by Kaitlin Ward
“Yeah,” I say, though I have no intention of giving Mary that plant. “It might.”
“Well, I won’t hold the two of you up any longer.” Glenn smiles and it’s probably meant to be friendly, but his smile is as intense as everything else about him. “Just wanted to check in, make sure that Mary wasn’t being … wasn’t trying to coerce you into anything you didn’t want to do.”
We’re outside his tent and across the cavern before Grayson turns to me and says quietly, “That was weird.”
“Yeah.” I frown, run fingers through my knotted, oily hair. “I think he suspects she’s trying to convince us to leave.”
Grayson sighs. “He could just ask, instead of turning it into the Spanish Inquisition.”
I laugh, even though I don’t find his joke—or anything, really—all that funny at the moment. Thankfully, Grayson is understanding when I excuse myself back to my tent. The tent doesn’t provide me the same sense of serenity as the grove, but I feel restless and unsettled and I’m not sure where I want to be right now. Seeing my things in Glenn’s tent settled a feeling like bad food in my gut, and I don’t even know why. I still have my journal and my phone. Those were the most personal items I brought.
I slip the journal out from under my hide and start to read it. I haven’t in a couple days, and it’s become a comforting part of my routine that I don’t want to depart from. As I skim my words, some more interesting upon reread than others, I feel off. It’s a crawling sensation under my skin that I can’t identify. A sense that something is out of place but no clues as to what.
And then I reach a page from three days ago. I read it. I read it again. And again.
I slowly close the journal, my breath catching hard in my lungs, because I’ve figured out what’s wrong. Three days ago, I wanted to leave here with every ounce of my being.
Today, my brain knows I have to go. But my heart could be content here forever.
I have been underground for two weeks now. Two. Weeks. The time has passed in a series of scratches on the side of my bed and notes in my journal. I barely trust my measure of time, but without it I would already have lost track. Two weeks might not seem like much. It sure isn’t when it’s the last stretch of summer vacation, for example. But here? It seems like an eternity.
“Eliza!” Eleanor gestures to me from across the cavern. I abandon my work with Mary’s collected geodes to join her by the fire. Because it’s our turn to cook lunch today.
“Katydid or millipede?” she jokes.
Because, obviously, the answer is millipede.
They live deeper in the caverns than the katydids do, and they’re harder to kill. Their exoskeletons are rock-hard and they can move so fast on their million little legs. Well, not little. The millipedes down here are about eight feet long. Remnants of an earlier time, when insects roamed the surface of our earth in unimaginable sizes, as Mary likes to remind me. A time before even the dinosaurs.
And I don’t know if it’s because I’ve already forgotten what regular food tastes like, but millipede meat is good. It has a rich, nutty taste and a good moisture level. Not too dry, but also not like a pasty glob of overcooked rice.
Anyway, we got a few of them yesterday, and it’s all everyone wants to eat until the meat’s gone.
“So when are you and Grayson going to do something?” Eleanor asks as we scoop the meat from its storage container onto the thin slab of rock it’s going to cook on.
My cheeks burn. “What are you even talking about?”
“Please. You know exactly what I’m talking about. He flirts with you all the time.”
I brush this off with a wave of my hand. “It’s just because I’m new, which makes me temporarily interesting.”
Eleanor rolls her eyes. “You’re permanently interesting. And what was up with you bringing him with you to talk to Mary the other day? Like he would have gone if he didn’t like you.”
“Well, if something’s going to happen with Grayson,” I say lightly, “there’s no way I’m going to be the one who initiates it.”
“What if he keeps flirting with you forever and never kisses you?”
“Then we don’t kiss.”
“You exasperate me,” she says, but it’s with a smile.
I wonder what would happen to Eleanor and me if we left this place. Would our friendship remain intact, or would we fade? We get along so well. Like Sherri and I do, when Sherri’s not being so … Sherri-like. Eleanor’s a window into the sort of person Sherri could have been if she hadn’t thrust herself into the role of alpha friend so aggressively. They have a lot of similarities. Bossy, funny, confident. But Eleanor knows when to stop. She has empathy. She’s become my closest friend. Maybe the closest friend I’ve ever had.
You’re supposed to want to leave, my brain whispers to me.
Because, of course, I don’t want to. But I feel wrong about that. It’s the reason I’ve decided to stop being angry with Mary. I need her asking me if I’m reading my journal (I am) and if I still want to go home (I don’t). I need to confidently lie in answer to that second question in order to feel right about things.
I prod my spatula into the meat, moving it around like scrambled eggs. Eleanor does the same thing at her end. We work toward the middle and then work back. It’s not too tough of a job, to be honest, especially since everyone takes turns. And it’s kind of nice, the way we all eat together at each meal, like a big family.
“Colleen! Injury!” The shout comes from the far end of the cavern, near Mary’s workbench.
My heart flies to my throat. Wordlessly, Eleanor and I lift the stone off the fire and set it aside so the food doesn’t burn; then we both rush over.
It’s Alice. She’s sobbing and curled into a ball, and I can’t tell how badly she’s hurt but blood slicks everything she touches, so I’m guessing it’s pretty serious.
“What happened?” Colleen asks, trying to peel Alice away from herself.
“Bioluminescents,” Alice gasps. Colleen gets her stretched out, finally, and I stare in horror at the heavy scratches across her stomach and ribs. “I didn’t expect—hadn’t gone very far. They’re never up this way; they don’t usually …”
She stops to cough, and then starts weeping, curling up against the pain. Colleen’s eyes flick up and land on me. Since I’m the first one she noticed, I’m the one she commands: “Get my supplies.”
I run to do as she asked, heart thudding against my tonsils. I’m only gone a couple minutes, but the crowd has multiplied to just about everyone who lives here by the time I return. I barrel through them and hand the bag to Colleen.
“Wait, I’m gonna need help,” she says when I start to back away.
I freeze in place while she rummages. She pulls out a chunk of moss and presses it over the rib wound. “Can you hold this here for me?”
I kneel beside Alice, pressing my fingers as gently as possible onto each edge of the bandage.
“With pressure,” Colleen instructs. I press harder, and avert my eyes when Alice flinches and groans. “I’m going to have to sew this up, so hold on to that while I get the needle ready.”
This is not the kind of science I’m interested in. I don’t want to watch Alice’s shredded abdomen get sewn back up.
“So they just attacked you?” I ask, doing my best to focus on her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispers. “I mean, not right away. I think—I don’t think they expected me to be alone. And when they realized that I was …”
“How many were there?”
“Three. I don’t think …” She bites her lip. “I think if they meant to kill me, they would have. I think it was a warning.”
“A warning about what?”
Alice notices then that others are starting to lean in, and she shakes her head. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because Colleen has the needle ready now. She tells Alice how much it’s going to hurt, and gives her a cloth to bite down on. I hold her hand because it feels like the right thing to do
, but I don’t watch as the needle dips into her skin with no anesthetic at all. She crushes the bones of my fingers with bruising force, but it’s a bearable pain.
And while her screams fill my ears, blocking out everything else, I think about what she said. I think about my bioluminescent, the woman who was just trying to give me a peace offering. How scared she was, how I knew immediately that she had no intention of hurting me.
A warning.
Because we killed one of theirs, and we went from neutral to enemy in the blink of an eye. It’s Glenn’s fault. He’s too kill-first-ask-later. And it’s Mary’s fault, for not trying sooner to make us allies. But it’s a little bit my fault, too.
And I can’t help but feel afraid that I’ve accidentally endangered us all.
Alice finds me later, when I’m sitting cross-legged on the far side of the river. I washed my hands and arms of blood a while ago, and afterward … I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the main cavern.
“You okay?” I ask.
She sits beside me with a grimace, dangles her feet in the water. “Not my best day.”
“I’m surprised you’re even up and about.”
“It pretty much hurts the same no matter what I’m doing, so I might as well do what I want.” She offers me a half-hearted smile.
“I’m so sorry, Alice, I feel terrible about this.”
“You didn’t claw me.”
“I know.” I curl my hands, nails digging into the rock. “But I can’t help feeling like if I hadn’t approached that bioluminescent, the one Glenn killed, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Where we’re, like, working up to a war or something.”
“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” Alice stares out over the water. “We’re miles below the surface of the earth, and we still can’t stop ourselves from starting wars. Are we fundamentally flawed as a species or what?”
I laugh humorlessly. “I guess we are.”
I stare at the water. Orange flame reflected in its surface, flickering violently.
“Do you ever feel … buried alive?” I ask, still watching. “Sometimes I feel like this place is a coffin and I’m screaming and screaming but there’s too much space between me and anyone who could hear it and dig me out.”
I can picture it in my mind, more vividly than I want to describe. When I really let myself think about it that way, it feels like my bones are cracking under the weight of all that’s above me. Like my lungs are running out of air, and my heart is running out of time.
She doesn’t say anything, so I go on: “We’re going to die if we stay here.”
“I know.” Her hands squeeze into fists. Unsqueeze. Squeeze. “Can I … Never mind.”
“Can you what?” I prompt.
“I …” She swishes her feet slowly back and forth in the water. “I did something that might upset you.”
“Oh? What’s that?” My stomach roils.
“I read your journal.”
My jaw drops open.
“Hear me out,” she goes on quickly. “It was only a couple days ago. After Glenn killed that woman. I started to feel sort of … I don’t know, wrong, I guess, and I wondered if you knew anything about it that you hadn’t told us. Which you didn’t, at least not that you wrote. But reading it … I saw how bad you wanted to leave here, and I remembered things I haven’t remembered in months. My home. My family. Wanting to leave.”
She stops there, inhales sharply. I glance up at her, my heart beating fiercely.
“I want to leave,” she says. “This is not our home, and we don’t belong here.”
“I want to leave, too.” I say it in a rush, like I have to speak it aloud to make it true.
“Okay. Um … what do we do now?”
“We see if anyone else will come with us, and then we just … go?”
“I think we need to do this fast. Like, tonight. Before we forget again and lose our nerve.”
I nod, and rise to my feet. She’s right. This place, it wants to keep us. And it makes us think we want to stay.
Alice struggles a little bit with standing up, so I bend to help her. As I straighten back up, I see something in the shadows of the cavern’s corner that makes my blood run cold.
Glenn.
He steps out when he sees me looking at him, my mouth agape in horror. He’s wearing his sword at his hip. His face creased with his ever-present serious expression.
“You can’t ask people to leave,” he says bluntly.
“Why not?” I fold my arms. This confrontation plucks at all the anxious parts of my brain.
“Because they won’t go. They don’t want to go.”
“They do,” I insist. “We’re all just brainwashed and need to be snapped out of it.”
As I say the words, I realize how true they are. I feel awakened right now. Plugged into reality. And I don’t know how long it will last.
“Alice,” I say through gritted teeth. “We need to ask everyone now.”
She nods agreement.
Glenn grabs my arm roughly. “You don’t know what a mistake you’re making. You don’t know everything you think you do. This cave wants to keep us, but it can’t do that on its own.”
“Let go of her.” Alice’s voice is dangerous. “She’s right. We’re going to ask everyone and we’re doing it now before you can stop us.”
Glenn releases my arm. “You’re young,” he says harshly. “And foolish. You think I’m trying to intimidate you, but I’m trying to save you. I—”
“Save the thinly veiled threats for someone else,” Alice says coolly and takes my hand. “Let’s go, Eliza.”
And we do. Glenn doesn’t follow.
Eleanor sees us at once. “What’s the matter?” she asks, pulling us to the side. “You both look like you just had a run-in with a cave wolf.”
“Something like that,” I say. My whole body trembles, fighting panic. “Listen, we need to get everyone’s attention, like, right now.”
“Everything okay?” She slides an arm around my waist.
I absorb the comfort of her gesture. “It will be.”
“Well.” She grins. “I’m loud. I’ll get their attention.”
She accomplishes this in the most obvious way possible: by climbing up onto one of the seats around the fire and shouting, “Eliza needs everyone’s attention over here immediately, please!”
Her voice echoes around the cavern, loud enough to make me flinch. Seems like the sound could practically carry on down to the bioluminescents in their own little village not far below us.
Once everyone’s staring at me, I start to feel very sweaty. How am I in charge of this? I look to Alice, but she just smiles encouragingly.
My voice wavers when I speak: “This cave wants to keep us here. It has us convinced we belong, but we don’t. Some of us will live longer than others, but none of us will make it as long as we should. That baby?” I gesture toward the infant, whose mother, Amy, pulls her closer. “She’ll never see the sun. Never go to school. Never play sports or have fights or go away to college. Not if she stays here. But she could do all of it. This is not our home and we can leave it.”
Everyone gasps, and I, myself, am just as startled. I’m saying the words and part of me believes them, but another part whisper-screams NO. This is my home, and my words are wrong.
“How?” Eleanor asks.
I blink, dazed. “What?”
“How could we leave?”
“Oh, um. We would go deeper. And then when we got closer to the mantle, we would hopefully find a fissure or something that leads to the surface. The earth’s crust is actually not that deep; it’s unlikely that the distance between the surface and the mantle here is more than twenty miles. Anything leading to the surface is probably much straighter than the tunnels we’ve been traveling through. It wouldn’t take us too long from there, at least not comparatively. Am I getting that right, Mary?”
Mary looks startled that I mentioned her. “Yes, I believe so. Of course, we wouldn
’t know for sure until we got there.”
Helpful.
“So anyway, I, um, that’s my plan. Alice is coming, too. The rest of you are welcome. You just have to snap out of the grip this place has on you.”
I’ve said the wrong thing, and everyone is angry, shouting at me. They’re silenced by a shout from Colleen that rattles the walls. She steps to the front of the group, eyes flashing.
“You think,” Colleen seethes, “that you, a child, are going to come in here and tell us what to do?”
“I’m not! I’m telling you what I’m going to do. But I wanted—”
“Eliza. Dear.” Colleen steps closer. Her voice has changed, sweeter now, but anger still rages behind her eyes. “It’s natural to want to go home at first. You still haven’t been here that long. It took Grayson longer than this before he was ready to stay, didn’t it, Grayson?”
When I started talking, Grayson wasn’t really that nearby, but as this has progressed, he’s moved closer, now leaning against the wall only a few feet from me. Our eyes meet for a moment, and his are filled with indecision. He already knows this plan. He just has to get on board. “Um, yeah. It took a while.”
“It won’t take you much longer, I promise. Until you understand, truly, how wonderful it is to be here. You love caves, don’t you?”
“Yes.” My entire body vibrates with stress.
“And you love the friends you’ve made here? Alice, Eleanor.” She pauses, and her voice takes a more conspiratorial tone. “Grayson.”
I bite my lip, and nod. “But they can come, if they want. I hope they do come.”
“What about me?” Colleen says, her tone almost hurt now. “Haven’t I treated you almost like a daughter? Wouldn’t you hate to leave me behind?”
My heart punches my throat, fist-like. “I would. I’d feel terrible.” Be strong, Eliza. “But you could come, too.”
“You would give up all of this, all of us, on a chance?”
“I would. I believe Mary when she says the odds are high.” My voice is barely a whisper. “You’re not the only people I care about. My parents and my sisters and my friends at home think I’m dead. I can’t just live here, knowing they’re home, devastated like that.”