Where She Fell

by Kaitlin Ward

  Indecision tenses my shoulders. And, as usual, it’s Grayson who moves closer to me. His hands slide down my sides, settle on my hips. “You still want to go home, don’t you?”

  “One hundred percent.” My throat is sandpaper. “But I think it’s okay that we’re resting a little bit here. I think it was needed, don’t you? For morale.”

  “I guess. Yeah.” His fingers tighten on my hips. “You promise, no plans to stay here?”

  His eyes pierce mine, and I frown, edging back a step. “Can I ask you something?”

  He nods, looking worried.

  “I think … I noticed that a lot of the time, when you’re closest to me, it’s when we’re talking about stuff like this. And then in between … I don’t know what I’m asking. I want to go home no matter what we are. I’d want to go home even if you announced that you were staying right here. But I just …” I trail off. This is the worst speech ever.

  Grayson doesn’t move toward me again. He shoves his hands into his pockets. “So, I didn’t hear a question in there.” He pauses, smiling ever so slightly. “But what I took from your sentence fragments is that you don’t know how interested I am in you.”

  I shrug and look away. My skin crawls with embarrassment.

  “You do realize that I am a much more open book than you are?” His words startle me. “I think I’ve made it pretty clear how interested I am. You, on the other hand? I have no idea.”

  “I—oh.” I chew a nail. “I’m sort of … You know I get anxious, talking to other people. Being around them. I’m always afraid I’m saying or doing the wrong thing. I’m constantly replaying conversations in my head and obsessing about whether something was dumb or insensitive or pointless or … you get the idea. I don’t know how to … I like you so much, and it’s scary. I don’t know how to do it the right way.”

  “Is there a right or wrong way to have a relationship with someone when trapped in an underground cavern?”

  I laugh. “I guess maybe there isn’t a template, huh?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Are you, um … saying we’re having a relationship?”

  He shrugs. “We seem to be?”

  I take a step closer, bravely. Run both my hands up the back of his neck to clench in his hair. “We do have a pretty great ‘how we met’ story. Bet no one else’s is similar.”

  “I sure hope not.”

  Our faces are so close, I can see every detail. Every long lash surrounding his beautiful green eyes. The stubble along his jaw, the two lone freckles on his nose. “Did you know,” I whisper, trying to let myself be vulnerable, “that you might be the best person I’ve ever met?”

  He cups my face in both hands. “Did you know that so are you?”

  Our lips meet, gentle and teasing and soft. Like we have all the time in the world to do nothing but kiss. Which, really, we do. We’re in a paradise. Grayson glides his hands slowly down my arms, his fingertips leaving goose bumps in their wake. I slip my hands beneath his shirt. Grayson is lean, courtesy of our not-quite-enough diet, but he’s also muscular, courtesy of our physically demanding lives. Feeling ridged abs beneath my fingertips unknots something inside of me. I sort of can’t believe that this beautiful human being is letting me touch him. That he’s pressing his lips to the side of my throat and holding me close like this means just as much to him as it does to me.

  It’s not that I don’t think I deserve what’s happening right now. It’s that I cannot believe I’m even capable of feeling such joy. Here. In this place. That I was lucky enough to find someone like Grayson, with his beautiful face and even better personality. And that he feels the same connection with me.

  I didn’t even know that I knew how to kiss like this until it happened. Kissing for me is usually as awkward and self-conscious as anything else I do. But when our mouths collide, everything else falls away.

  I slide my fingertips down his cheeks, press the rest of myself closer. His hand rests on the small of my back, and the other twists in my hair as our kiss grows more heated. Kissing, suddenly, doesn’t feel like enough, but I don’t know where we go from here. He seems to feel the same, kissing me even harder and sliding his hand to the very bottom of my back.

  A throat clears behind us. We break apart and I glance over Grayson’s shoulder. It’s Mary.

  My cheeks flush with embarrassment. Luckily, the lighting isn’t great in here, so it won’t be noticeable.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she says casually. “But I wanted to talk to the three of you.”

  That’s when Alice peeks out from behind her shoulder, awkwardly.

  “Sure! Of course.” I sit on the bed, unsure what to do with myself. Grayson sits, too, leaving a wide swath of space between us.

  “I’m going to stay,” Mary says unceremoniously. “Here in this village. I feel … at home here. I’m relatively safe and I can study this cavern, I can learn everything about it. This is my life’s work; I feel so sure that it is.”

  “We don’t belong down here, though,” I say. “Even you.”

  Mary smiles sadly, leaning against the wall. “That’s true, but it’s also not true.”

  I furrow my brow. Alice folds her arms tight.

  “How are we supposed to go the rest of the way without you?” Alice asks.

  This time, Mary laughs. “You’ve been without me this entire time, and look how far you made it.”

  She’s right; we did make it far. But we lost Eleanor. If Mary had been with us, maybe … I press my palms to my forehead, trying to squash the thought. Thinking about Eleanor shrivels me up inside. Her memory is a thousand knives shredding me to pieces.

  “Hey.” Mary places a tentative hand on my shoulder. “Please don’t be upset. You know I have to stay.”

  I nod, but don’t trust myself to speak anymore. Mary was never meant to come along with us. She fits in so well here. She truly does belong.

  “One other thing I wanted to discuss,” Mary goes on, “is what you plan to tell people when you leave.”

  “The … truth?” Grayson says.

  “I … advise against that,” says Mary. “I know times are different since my grandfather came down here, but it’s almost worse if people believe you than if they don’t.”

  “How?” Alice asks.

  “The bioluminescents. This is their home. What if people are curious about this place, start drilling in? What happens to their homes, to them?”

  I hadn’t thought about this before. It unsettles me.

  Alice starts to respond, but a long, loud wail cuts her off. Bioluminescents don’t have vocal cords, so there’s only one thing that could be making that noise: a tube of rock the bioluminescents use to create a warning noise during times of danger. It means everyone’s supposed to take shelter in the shrine room.

  I jump quickly to my feet, grabbing my backpack on instinct. Grayson’s hand finds mine, and the four of us leave the alcove together. We melt into a crush of bodies outside our alcove, most pressing toward the shrine room, some standing their ground against the invaders, an army of what look like recently hatched, nearly knee-high spiders. They look similar to spiders I’ve seen before, so I know their venom isn’t deadly, but there are so many. I freeze up at the sight of them. Luckily, Grayson keeps his wits and tugs me along.

  We’re blocked, though. The spiders dart wildly about, directly in our path to safety. We have only one escape that I can see, and it’s the tunnel marked with three lines. The tunnel that leads away from our temporary sanctuary and back to our homes. Our real homes.

  I squeeze Grayson’s hand, and point. For all the utter chaos of the scene before us, everything is silent. A gentle clicking of jaws from the spiders, the padding of feet and the squelch of weapons rending arachnid flesh, and that’s it. So I remain silent, too.

  Grayson grabs Alice’s arm, getting her and Mary’s attention. He points, just like I did, and they both stare at the tunnel for what feels like much too long. Finally, Mary nods. She p
lanned to stay, but she’ll leave now, with us.

  The four of us travel mostly in silence at first. It’s quite an obstacle course down here now, cave formations everywhere, clotting up the tunnels. As we continue deeper, the tunnels continue to narrow, become more spiked with formations, more dangerous. None of us says anything, but we all know we’re now outside the “safe zone” where the bioluminescents most commonly roam—although clearly, that wasn’t so safe, either. We don’t know what might be down here. How hungry it might be. How quickly we could be killed. They were so worried about us dying; it can’t have been for no reason at all.

  But we carry on, because we have to. We’ve reached the point of no return. The part of the video game where you can’t go back and do side missions anymore, because you’re too close to the end.

  I weave through an obstacle course of thick stalagmites, all varying heights and shapes and girths. Alice is behind me, Grayson and Mary ahead.

  There’s a fatigue in my limbs that wasn’t there when we set out the first time. It’s not the fatigue of physical exertion, although that’s there, too. It’s just a bone-tiredness. I want this all to be over, I don’t want to be fighting and clawing and struggling for my life.

  It was easier not to think about it in the safety of the bioluminescent village, but there’s a hole in my chest where Eleanor is missing. People say that sometimes, when a loved one dies, but I never got it. I see my chest as this place where my anxiety lives. It’s where I get to feel all the pressing and twisting and aching and whirring. It’s what works up my brain into cycling through all the social interactions I’ve ever had, and whether the person now hates me because of that dumb thing I said that one time seven years ago.

  But now, I finally realize that there’s more going on in my chest than anxiety. It’s also the part that clutched tight to my friendship with Eleanor, and it’s the part that most keenly feels her loss. Every time I think of her, a black hole opens up in my heart, and I’m just so incomplete.

  Grayson catches his leg between two particularly close-together stalagmites. He pulls free, but the stalagmites have marked him with a scrape. He inspects it with a sigh that says, This again, and carries on.

  If the wound were deeper, I’d make him stop so I could wrap it up, but this isn’t worth the argument. We’re all scraped up at this point.

  We come to a halt at the center of a star-shaped collection of tunnels. Two of them angle down. And if there’s a marking, we can’t find it.

  “I think we should split up,” says Mary.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” I disagree at once, my eyes scouring the walls for any signs.

  “Not for long,” she insists. “Just to see what these two tunnels here look like a little ways in.”

  “I sort of … think she’s right,” says Alice.

  All the fight goes out of me. I can’t anymore. “Okay.”

  “We all need to be very alert,” says Mary, “so no offense to either of you, but, Grayson, you’re going to come with me and, Eliza, you’ll go with Alice.”

  I want to be offended, but who am I kidding? She’s probably not wrong.

  Alice and I start carefully down the left of the two chosen tunnels. I hold my glowite close to the walls, looking for any signs of markings or writing or just something. We’re not supposed to go too far; Mary said to try to judge five minutes and then return. Like I have a clue what five minutes feels like anymore.

  “I don’t see anything at all helpful,” Alice says in a dead voice.

  “I know. Me neither.”

  “Can we just, like, sit for a minute or something?”

  “Of course.” I stop, crouch beside her worriedly. “You okay?”

  She rests her face on her forearms. “Yeah. I just got a wave of exhaustion. Do you feel that way sometimes?”

  “Pretty much all the time.”

  “I’m ready to be there. I’m sad and I’m tired and I just …”

  “I know. I’m all of those things, too. But we’re close; we have to be close. We can do this.”

  “We can.” She sighs heavily. “Yes. We will make it. All of us. We have to.”

  But that’s not how things go for us, of course. It’s never how things go.

  Because that exact moment is when we hear the horrible, wailing scream from somewhere not far ahead.

  We look at each other for a fraction of a second, and then both break into a wild sprint.

  It’s already too late when we arrive.

  Blood is everywhere.

  Dripping down the walls, puddling on the floor. It glows, extra sinister, in the light of the bioluminescent plants dangling from the ceiling. Which are also coated in the sticky crimson substance.

  I see Grayson first, and I gasp. His face is splattered with gore, and he holds a stained knife in his fist. At his feet is something monstrous. It looks like an enormous crab, except it’s covered in thick brown fur. My eyes sweep farther, and I fall to my knees.

  Mary’s head lies near the claw of the dead thing. Alice sees it, too, and she halts with a gasp. I glance behind us, to the tunnel we emerged from. My brain seems to be working more slowly right now; I can’t piece this together. The tunnel that Grayson and Mary took exits right next to ours. So, if we hadn’t decided to sit down, we might have been here for this, too.

  I crouch, shaking, beside Mary’s severed head. I don’t even know where her body is and I think I’m in shock. I think we’re all in shock. Her eyes stare at me, wide and still glittering. The white inch of spine peeking out from her throat contrasts with the crimson that coats everything. Tubes of snapped veins and twists of sinew drape down to the floor.

  I want to be sick but my organs won’t do the work. I press fingertips to her smooth, pallid cheek. Mary. She seemed so invincible.

  No one else has moved. I turn and rise slowly. Grayson has dropped his knife. I step cautiously around the mangled corpse of the crab creature, bending to retrieve the weapon. I hold it out to Grayson handle first.

  “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  “I’m fine.” His voice is laced with pain. I sweep my eyes down the length of him until I find what’s wrong. Deep teeth marks on an arm he’s tried to angle away from me.

  I don’t say anything. Just turn and walk away, retrieving my backpack from Alice.

  “What is that thing, and could there be more?” I ask, lifting Grayson’s arm gently.

  He watches me pour water over the serrated flesh. “Of course there are more. Someplace. Probably nearby. I think it’s why the bioluminescents said it’s too dangerous to come down here. It’s very strong and very hard to kill.”

  I dab at the arm to absorb some of the excess water, but it’s a lost cause anyway. The wound immediately wells up with blood. “How did you kill it?”

  “Mouth,” he answers, and winces. I’m wrapping gauze tight around his forearm.

  “Okay.” I step back. Press a hand to his blood-freckled cheek. “We know that now, I guess.”

  He nods. “I guess we do.”

  A droplet of blood lands on my hand. I grimace, look up.

  And immediately wish I hadn’t.

  Mary’s body dangles limply from a stalactite, impaled through her torso. The thing that beheaded her flung her body toward the ceiling and …

  Mary didn’t even want to come.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “We need to get out of here,” I say in my very calmest voice.

  Grayson nods. He peels himself away from the wall, eyes darting upward edgily. His fist tightens on the hilt of the knife, and then he’s following me. I hope Alice is, too. I am trying to be brave and strong and get us away from here, but all my energy is going into maintaining the numbness I feel right now. Not letting myself think about Mary or the fact that we’re down to three again or the full horror of the carnage I just walked into.

  Keep going down. Mary’s words echo in my head. Down, down, down until you hit magma. Until it’s so hot you think you’ll melt. Then star
t looking for the way up.

  For the time being, that’s all we can do.

  Every step feels heavier than the last. Every time we come to an intersection of tunnels, or emerge into a bigger cavern, I flinch away from it, sure we’ll come across hungry wildlife. We don’t, though, at least not for the time being.

  When we reach a stream, all of us stop to clean up a bit and refill our water bottles.

  “Eliza,” Grayson says, his voice dead. “Do you think it’s okay that we left Mary … where she was?”

  “I think … we had to.” I swallow hard, not wanting to think about it. About the fact that we left Eleanor to be devoured by bloodthirsty grubs, and left Mary in pieces. We did these things because we had to if we wanted to survive. But our insides are slowly and steadily becoming more dead.

  “You’re right.” Grayson’s voice gets hoarse. He glances down at his arm, bleeding through the gauze. “I just …”

  A silence yawns between us.

  “Let me change the gauze,” I say. “You should wash that, while we’re here.”

  He listens to me, like I know what I’m talking about. Winces while he unwraps the gauze, dips his arm into the water to wash the wound clear. The flesh around it is red and puffy. Not great.

  “I know,” he says tonelessly when I carefully start to wrap it. “It doesn’t look good.”

  “It, um …” I wrap faster so I don’t have to look at it anymore. “The magma can’t be far, and then we’ll get you the medical care you need.”

  “Sure.”

  We’re battered and bloodstained, all three of us. I’m saying the words as though I believe them, but Grayson can’t even muster that. He’s not as lucky as me, though. I only witnessed the aftermath. I didn’t have to see that thing fling Mary’s body to the ceiling, didn’t have its razor teeth chew open my arm.

  I glance at Alice. She’s swirling her fingers in the water, a bit upstream, looking lost and alone. She had just said we needed to all make it out of here, and now Mary’s gone. I want to say something to make her feel better, but when I think about what I’d want someone to say to me about Eleanor or Mary, I can’t come up with a single thing. None of it would fix anything. None of it would repair the ever-widening hole in my chest. The numbness overtaking me, crawling through my veins like a virus.