by Kaitlin Ward
What Alice is feeling, that cannot be fixed. Not with a squeeze of my hand, not with an arm around her waist or a head against her shoulder. Not with any words that exist. Not with anything except maybe time. And maybe … maybe sunlight.
I wonder if I’ll be able to face the sun, though. After this.
It isn’t long before Grayson returns, I don’t think, but it feels eternal.
Seeing Eleanor’s limp form, my stomach turns into a nest of snakes. I don’t feel good about this at all now. We edge as far to the right as we can on this outcropping, and choose the closest tunnel by default. Even though this was my idea, I shut my eyes when Grayson heaves Eleanor’s body over the edge, as close to the middle of the cavern as he can get. My gut lurches when I hear the awful, squelching sound of the landing, but I open my eyes to jump down.
And flat out sprint. We don’t know how fast these things are, but hopefully not fast enough that they’ll go after us when they have easy prey.
We meet two of them in the tunnel. Alice takes care of one, and I sink my knife deep into the other. And we continue on. It’s a wide tunnel, so we’re able to bunch together, running as fast as we can.
We barrel through caverns, choosing tunnels at random; anything that seems to head deeper into the earth.
The thing that finally brings us to a stop again is a river. It’s in a medium-sized cavern filled with beautiful cave formations, like nothing we’ve ever seen. And it glitters with bioluminescence. This cavern is alive. So breathtaking, I choke back tears.
We walk through slowly, awestricken, surrounded by glowing colors. The ceiling is maybe ten feet high, and illuminated by dangling plants like the one in my backpack. Only these are electric pink. I reach up a hand and brush my fingertips along their delicate ends. They rustle, like feathery seaweed.
Glowite is everywhere, and in a myriad of colors—red, blue, green, purple. All the formations are lit up like museum exhibits. Luminous orange, purple, and yellow mushrooms grow in clusters along the floor and some of the formations. Water moves sluggishly along the far edge of the room, and even that glows. Tiny, glittering creatures swirl beneath the surface, all the way down to the stony bottom. Steam rises in lazy coils above the surface. I crouch beside the water and cautiously submerge a finger. It’s quite warm. Almost uncomfortably warm, like a hot tub.
Alice joins me. “Warm?” she asks.
“Hot.”
She tests it. “Oh wow.”
I pull my knees to my chest. “Eleanor would have really loved to see this.”
Alice skims her fingers along the water’s surface. “She would.”
I watch her silently for a few minutes while Grayson circles the cavern, checking out all the formations. I think we’ve come to the unspoken agreement that we’ll be spending the night here. It’d be pretty tough, at least, for something to sneak up on us in this place. Maybe that’s why, while it’s completely teeming with life, none of that life is predatory.
“What made you decide to leave?” I ask. “I mean, I know it was my journal and it was your injury, but, like, what really made you decide it?”
I hope my question doesn’t sound like total nonsense. Prying makes me so anxious, but I’ve known Alice as long as anyone else, yet I don’t know her the way I know Grayson, the way I knew Eleanor. I know she’s twenty-three and that she’d been almost finished with a degree in business. She ended up here when she got separated from friends during a spelunking adventure about a year ago. But that’s it. I don’t know anything about her history or her interests or what she was planning to do for work. Who she left behind, who she doesn’t miss. She’s been somewhat of a closed book.
“It woke me up,” she says. “I don’t belong here. No offense because I know you’re, like, totally into caves and stuff, but this … I only went spelunking the first time because my friends said it was ridiculously good exercise. I kept doing it because they were right. The caves themselves, I don’t care for at all. It was part of the adrenaline of the thing, you know? I hated the feeling of it; I hated the dark spaces and the tiny crevices. But afterward I would feel so alive, when I came back into the world and the sun was hot on my face and my muscles were tired. This is just … it’s the world’s longest spelunking adventure and I’m ready to be done. I’m supposed to be starting my life as an adult. Not camping out and waiting to die.”
“So you’ll probably never step foot in a cave again after this, huh?”
She laughs. “You will?”
I shrug. “I mean, probably. Just … carefully.”
She laughs again. “Good for you, I guess. I, on the other hand, will be sticking firmly to aboveground terrain. I don’t even want to go into a basement after this.”
“Watch. You’ll end up missing it.”
“The day that happens, I’m scheduling myself immediately for therapy.”
We’re all going to need therapy after this, I think. Or, in my case, extra therapy. I cannot begin to fathom how I’m going to process what’s happened to me when I get back into the real world.
If, my brain whispers. I ignore it, but it gets louder: Eleanor thought she’d make it back to the real world, too. Just because you believe in something doesn’t mean it’s possible.
I press fingers to my temples, trying to squeeze the thoughts out. Shaken by my abrupt loss, I’m starting to have a very hard time with my confidence. Who decided I was right? Who decided that I had any ability at all to decide something like this, be responsible for the welfare of others? I can barely manage to be responsible for myself.
I heave a large sigh, trying to calm my racing heart.
“You okay?” Alice asks.
“Yeah.” I stand up. “Just tired.”
Exhausted, more like. Drained to my very bones.
Our new debate: whether we should try eating the mushrooms. Grayson and I are not on the same team.
I know everything glows down here, but to me, a radioactive-orange mushroom screams, DO NOT EAT ME, and I cannot believe it doesn’t scream this to everyone.
“Are you trying to die?” I ask, snatching away a mushroom that Grayson picked.
“No,” he says irritably. “I’m trying to eat. If these mushrooms are edible, wouldn’t that be so much easier than trying to kill insects for food? These mushrooms look like glowing versions of a morel. Edible, and tasty.”
“Aren’t there poisonous lookalikes to that?” I ask.
Grayson sighs. “There are poisonous lookalikes to most mushrooms. But I feel really confident about this.”
“If he wants to eat it, let him,” says Alice. “He’s the one who’ll suffer if he’s wrong.”
“You mean he’s the one who will die,” I snap.
“We’re all gonna die of something,” Alice mutters.
If Eleanor were here, she’d say something to cheer us all up. But she’s not.
“Whatever,” I say. “Just make sure you cook it thoroughly.”
“I will,” Grayson says to my retreating back.
Annoyance flares in my chest. He promised he wouldn’t die. He said he would get out of here with me. And yet he’s stubbornly refusing to see why eating a glowing mushroom might be an incredibly dumb idea.
I don’t watch. I sit by myself at the water’s edge, and I don’t care if it makes me look petulant. Neither of them comes to sit with me, and I don’t care about that, either. Alice can come get me when Grayson’s dying in a frothing heap on the floor, or when it’s been long enough that we know he’ll be okay. Until then, I welcome the solitude.
Alice does, eventually, approach me. “He’s fine,” she says. “Guess the mushrooms aren’t poisonous.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
She doesn’t leave, so I look up at her. Her arms are folded, and her posture stiff.
“It bothered you, didn’t it? What I said before about death.”
I just shrug.
“I shouldn’t have been so flippant.” She sits. “I’m just … We all process
in our own ways, you know? Everything feels different without her. It all feels wrong.”
“Yeah.” Tears well up in my eyes. “It does feel wrong. It feels like I led us into this and I let us all down, Eleanor most of all. And I’m not even—I’m not a leader at all. I don’t know why everyone thinks, somehow, that I’m capable.”
“You are, though. Maybe you don’t want to be. Maybe it doesn’t fit naturally. But it is what it is. You agreed to lead us in this, whether you meant to or not, and it’s a little late to back out now.”
It’s not what I wanted to hear, but maybe it’s what I needed to hear. Pouting at the side of an underground river isn’t a great way to deal with my emotions. Maybe I need to swallow down all the bad feelings for right now, and deal with them later. When I’m out. When I’m home.
I run fingers through my greasy hair. “It scares me to let people down,” I confess.
Alice purses her lips. “I think you’ll find that most people don’t love letting others down.”
“No chance that mushroom kills Grayson?”
Alice shrugs. “Seems unlikely.”
“Okay. I guess I should go back over, then.”
“There you go.” She smiles.
I return the smile, waveringly, and trudge back to where we’ve set up camp. Grayson’s roasting mushrooms over a fire built from detritus and lit by his lighter. He looks up at me with a hint of guilt in his eyes, and it makes me feel bad. Testing an unfamiliar mushroom was dangerous, but I didn’t react the way I should have, either.
I sit cross-legged beside him and lean my head on his shoulder. “Thanks for not dying.”
“I wouldn’t have tried it if I wasn’t confident.” He kisses my hair and slips his hand into mine. “I promised we’d live through this together, and I’m not gonna forget.”
Later, I try the mushrooms, and they’re surprisingly tasty. After weeks of insects and algae, my mouth is ready for a different flavor. Between the edible mushrooms and the beauty of this cavern, our spirits rise ever so slightly.
I should enjoy not having to be in charge all the time—it’s nice, actually, that Grayson and Alice found us a new food.
If only Eleanor were here to share it, too.
After the beautiful cavern, we begin to see glowing things more often. Glowite, particularly. Lodged sporadically into the walls of tunnels. We barely need our lights, which is nice except that the brightness makes me feel exposed.
But the brief respite we experienced in that beautiful place is not, it seems, to be re-created. The air is muggy and uncomfortable. We wear a layer of sweat full-time, like an undergarment. The sweat stings in the cuts all over my body. The mugginess feels like, as Alice puts it, a dog’s mouth.
The tunnels are slippery and dripping, clogged with flowstones and stalactites. Creatures, too. Some glowing, some not. Most, trying to eat us.
Today, we’ve stumbled upon a nest of something like what killed Eleanor, only much, much smaller. They lunge at us with their too-toothy jaws and actually spit the substance they secrete that causes burning and itchiness.
But we slaughter them. Mercilessly. Brutally. This is our revenge, and each time my knife plunges into one of those gooey bodies, it gives my heart a brief moment of peace.
Even if, after, we’re all sore and wincing from our burn wounds.
“Does this look right to you, Eliza?” Grayson asks me, crouched beside one tunnel.
It has the three lines, but fainter than usual. And something else, near the floor. I brush aside debris. “It says CAUTION right here.”
Alice crouches to look. “Huh. Wonder why here and nowhere else?”
“Because it’s getting more dangerous,” says Grayson. “The deeper we go, the more trouble we’re in.”
“That’s not …” I trail off because he isn’t entirely wrong, unfortunately. Tension between the three of us has been increasing as the heat and the danger and the pain has made us irritable. Soon, it’s going to snap.
“I’m worried about this,” Grayson says.
“Why?” Alice folds her arms. “What’s more worrying now than before?”
Grayson laughs, harshly. “I don’t know, Alice. Think what we’ve been through already, and that didn’t warrant use of the word caution.”
“Well, we can’t exactly go back,” I point out.
“I know.” Grayson runs fingers through his hair. “I’m just … I want to be done. I want this to be over.”
“We all want this to be over.” Alice leans against the wall. “This is miserable. I miss—I miss the colony.”
My stomach knots anxiously. “But not as much as you miss home, right?”
Alice glances up at me with a frown. “Right.” It’s unconvincing. “Anyway, we can’t go back, so let’s go on.”
We do, but we’re all quiet and miserable and I’m quite sure that they’re both blaming me for this, seething about me in the silence. It gnaws at me, sends tingling numbness up my arms.
“I’m sorry I caused this,” I tell them, when I can’t stand it anymore.
Alice, in front, stops. Her foot rests on a broken-off chunk of stalagmite.
“You know,” she says with a heavy sigh, “there’s something I didn’t say to you about reading your journal. Mainly because I knew reading it wasn’t cool in the first place.”
I clutch involuntarily at the straps of my backpack even though that ship has long since sailed. “And what’s that?”
“Your friends truly suck.”
It’s the last thing I expected her to say, and I can’t help the laughter that escapes my lips. Alice laughs, too.
“No, but I’m serious,” she insists. “You are a kind, smart person, Eliza. You have so much to offer, and yet for some reason you don’t seem able to believe that you’re worth anything.”
My stomach clenches. “You’re right. I do have trouble with that. I have trouble … with people in general. If you knew how much of my life was spent recapping conversations in my head and picking them apart for all the ways I embarrassed myself, you’d be appalled. I’d like to blame it on my friends, but … that’s all internal.”
“Sure,” says Grayson. “And there’s nothing you can really do about that, right? It’s just how your brain works. But what you can do is stop wasting any energy on people who make that feeling worse instead of making it better. Alice and I aren’t mad at you. You didn’t cause this. The situation’s frustrating and we’re tired and we want to be safe again, but you woke us up, Eliza. This cave is a parasite and it wormed inside our brains and made us think the colony was where we belonged. You freed us.”
A lump forms in my throat. “That makes me sound, like, a thousand percent more heroic than I ever could dream to be.”
Grayson grins at me in a way that makes my heart loosen in my chest. “Well, I’m not taking it back.”
I stare at him for a long moment. Marveling that, somehow, this person I’ve barely known for any time at all cares so much about me. That he’s kissed me and that I know he’ll do it again.
“Okay, as the third wheel here, this is getting a touch awkward,” says Alice, poking at my shoulder with a finger.
“Sorry.” I turn back around. “Let’s keep going. And I’ll try to stop apologizing so much. Even though I just did it again.”
Alice laughs. “We’ll start you with a clean slate, right now.”
“Yeah, and—” Grayson is cut off by a loud, urgent shh by Alice.
“I heard something,” she whispers.
Instantly, we’re all on alert. Silent. I hear nothing. And I can tell by the others’ expressions that neither do they.
“Maybe it was nothing,” Alice whispers again, uncertain. “Maybe—”
Something leaps out from the shadows ahead and grabs her roughly by the arms. Before I have even registered what it is, cold hands grip my wrists, holding them tight behind my back. Wrapping something around them.
Bioluminescents.
They’ve fo
und us, and they’re tying us up.
I scream. It’s long and loud, filled with all the pain and fear possessed in my heart.
I wanted to make it. I really, deep down inside, thought we would make it. But it turns out that Colleen was right after all. We should never have left.
And we’re going to pay for the mistake with our lives.
I don’t know what they did to knock us out. I have no memory of it happening. But all three of us wake almost simultaneously, groaning and struggling. We’re tied to a post in the middle of a spacious cavern. It’s dazzling. Even with the danger of the current situation looming over me, I can’t help taking a moment to admire it all.
Everything in here glows, like so many of the tunnels and caverns since that first glowing cavern we came across. But it’s more … organized. The plants dangling from the ceiling have been woven together, forming tapestries of color and patterns that mean nothing to me but probably a lot to these people. Mushrooms grow in a cultivated manner across one side of the cavern, and behind a tightly woven fence, insects mill about, chirping and rustling. These are different than any we’ve seen. They look like long-legged, wingless dragonflies and they have luminescent blue stripes down their backs.
Pathways are etched out by rows of glowite, and bioluminescent humans move in and out of tunnels, most shooting us furtive glances. None making direct eye contact.
My heart pounds so hard I feel faint. I tug in vain on my binds, but I’m tied up securely.
Then three bioluminescents walk right up to us, observing us like we’re livestock at an auction. They don’t speak verbally, but I immediately recognize their language of gestures and motions. Of course, I don’t know enough to catch most of it.
I stare, mesmerized by their glow, by the way their organs and muscles and veins shift inside their bodies as they move. Their facial expressions change as their gestured conversation continues, and fear wells up inside me. With fingernails more like claws, they could hurt me easily. One licks his lips and I get a glimpse of canine-like teeth. Sharp and menacing.