Where She Fell

by Kaitlin Ward

  “Let’s go,” I say, loudly enough for both of them to hear. Because we’re doing nothing, and it seems like they’re waiting for instruction.

  Not from me, it can’t be from me.

  But apparently they’ll take instruction from anyone now, because they listen, following me to the end of the cavern, where our only exit is via a short waterfall down into another glittering cavern.

  As we continue on our way, I have all these worries at the back of my mind, except they don’t even feel like worries. They don’t feel like anything. They just exist.

  I’ve barely even thought about the colony since we reached the bioluminescent village. What would Colleen say now? She’d be so smug. Five of us abandoned her, three of us remain, and one of us has an infected wound that will surely kill him if we don’t make it back to the surface soon. We’ve really messed up, haven’t we?

  There’s nothing to do about that now. Nothing to do except keep walking, like half-dead zombies, going through the motions.

  If anything attacks us, I don’t even know that I have the strength to fight it off.

  As we continue deeper, I feel more and more numb. I don’t even feel anxious anymore. I’m so worn down that even my most predictable trait has gone dormant. Nothing has made me anxious in the hours since Mary’s death. Not even the tunnels we passed that definitely had creatures in them. Or the things that came out to greet us. The things we had to kill.

  My clothes are saturated now, with blood and ichor. Stains that will never come out, that stiffen the fabric and make it scratch against my skin with every step I take. I wonder if this is what people feel like who live in war zones. If this is what I would feel like were an apocalypse to come. The complete all-consuming nothingness is welcome and it’s awful, all at once.

  We reach another star-shaped intersection, and it gives me a tiny thrill of anxiety. Oh no. But also: finally. The numbness was unnatural. It couldn’t last.

  Grayson and Alice stand in the middle, hesitant. I start to feel panicked. There’s no way this is the case, but … what if it’s the same star-shaped intersection? What if, somehow, we’ve circled back around? What if we die here, slowly, in the tunnels. Or quickly, murdered by avenging bioluminescents or monster crabs.

  “Which one do you think, Eliza?” Alice asks me.

  “I, um … the … give me a second, I have to think about it.”

  “Of course!” Alice physically steps back from me, like her nearness is the reason I haven’t figured it out yet.

  Two of the tunnels are basically identical. A third and fourth also slope down, but not as much. I should rule them out, based on the “whichever one goes down steepest” criteria, but something in my gut won’t let me. I pace back and forth in front of all the tunnels, frozen with indecision. Why aren’t their markings here, either? It seems like the place to have markings is the intersection with eight choices, more important than the intersection with two.

  “Eliza?” Alice moves hesitantly to my elbow. “Do you want to talk it through with us?”

  I stare at her. Then at Grayson with his sheen of infection sweat and his labored breathing.

  And I melt down.

  Hard.

  “I can’t do this.” I slump down, the ridges of the wall scraping my back. “I’m not a leader, you guys. This is when we need Mary the most. She knew everything, understood everything. I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re trusting me and why would you ever trust me? I’m just a girl who loves rocks and would do anything her best friends said to just so they wouldn’t think she was a boring old pile of nothing.” I start to cry. I can’t control myself. The cap has come off the soda bottle, and I’m frothing everywhere. “But I am a pile of nothing. I didn’t want to come to the swamp. I didn’t want to go to any of the parties or try the beer or climb the fence to the football field and streak across it in my bra. But I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want to be not good enough and look at my punishment. Everyone’s dying around me, I’m just toxic. I’m—”

  “Eliza, stop.” Alice grabs me by both shoulders, and it startles me enough that I do stop, for a moment. “I know you’re upset, but you have to pull it together. Because you know what? Maybe you weren’t a leader when you came here, but you’re a leader now. Leaders aren’t the people who know the most or are the best qualified or have perfect confidence full-time. They’re the people who lead, and I gotta tell you, you’ve been doing it. You’re quiet and you’re gentle but you know what you want even if you don’t think that you do. Your friends are jerks, I’ve already told you that. They’re terrible. But you know what? I’m grateful to them. Because they got you here, and that means I have a prayer of going home, finally. Finally. None of us got the courage to do this till you came, remember? You did this. You led us out.”

  The tears won’t stop flowing down my cheeks. I drop my face onto my knees, trembling and sobbing. “But we might not make it. What if I let you down, like I already let down Mary and Eleanor?”

  “Hey, you did not let them down,” says Grayson, crouching beside me. He lays his good arm across my hunched shoulders. “Don’t let yourself think like this, Eliza; it’s not a healthy path. We need you. It’s like Alice said. None of us were ready to go till you came. You don’t need to be anybody else. You don’t need to be braver or stronger or fun in the exact right way. You don’t need to be anything except the Eliza we know. That’s the Eliza we love.”

  “I am being so pathetic,” I murmur into my knees.

  “No, you’re not.” Alice squeezes my hands. “You’re not being pathetic at all. There’s nothing wrong with sharing your feelings. I do it all the time! It feels good. Let it all out. Every last bit, so we can get ourselves on home.”

  I am ready to be home. I am so ready. My mind fills with visions of my parents and my sisters. My house, my room. I even miss my school. The routine of the school day was everything to me.

  Meg and Sherri were not my only friends. The revelation comes to me with an abrupt burst of clarity. Neither one of them was even in most of my classes, once I started taking AP and focusing on the sciences. I could name, right now, at least seven people who I can’t wait to see. Who I would consider calling and inviting over to hang out. Why didn’t I ever do it? Why did I refuse to let myself see that there were plenty of people who liked talking to me? Who didn’t tell me I was an insufferable nerd and didn’t make me feel like they wished I’d just shut up every time I opened my mouth.

  Those were my real friends. Those, and these two people standing before me right now.

  And right now, these friends need me. They need me more than Meg and Sherri ever have. I learned a lot from those friendships, things I didn’t realize. I can take the good pieces, I can take the hurt and the pain, and I can turn it into something good. I will not let Alice and Grayson down.

  Slowly, confidently, I get to my feet. I hug them each in turn, even though I think it scares them, and then I turn back to the tunnels, facing them with hands on my hips.

  “That one.” I point confidently at a tunnel angled slightly to the left. “I know it isn’t the steepest decline, but it actually has a little bit of a breeze, and a noticeable temperature increase. I think we’re close.”

  I turn around and smile, broadly. “I think we’re really close.”

  I love being right.

  I have never loved being right so much as I love it at this particular moment.

  After countless hours of traversing an increasingly steep and treacherous tunnel, we’ve done it: We’ve found the earth’s mantle.

  How we are not dead, burnt to a crisp, is beyond me, because the room we find ourselves in is what can only be described as a magma chamber. The air is dry as a fireplace. It pulls heavy and searing hot through my lungs. We’re surrounded by obsidian. The walls, floors, everything here is made of it. Including all the incredible and unique rock formations throughout the room. I walk through it like a museum, not touching anything, just observing.
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  There’s very little bioluminescence here. A cluster of mushrooms in one corner, but that’s it. Everything else is just blackness.

  Well. Almost everything else. Because there’s a bright glow of orange emanating from another corner. It’s magma. Real, honest-to-God, not-from-a-volcano magma. I can’t get too close to it because it sends fry-the-skin-off-your-face waves of heat that knock me back, but it pulls an emotional response I would never have expected out of my chest. I’m sobbing with the sheer beauty of it. Of actually making it to the bottom of the earth’s crust, to see evidence of the mantle with my own eyes.

  “Eliza? You okay?” Grayson crouches beside me.

  I nod, wiping away my tears. “It’s just—no one is meant to be able to see this. Not with our current technology, not standing ten feet away from it. It’s so—it’s magical. I know that’s a ridiculously nerdy thing to say, but it’s true.”

  Grayson slips an arm around my back. “Listen, I don’t know a thing about geology besides what you and Mary have taught me. But even I know this is a big deal.”

  My throat swells, I fight back another wave of tears. “I wish she were here to see it. I don’t even think—she never really wanted to leave this place, I don’t think. But I know she would have wanted to see this.” I swallow hard. “But she was right. We made it. And look—do you see that tube over there, leading up? I’d bet anything it takes us back to the surface.”

  Grayson swipes a finger discreetly beneath his eye. I don’t say anything about the fact that he’s crying because I know he doesn’t want me to, but I don’t blame him.

  “Is this it?” Alice asks, approaching. “Is this what we wanted?”

  “Yeah.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Yeah, it is. You guys, we made it.”

  We didn’t all-the-way make it, not yet. But upon further inspection of the structure I’m calling a lava tube, even though that isn’t quite what it is, I feel more confident than ever. For the first time since I fell through that sinkhole, I have true hope. Not the half-hearted hope I clung to before, where I kept telling myself there had to be a way, and went through all the motions, determined and bullheaded. Now the hope is so thick and so real, it sits in the cavities in my heart left by Eleanor and Mary, and it plugs them up. It’s not a solid fill; it’s like reattaching a car bumper with duct tape. But it gets the job done as well as I need it to for now.

  We’ve decided to stay here for the night—or for what we think is the night, because with our traveling, we have less concept of time than ever. But we want to be well rested when we depart. So we set up a little camp in the middle of the cavern, eat most of the food we have remaining, and reminisce.

  “What are you going to do first when you get home?” Alice asks.

  “Eat something that’s not made of insect or fungi,” Grayson answers immediately. We all laugh, and agree.

  “I’m really excited to sleep in my bed with my warm, dry sheets and my nice soft mattress,” I add.

  “Take a shower with soap,” says Grayson. “And, you know, go to the hospital.”

  I frown. He’s been handling his wound pretty stoically, but it’s starting to really fester. It stinks when I remove the gauze, and the angry red has worsened into a purplish sheen, oozing yellow pus.

  “The hospital will be our first stop,” I say, resting a hand on his knee.

  “And we’ll bring you fast food or something,” Alice adds, “because hospital food is not what you want for your first meal back on the earth’s surface.”

  “Oh please.” I scoff. “Like they’re going to let any one of us out once the three of us walk into a hospital.”

  “Good point.” Alice smiles. “But I guarantee I could get my parents to bring us any food we wanted.”

  “Mine, too,” I add.

  “My mom makes the best steak,” says Grayson with a wistful sigh.

  Talk of food and friends and family keeps us going for quite a while, but eventually we get tired and decide to sleep.

  While the others settle in, I clean out my backpack of excess glowite and other supplies we won’t need anymore, wanting it to be as light as possible before our ascent in the morning. At the bottom, I find something I can’t believe I’m just seeing for the first time.

  “Glenn left us a note in here,” I say.

  “Really? What’s it say?” Alice perks up.

  I sit cross-legged between them. “It says, ‘You deserved to be free.’ And he signed it.”

  “Wow.” Alice blinks against tears. “I hope he’s doing fine back there. I hope they all are.”

  I lie down, exhausted now. We thought Glenn was the dangerous one, when all along, it was Colleen. “I hope so, too.”

  We settle in for the night, bone-tired and eager to get home. None of us keeps watch, even, because there’s no point. It’s extremely hot in here. Bearable, but unpleasant. Between that and the magma, we’re confident nothing will come looking for us here.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I ask Grayson, though he is clearly not feeling okay.

  “I’m fine.” He pulls me to his side. “I have to be fine.”

  “But—”

  “Eliza,” he sighs. “We’re going to make it out of here tomorrow. I can last until then. I promise.”

  I nestle closer to his side, rest a hand on his stomach. His skin is too warm, even for our current atmosphere, but I try not to let it worry me. There’s nothing I can do, so I have to believe him when he says that he’s fine.

  “You have to make it out of here with me,” I whisper. “I’ve gotten kind of attached to you.”

  He lets out a soft huff of laughter. “I’ve gotten kind of attached to you, too.”

  I press a soft kiss to his cheek and then use his shoulder as a pillow, closing my eyes, content. Old Eliza would have thought this was beyond scandalous, sleeping curled up with a boy. New Eliza knows that as intimate as it is, it’s not intimate like that. It’s just comforting, listening to the low hum of his sleeping breath.

  Our last night here, I think, with that same sense of hope and optimism pounding in my chest.

  And then I will be home.

  Our morning is leisurely. It’s almost like now that the time has come to depart, we’re not sure how to go about it.

  The lava tube has a smooth texture, ringed like an esophagus, and with a sharp incline. None of us is super confident about how it’ll go when we start to climb, and we don’t know how long it’ll take. Nerves buzz in my stomach. All three of us are quiet as we gather our things and prepare to depart.

  “This is going to be tough,” I say. “We’re not really going to be able to rest, and I know we’re all so tired already.”

  Grayson’s face is grim and pale. Looking at him turns my gut into claws, but I don’t want him to know how worried I am about his health.

  “Are we ready?” I ask, because neither of them has spoken.

  “I’m ready,” says Alice, determined.

  Grayson ducks his head up into the tunnel. “It’s hot in there,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I shake my full water bottle in his direction. “We’re going to have to ration this.”

  “I don’t … I mean, I guess I’m ready.”

  I slip my arms around his waist, rise to my toes, and kiss his cheek. His too-warm cheek.

  “I know you’re not feeling well,” I tell him. “But we’re so close.”

  He smiles down at me. “I think the hard part is only beginning.”

  I sigh. “Such a negative attitude.”

  “We can do it,” Alice says confidently. “We’re strong. We’ve been through so much. It’s time.”

  We are traveling up the tube for what feels like forever. We can’t stop and rest because there’s nowhere to stop. The only thing that keeps us going is our complete and utter desperation to reach home.

  The spot where we reached the earth’s mantle is likely close to twenty miles from the surface. Now we’re going pretty close to straight up. If we were wa
lking at a fast pace, we could do it in eight or nine hours, but we’re not walking, and our pace is not brisk. It’s probably going to be double that, if not more. It’s killing us.

  My arms ache, my legs have turned to blobs of mush. I don’t know how long I can go on like this. How long any of us can go on. Especially Grayson. He made me overtake him, because he’s breathing too hard, falling behind, and he doesn’t want to knock me loose with him if he slips. I keep glancing down. The gap between us keeps increasing, even as I continue to widen the gap between Alice and me so as not to leave him behind.

  And then he stops. He lays his whole body on the sloped part of the tube like he’s completely given up. I scramble down to him without a thought.

  “Grayson, you have to get up,” I say, running my fingertips through his hair. He’s pouring with sweat. We all are; it’s a billion degrees in here, though it has cooled as we have moved upward. But Grayson is the worst. He looks sickly, his skin unnatural in hue.

  “I can’t,” he murmurs. “I’m not gonna make it, Eliza. Please—go with Alice. Leave me here.”

  “I can’t do that.” My eyes fill with tears. “I’m not leaving you here.”

  “I’m dying.” He lifts his head. “I’m dying and I have no strength left.” He reaches for my hand, holding it in his, which burns with fever. “I love you and I want you to go. Please.”

  I cannot think of what to say. It makes me angry. “That’s not fair at all, Grayson. You don’t get to tell me that you love me and then in the next breath tell me I’m supposed to abandon you. I’m not an abandoner. That is one thing I don’t do, will never do. I love you, too, you know.”

  “You can’t just sit here with me,” he says angrily. “You can’t stay, Eliza; you have to get out.”

  “I’m not letting you go, not when we’re so close to the end. We have to make it, Grayson. You are going to make it.”