaled. She didn’t mind. She had come here to lose the arguments of the day. Let this witchy geological sermon preach.
Then she turned her headlamp to a seam no wider than a shy grin. Flurries of cave dust reflected breath moving where no breath should have been.
It looked like breath. It was air moving, a draft through rock, common enough when the cave had an alternate exit that equalized pressure. But this wasn’t that. This was a slow inhalation and a slower exhalation, like a giant sleeping somewhere on the other side.
She had a list she kept in her head called Bad Ideas. She took a pen of decision and added, Squirm toward the creepy breathing.
She got on her side and stuffed one arm through the seam, then her shoulder. It wasn’t a hole so much as the promise of one. She exhaled and made herself thinner, an old trick that still felt like a magic act. She moved and the stone moved differently around her, not like stone but like – like field lines around a magnet.
The hum intensified. The air vibrated. She pinballed between two realities: the one where she was a woman with scuffed kneepads, a headlamp, and a strained relationship with Seriousness – and the other where she was a particle being accelerated.
She debated backing out and yelled in the only direction there was to yell, which was forward. “You want me, you spooky cave? Come get me!”
The cave obliged.
Thunder roared, one sound made of all sounds. It impressed itself on her bones and knocked out of her any thought that she was doing this on purpose. The seam went from grin to throat. In that instant, she was neither moving nor still. The light on her helmet became threads, then ribbons, then a halo she couldn’t tell belonged to her. Shapes at the edge of her vision multiplied: three Quinns moving three ways. She let go of even the idea of letting go.
She fell.
Falling wasn’t down. It wasn’t gravity. It was a series of reached-for steps not being there and the steps that were there being unexpectedly soft, like apples that had sat in a bowl too long. She braced for impact and met honeyed darkness. She extended her hands and kept not meeting what she thought was next.
She remembered Peggy’s hands kneading soil around a tomato start, the press-turn, press-turn gentle insistence of a person who would rather coax than command. She thought of the ducks, of Sir Kevin’s unfair wings. She thought of a polished ball of dirt that had felt, in her hands, momentarily like an egg, a promise.
She fell, and the cave sang to itself. A voice not spoken, not musical, addressed her body and said, in the language of pressure and light, You are now between.
She hated between. It was a place kitchens made.
She might have laughed. She would deny it later.
#
The rift spat Riley into a sideways room.
She knew it was sideways before she even got entirely through, because the laws of echo had changed. The room took her small huffs and turned them into long sighs. She had the unhelpful intuition that she was being listened to by stone, which was normal, and by something else, which was not.
She slid the last of the way in and lay there an extra heartbeat, her face pressed to the cold floor. There were bones under her hands. Not human, she assured herself, some long corridor of calcified time. Old deer bones, old goats maybe, washed in.
She rose onto her knees. The headlamp lit a cave that was built to warp light. The walls were fluted, and the ceiling, where she could see it, was low in one place, high in another, and studded with mineral blooms. In the beam’s reach, droplets hung, fallen from nowhere, caught in threads that were not spiderweb and not anything she knew. The air had a bite to it, not a stench but a feral taste like a herd had stampeded here and left a wild trace.
“Brien?” she whispered.
Her voice went out, hit surfaces, and came back wrong by fractions. The fractional wrongness made the animal of her brain pace.
She stood, lifted her hand to her helmet, and tapped the mike that wasn’t there. There had never been a mike there. The radio was on her work helmet. Now she was the radio. She shouted, louder, “Brien!”
A pause, and then the cave sent a sound to her that was her voice and not her voice at all: a woman yelling for someone with a different name, the syllables glancing off each other, the end of a word: “-eggy!”
Riley froze. It was nothing, and it was everything. She took a step, and her breath fogged in the headlamp’s light. It was cold here. Colder than her caves. She inhaled, and the air felt too rich, like it had been pressurized then released.
Her optimism scooted up and put its winter coat on. “Okay,” she told herself. “Okay. We’re okay. We’re lost in a part of the cave we haven’t mapped. It happens. We have a headlamp. We have water. We have chocolate. We have time. And we have a notebook to sketch a way back to Brien.” She patted the pack where her sketches waited.
She couldn’t feel her phone in her pocket. She patted again. It wasn’t there. When had it left? Back in the Keyhole, maybe, scraped off by rock. Useless down here anyway, she kicked herself for not leaving it in the car where the GPS would at least lead searchers to the cave where she parked.
“Okay,” she said again, but softer. She took a slow sip of her water, which steadied her hands. She did a slow turn in place, carving a mental map out of what could be seen, then took out her sketchbook and, to prove to herself she wasn’t in a panic, meticulously drew the Shrike and the surrounding alcoves partitioned by stalagmites: The route back was a cleft she would recognize anywhere. What had happened in there was unfathomable, and she turned her back on it. The room opened before her in two directions. To the right, a low creep into shadow. To the left, a broad downward incline that promised a wider chamber.
Stones moved under her boot with small skitters. Some of them were bones.
She chose the left-hand descent because it invited breath. She went toward breath.
#
The Shrike cracked behind Quinn with a sound like a distant something closing gently. She didn’t panic about that. The panic she saved for the fact that her headlamp dimmed and then brightened and then made of the world a smear and then a clarity. She staggered forward onto her hands and knees and touched something that could have been a femur.
“Really?” she told the darkness. “You’re going to do bones?”
Her breath fogged the air in a small glory. She would have made a joke about vaping if she were not alone in the cold. She tasted winters she had not lived through. She had crawled into a limestone cave in late spring. She blew a strand of hair off her mouth and spat cave grit.
The room she had entered had been somebody’s cathedral once. The fluted stone walls and the majestic breadth of it made her headlamp throw shadows in five directions. She turned too quickly, and space and its shadows did a concerted flinch. She found her hand on the dorodango bag strapped to her pack and took comfort in that small ridiculous weight.
“Peg?” she said reflexively, even though she knew Peggy was watering the azaleas at home, waiting for Quinn to text to say she’d be back for dinner.
The cave informed her, with language only half in her ears, that the word she had said aloud had been received and swallowed and would be used later for the cave’s own purposes.
“Not comforting,” she told it.
She got herself up to a crouch, found her balance, and took inventory. Lamp, check. Spare lamp, check. Gloves, check. No phone service, no GPS dot. The cave did that anyway. The world above didn’t care that she’d fallen into one of the planet’s forgotten rooms.
The whistle around her neck was a human thing, a neat trick from the before-time. She held it and didn’t blow it. She didn’t want to hear how it sounded alone in this place. She wasn’t alone. She was accompanied by her heartbeat.
Forward or back? Back looked like the seam she had rolled through would take her if it were still the same seam it had been. She had the intuition that it wasn’t. Forward looked colder. Forward was a downward slope of flat rock dusted with stone flour milled by a glacier ages ago. No animal spoor or footprints here. She went forward and called, but she called quietly.
“I’ve been in weirder places,” she lied. She had been in a Big Box store on Black Friday. She had been at a dinner with Peggy’s brother where grace had lasted five minutes. She had been at the DMV. But this was new.
She came to a place where the chamber widened and her light fell into a pool not of water but of air that looked like water. It had that visual shimmer. She could see, faintly, lights. Not sunlight. Something like a glow far away, the way a city glows if you see it from a rural highway. She exhaled and watched her breath go out and get caught in an eddy of airflow, caught and cocooned and carried back over her head. The cave was not just a cave. It was a lung, a throat, a breathing thing.
She thought of Peggy’s face if she could see this. The sequence of expressions: first fear for Quinn, then wonder because even Peggy’s practicality had a trapdoor that fell into awe. She said, “I wish you could see this,” and the cave took the sentence and threw her a different wish back.
“Brien!” a voice called, faintly and not faintly, as if the person who called was very near and very far.
Quinn froze in her crouch. Her brain told her she was hearing an echo stuffed through a dozen tunnels. It told her that caves did things with sound that would make skin crawl. This was true.
“Anyone?” Quinn called, not choosing more words, just wanting to make a sound that was not a cave-sound. The syllables came back like whale-song.
If she were smart, she would sit down, stay put, and let the fact that she had water and a working lamp be her plan. Someone would find her. Peggy would call the group. The cave club would come with coils of nylon and Kevlar and ridiculous banter and get her out. That was the narrative that kept people alive.
Quinn should have been smart. She was smart. She also was built of movement. If she sat, she would start thinking about the conversation that awaited her with Peggy, and that was a cave of its own and it had not been mapped.
She did the compromise she always did: She went forward a few meters and promised herself she’d reevaluate. She did not have ropes to get herself in trouble. She did have a pack with a few glowsticks. She snapped one. The sudden poisonous green lit her hand. She tossed the stick ahead and watched it bounce off a wall and jump to a stop next to something that looked like a pile of ribs.
She could have chosen not to look at the pile of ribs. She chose to look. The only way to make bones not be monsters was to call them bones. They were long, and there were many of them, and they were not arranged the way river wash would have arranged them. They’d been carried. Placed.
“Cool,” she told the air. “We’re in a dragon’s pantry.”
She waited for laughter. None happened. She made it herself, a brittle thing like spun sugar that the humidity immediately ruined.
She picked up the glowstick and put it back in her pocket. It had a charge left. But she probably wouldn’t need it. Even so…
She slipped once, left heel sliding on pebbles in the stone flour, and caught herself with a palm against the wall. The wall was warmer there. Warm in a way that felt organic. She leaned and felt it again. The warmth was intermittent: a pulse behind rock. She pulled her hand back and stared at her glove like it would tell her anything. On the rock wall, faintly carved, a perfect circle big as a dinner plate with five curling lines. In her wavering headlamp, the thinly etched lines seemed to breathe with the cave.
“Okay,” she said. “Now you’re showing off.”
#
Riley went left, down the slope, and the cave opened with a suddenness that made her lamp feel too small. She panned the beam. The chamber was long enough that she could hear the echo of her step return to her like a friend running late. She took three more steps and then stopped. The floor ahead had dropped away.
No, not dropped. The rock went on. Her lamp found it. But between here and there was a span where the air wasn’t behaving the way it should. The light showed the world doubled. She waved her gloved hand in front of her face and saw two hands with a gap between. The hair rose on her arms.
She took a breath. It fogged. The fog drifted three ways at once. She laughed, a small bark, and it was either courage or hysteria. “Okay,” she whispered, and the whisper came back with two voices, hers and someone else’s.
“Anyone?” the cave asked her, in a woman’s voice low and trying to pretend at calm.
She lifted her head. “I’m here!” she yelled.
Silence bloomed and then un-bloomed. In the pause she understood, This is not what caves sound like. She had never believed in anything like this. Belief had always been a luxury she saved for nice things like people and soup and mornings. This she didn’t have a category for. So she would not name it.
Riley squinted and aimed her lamp at the doubled air. The gap was not a door. It was not a shimmer either. It was a place where space had situated two mirrors face to face. She patted the ground for a rock, found one small and unimportant, and tossed it through. It crossed the gap and vanished, then clinked three beats later, not where she expected. She felt a breeze at her ankles as if her thrown rock had dragged air with it.
“Between,” she whispered, mimicking something she thought she’d felt earlier. She looked back. The seam she’d squeezed through was uninviting. The Keyhole was blocked. Brien was behind rock she couldn’t lift alone. Hope was a rope, and rope would come from people, and people from outside, and outside from going forward into a physics problem.
She checked her pack: water, check. Chocolate, two squares. She took one and let it melt on her tongue like a sacrament. She adjusted her helmet, tightened it, and lowered herself onto her belly. The doubled effect was stronger here. The floor felt like there were two of them, one lying gently atop the other. She slid into the place between places.
Her head swam. The air around her sang, a high thread of something like electricity. The hairs on the back of her neck touched her helmet liner and stayed there, thrilled. Gravity became a casserole of suggestions. She pushed herself hard off the lip, thinking to throw herself through like a swimmer breaking a plane of water, and the gap shook and admitted her and took her skidding forward fast.
It wasn’t pain. It was intensity. She clenched her teeth, and the pressure pushed on them like a bit in her mouth. She had the sense, impossible and true, of someone else flying with her, near her, in a strip of space that touched hers the way a pair of book pages touch.
Then it let her go.
Riley sprawled and skidded across flat rock and packed earth. She rolled to avoid a natural gutter, hit her shoulder on an outcropping, hissed, and lay still, cataloguing: intact, intact, intact. The air she breathed now was not her cave’s air. It was too rich with oxygen. It cracked on the tongue like the first minute after lightning. It was colder than ever. She shivered, exhaled and watched her breath bloom into a small cloud.
“Brien,” she said, almost to the air. “Please be somewhere.”
“Peg,” said the cave, softly, and then swallowed the word whole.
She pushed up to her forearms and wiped her face with the back of her glove. Turning slowly, she squinted into the dark. The chamber had edges she could not see. Beyond the reach of her lamp, the cave went on and on. She listened. Drips, yes. A low hum like distant machinery buried in geology. Far away, deeper, the possibility of a trickle. And something else, a raw absence of sound that made her ears fill with ghostly ringing.
She chose a wall, put her palm on it and moved along, a slow side-shuffle, careful of the bones. Her gloves touched an engraving. She hissed softly. Someone had scratched a mark here. Not initials. Not the surveyor’s numbers she knew. A symbol that vibrated in her skull like an earworm. A large circle with five sinuous lines radiating. A child’s drawing of a sun, except that each line doubled back. She traced it once and felt the queasy sensation of déjà vu.
She pulled her hand back and swallowed the impulse to apologize to the wall.
“Okay,” she said again, to the bones, to the air, to her own chest. “We are not the first to be here.”
She hoped that was comforting.
#
On the other side of the same chamber, Quinn pressed her palm to a similar mark and felt it warm under her glove. She pulled her hand back and reached for the dorodango in her bag. For the first time since she’d made this one, she took it out.
It sat in her palm and glowed orange in her headlamp, polished. It looked like an idea that had been made round. She pressed it to her forehead, a talisman, and then put it back in her bag and fastened the strap. “If I die,” she muttered, “someone make sure Peggy gets this.” Then she shook her head. She didn’t believe in that sentence as anything but melodrama. She believed in the immortal practicality of rocks – and the practical immortality of jokes.
She moved toward the sound of trickling. At what she guessed was the room’s center, there was a shape. Her lamp found it. A pile of something. Crates? No. Stacked stones, mortared. Atop the stacked stones lay a skull large enough to be a horse’s, but not a horse. The jaw was different. The teeth wrong. It had ridges along the top like a dinosaur.
Quinn stared at it for three heartbeats, then made the decision not to classify it. She was neither scientist nor priest. She was a woman who loved a woman who loved tomatoes, and this skull was part of a room she might one day tell her about.
She studied it and then spoke aloud since silence had started to grow fur: “Hey there.” Her voice sounded like it did when a customer brought a dead appliance to the help desk and it was clearly out of warranty.
“Hey,” said the chamber back, in an entirely different timbre – higher, cheerier, and shaking slightly. Very faint.
Quinn’s heart almost came out of her body. She turned, rapidly, and the beam sliced air and stone. Nothing. Someone was here, a meter, ten meters? Or in another cave.
She said, “If you’re there, keep talking.”
“Keep talking,” said the echo, and added something her echo would not: “I’m Riley.”
The name landed on the stone, rolled once, and came to a stop inside Quinn’s ear. She reached for it.
“Quinn,” she said, and heard the word travel out, do its useless work and come back thinner. She squatted and concentrated on breath. It clouded nicely. It was a small production. She could sustain it.
“All right,” she told the bones and the not-horse skull and the humming stone. “You have me for a little while. Try not to make it boring.”
No one laughed but her.
#
Riley found a wall and slid down it into a sitting position. It felt like surrender until she renamed it rest. She attached the tether of her lamp to a loop on her jacket like she always did. Ritual mattered. She put her arms around her knees and pressed her forehead to them and let herself think of Brien for exactly thirty seconds.
She pictured him wedged and scared and telling her – falsely and beautifully – the script of all right. She pictured him smoothing his palm over the brochures this morning. She pictured him as he had looked in the Keyhole, caught between, eyes huge. She carved from that picture a promise: She would make her way out of this, find an entrance, find people, find a team, bring rope and pry bars and knowledge, and they would come back full of certainty. She would tell him when she had him by the hand again that she loved him and she would try to see rings as circles rolling, not constraining.
The cave breathed. It would not let her make promises without paying for them with humility. She grinned through tears and said to it, because it was an entity now and she had personified worse things, “You don’t get me for free.” She pulled out her notebook and sketched the radiating symbol she’d seen, whispering, “This is my map back to you, Brien.”
Her lamp beam winnowed into a cone of light. She moved it slowly. The chamber she was in, she could tell now, was not natural. Not entirely. The stacked stones in the center were deliberate. The skull – what was that? – resting atop. It had been placed there.
“Okay,” she said for perhaps the twentieth time and once more for luck. “Okay.”
She took stock of her body: damp, chilled, the beginnings of a headache that lived behind her eyes. She rummaged in her pack and found the foil blanket she carried. She shook it open and draped it around her shoulders, ignoring the crinkle that sounded too loud in this place. It reflected her headlamp back at her. She looked like an emergency.
Somewhere in the chamber, a woman’s voice spoke, no more than a thread of a whisper, “Try not to make it boring.”
Riley half-laughed, half-coughed. “Deal,” she told the darkness.
The chamber took her laughter and returned it to her in pieces.