“Incredible,” marveled Dale, his voice distant with awe as he soaked in the revelation. “All deduced by a single playboy lord, a man wholly undistinguished as a scholar.”
Before Milo could respond, a low rumble began to build in the eroded ceiling, the little trickles of dust turning into pouring streams as rocks began to fall around them. A second collapse had been triggered.
“Run!” screamed Bridget, breaking for the tight, fragile tunnel. But it was too late. Boulders cascaded from the ceiling with a grinding roar, blocking the only path of escape. Milo sprang to his feet, chasing after Dale and Bridget as the three plunged into the unstable passageway, holding hands over their heads to block a deluge of fist-sized rocks. The entire chamber shook ferociously as choking dust swirled around them, reducing their visibility to nothing. With a deafening crack, the floor beneath Milo’s feet split open, sending him cartwheeling into the void below. In his freefall, the last thing Milo heard was Bridget’s scream.
CHAPTER 35:
WARRIOR’S PATH
Milo knelt in the savanna grasses of his vast dreamscape, dark starlit sky twinkling above the eternal plains, all of the earth before him no more than a grain of sand in the endless stream of the cosmos.
But he was not alone this time. Bridget crouched beside him, her dark hair drawn back into dreadlocks, her slender neck pale in moonlight. As he drew himself to his feet, two splinters penetrated his heel, and Milo bent to draw them from the earth. In his hands they grew to a pair of long, obsidian-tipped spears, the lengths now taller than himself. Milo separated the twin weapons, passing one to Bridget.
As before, holes beneath their feet widened as albino locusts emerged in a growing swarm. One bite, two bites, a dozen, a hundred; he felt their pincers pulling at his skin. The entire breadth of the landscape teemed with seething insects, so vast in number they threatened to consume the very world beneath him. Milo allowed the pain of the bites to grow until Bridget cried out—and then he began to run. She matched his pace, striding slowly at first, the brittle bodies of the white locusts crunching beneath their feet. Together they ran faster and faster until he lost any sensation of speed, lush grasslands passing in a blur, the insects retreating to their shrinking holes.
His vision now incredibly clear, Milo watched a lion as it stalked the low wetlands. With each bounding step, the pair rose higher in the sky, soaring through the misty froth of stellar constellations. Spears raised, Milo and Bridget plunged toward earth, wind whistling in their ears like a hurricane’s howl.
The lion swiveled with fangs bared to meet them, defiant as it reared and swiped, its roar shivering through the swamp’s low trees. Milo slammed the spear into the beast’s shoulder, piercing the thick hide deeply as Bridget drove her weapon into hardened skull, the thick wooden shaft of her weapon shattering in her hands. The wounded animal bellowed, Milo clinging to its matted mane, one hand on his spear as he violently forced the glass tip toward his quarry’s beating heart.
Bridget dodged flashing teeth and claws, lost to a cloud of dust as the lion pounced the air where she’d just been. Spinning around to face the beast, she lunged with obsidian spearhead alone, the blade clutched in her fist like a knife.
The lion charged. Milo leapt forward, grasping the mane as he physically wrenched the animal’s snapping maw upward. Bridget issued a piercing scream, baptizing herself in blood as she slashed the lion’s throat with the obsidian spearhead. Milo threw himself free, tumbling over the grass as the animal collapsed, sighing one last foamy breath with Milo’s spear still vibrating in its back.
Breathing hard, legs trembling, Milo and Bridget looked first to each other, and then to the foot of the great oasis where they found themselves, incalculable herds of elephant, giraffe, and antelope surrounding them. Hippos and alligators floated within as leopards and hyenas stalked the outer perimeter, birds circling above.
His hand reaching to clasp hers, they together parted the tall grasses, tiptoeing to the sandy edge of the oasis waters. Milo and Bridget embraced and sank to their knees, ground soft beneath them, she soaked with blood, he panting and sweat-slicked. Pushing him to the sand, she straddled his body, pressing herself into his firm flesh.
But then she stopped—beside them, the oasis had begun to drain, waters vanishing to a swirling whirlpool. The hippos grunted and made for shore while the crocodiles sank into the mud. Bridget pulled herself away from Milo; they crouched together as the last of the water disappeared. All that remained was the black pit, unimaginable in scale, with thick golden ropes leading from the banks to the center of the earth, the long woven chains glowing bright as the rising sun.
Bridget leaned over Milo and put a hand on his forehead, her mud-caked face revealing profound relief as he slowly stirred. Moving his arms, he felt soft sand beneath his fingertips, momentarily reminding him again of his vivid dreamscape, flashes of the eternal plains briefly drowning out the pain.
“You are officially unkillable,” said Bridget, eyebrows raised as she spoke. “I wasn’t sure you were even alive down there.”
“What happened?” croaked Milo. “Last thing I remember was running—the entire chamber was coming down around us.”
“The floor collapsed out from underneath you, dumped you into the chamber below,” said Bridget. “You fell at least sixty feet, maybe more. Dale broke his wrist in the cave-in and it took us almost three hours to climb down to reach you. You’re just lucky you landed on a sandy hill and not bare rock.”
Milo looked around. With the limited light, all he could tell was that he’d landed hard on the crest of a steep sand dune, then tumbled another thirty feet before coming to a rest. Around him, massive rocky formations from the cave-in dotted the sand, all nestled within their newly formed impact craters. It was a miracle he hadn’t been crushed.
Dale approached from below, slowly shuffling up the sandy hill to reach him, arm cradled in a tidy sling. “Hallo!” called Dale. “He lives! No worse for wear, I hope?”
“We’ll see,” said Bridget, restraining her optimism. “He took a pretty serious tumble.”
Looking around for the first time, Milo realized the rolling dunes were within an immense underground canyon, sheer walls on either side, a winding, subterranean stream cutting through the middle. Through the darkness, he could barely make out the newly formed gash in the ceiling from where the unstable chamber had collapsed, dropping him into the ravine below.
“One of the falling rocks sliced you up pretty good,” added Bridget. Surprised, Milo checked his arm. She’d stitched it up well, especially given that she’d used thread from the frayed remains of her pants. Though his arm was still painfully swollen, he’d already regained a surprising amount of mobility, if not strength.
“Thanks,” said Milo, genuinely impressed at what she’d accomplished given the conditions.
“Can you believe the size of this place?” said Dale, his voice echoing as he gestured to the canyon with open reverence. “Just goes on, and on, and on . . .”
“So what’s our situation?” asked Milo, slowly drawing himself to a sitting position. He supposed he felt more or less all right, at least not considerably worse than before the impact.
“Down to one light,” answered Bridget, standing up beside him and offering a hand, which he took. “Yours broke when you hit the dune, but I was able to save some of the batteries. Nothing left in the way of supplies. No water, but we have the stream, so dehydration isn’t an immediate problem.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” said Bridget. “I kind of landed on you when I came off the wall, fell the last ten feet or so. Feel terrible about it and wanted to get it off my chest.”
Milo tried to laugh, but his bruised ribs and cracked sternum wouldn’t let him. It came out almost like a wheeze instead.
Dale cleared his throat before Bridget could answer. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, kneeling beside Milo, “but look what we found down here.” Dale held up a
glinting obsidian knife, the razor-sharp edges hewn with the careful taps of an experienced hand.
“Don’t tell me,” said Milo. “You made this yourself based on a documentary you saw in seventh grade?”
“Not even close,” Dale said, chuckling. “Take another look across the stream.”
Milo turned to watch as Dale’s light played across the sand dunes and sheer wall. At the base of the rocks lay an uninterrupted collection of low altars stretching in both directions, some built tall like the one he’d discovered beneath the flooded cathedral, others no more than a thin slab of simple rock. Skeletal bodies lay atop each altar, most naked but all adorned with stone tools, ivory masks, crude leather pouches, and gourds. The oldest among them held short-statured skeletons with low, wide skulls and thick brows—ancestral precursors of humanity.
“These are San warriors—the first people,” whispered Milo, his voice filled with awe. “They must be the tribal warriors who came to this cave in ancient times. Are these the ones that never made it out? My God—some of these altars are prehistoric, probably built tens of thousands of years before the birth of Christ.”
“This could be one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time,” said Dale. “According to legend, once in a generation a carefully selected warrior would enter the cave to meet his destiny. If he survived, a powerful medicine man would emerge. The Imperial Japanese heard stories that these transformed men could see in the dark, run for days at a time without resting. They were legendary in combat and were said to possess perfect memory, able to instantly recall events and topography from years, even decades previous. Sound familiar?”
His injuries briefly forgotten, Milo brought himself up to his feet, transfixed as Dale and Bridget helped him wade across the stream to reach the open altars. With Dale’s lamp as his guide, he trembled at the sheer number of burials; the mounds following the immeasurable length of the subterranean canyon.
“Some of these bodies were placed here decades after they died,” whispered Bridget. “They were probably collected from all corners of the cavern system. It would explain why we haven’t found more bodies. Most of the ones I examined died violently—probably from falls and such. But I couldn’t establish the cause of death for all.”
“Some likely drowned,” said Milo, allowing his hand to drift to the cool edge of the nearest stone altar, careful not to disturb the body. “Others from dehydration, starvation, disorientation, or insanity.”
“At least we’re not completely stuck down here,” said Bridget. “As far as I could tell, this canyon goes on more or less indefinitely. I have no idea if it leads anywhere worth going.”
Milo nodded, his mind eased by the trickling of the gentle stream. Bridget gently took the obsidian knife from Dale and returned it to the withered hand of a short, skeletonized warrior, his body lovingly decorated with ostrich hide and ivory beadwork.
“Almost beautiful down here, isn’t it?” asked Bridget with a sigh. “I can think of worse places to wander aimlessly until we run out of light and starve to death in the darkness. But if we tried for the surface again—”
“Even if we had enough batteries, which we don’t—” added Dale.
“—I don’t think we could make it, not in our current condition,” continued Bridget, finishing her sentence. “What should we do? This feels like the end, Milo. We’re running out of options.”
“Warriors entered this cave,” repeated Milo, grimly nodding his head. “They made it through four thousand vertical feet of darkness. Some of them made it back out again, and we need to figure out how—it’s our only hope. I want to see what Lord Riley DeWar found down there.”
The trio removed their boots and slung them around their shoulders by the laces as they slowly trudged the sands of the subterranean canyon. With every step, Dale’s lamp fell across more burials, some little more than the crumbling dust of ten-thousand-year-old bones.
Milo reached over to touch Bridget’s hand; she returned the grasp. There was a certain comfort in their mutual resignation. He allowed his mind to wander, taking in the beautiful vastness of the chasm, the cool texture of the wet sand between his toes.
Putting a finger to her lips, Bridget waved for Milo’s attention and then pointed high up into the air, stopping the trio for the first time in hours. Squinting, Milo could barely make out a faint light at an impossible distance above them.
“What the hell is that?” asked Dale, trailing closely behind.
“It’s our camp,” murmured Bridget. “Charlie and Joanne are still up there, stuck on that suspended rock. I just hope Joanne made it back safely and that she’s smart enough to self-quarantine—but we can’t help either one of them from down here. There’s no way we could climb to reach them, it’s just too dangerous. Should we try to call out, let them know we’re all right?”
“We’re all right?” grumbled Dale. “Not from where I’m standing.”
“No,” answered Milo with his own whisper. “To them, we’d only be ghosts in the abyss.”
They followed the dying light like a guiding star until the last of the distant camp’s dwindling lamp slowly winked out for the last time. Far above, the sounds of plaintive human grief spilled into the unfathomable void as Joanne cried into the darkness like a forsaken angel.
CHAPTER 36:
BREAKDOWN
2,595 feet below the surface
After miles of gently winding between sand dunes, the stream drained into a hole in the canyon wall. The trio of cavers followed it, soon emerging into the familiar waters of the serpentine river. Newly deposited silt rose up in blossoming clouds behind every footfall as they waded downstream. It was as though the river had turned chameleon, the copper-flecked greens transmuting to earthy hues as they trekked ever deeper. Milo couldn’t help but remember what Dale had said: that subterranean waters marked the final delineation between the world of man and next.
They sloshed through in waist-deep waters for hours. Milo regretted he’d once compared the system to a Parisian sewer. No, the serpentine river was no French drainpipe; it was a thing more ancient and astounding altogether.
Holding their breath, the three swam under the lowest ceiling until the passageway opened to the full breadth of the flooded cathedral, spike-studded ceiling now three hundred feet above. Before them stood the statue-like stone edifice, the towering figure in shadow like a winged angel, a frozen crystal pillar pouring from its heart and into the waters below.
“Indescribable, isn’t it?” asked Dale.
“Every time I see this formation, I think of the Book of Genesis,” said Bridget, staring at the natural figure with reverence. “Chapter three, final verse . . . so the Lord drove out man, and he placed at the gate of the Garden of Eden an angel with a flaming sword.”
“Lord Riley DeWar would agree with you,” Milo murmured. “He wrote about a stone figure with a crystal saber, carved by nature herself.”
“He had quite the talent for the dramatic,” added Dale. “Pity he never returned to write about his underground exploits.”
As they paused, the trio watched the motionless stone under the dimming illumination of Dale’s headlamp.
“Are you ready?” asked Milo, looking toward the stone pipe organ that stood atop the flooded passage to the inner sanctum.
Bridget pursed her lips before nodding. “Keep track of your pants this time,” she said. “I’m not swimming after them twice.”
Milo caught Dale stifling a smirk before they all dove, kicking through the crystal clear waters, sharp rocks nipping at Milo’s clothes and boots as he pulled himself through the flooded tunnel to the next chamber, Bridget and Dale following inches from his heels.
The three surfaced simultaneously, bursting from the water with ragged gasps. The room remained untouched by the flood, the small peaked island at the center of the chamber still adorned by the altar and ivory masks. Below them, the massive boulders of the collapsed ceiling rippled beneath diminishing waves.
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Milo and Bridget swam to the island, pulling themselves ashore as Dale treaded water behind them. The warm golden light beneath had grown in intensity since their previous visits, rays bursting from between the rocks and erupting from the surface of the subterranean lake.
Dale clicked off his headlamp. “Got to conserve every milliamp,” he said. “We have a few hours of power left, tops.”
The first wave of familiar dizziness washed over Milo. The chamber was sauna-warm, feverish heat crawling across his skin as his perception flooded with a deluge of memories. Roughly grabbing him by his neck, Bridget pressed her mouth to his as Dale turned away, Milo’s evaporating mind almost succumbing to the rapture of the golden glow. But then she pulled away.
“You think we can make it to the other side of the rocks?” whispered Bridget, leaving Milo dangling over the edge of cognitive abyss. She pointed straight down, toward the submerged golden light.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I think we ought to try.”
Bridget nodded and peeled off her shirt to a sports bra and unzipped her pants. “What?” she demanded, realizing both Dale and Milo were watching her with a somewhat bewildered expression. “I don’t want to get my clothes caught up on the rocks—besides, it’s too hot in here anyway.”
“Good thinking,” said Milo, shrugging as he unbuttoned the shredded remains of his shirt, joining her as he stripped down to his underwear.
“Are we ready for this?” asked Bridget, hands pausing over her half-removed trousers. “Really ready? Milo, we’re sailing off the edge of the world here. We could get stuck, drown. Even if we make it to the other side, we could go insane or die instantly. Whatever is affecting us might be filtered through forty feet of water. We have no idea what total exposure does.”
Milo looked deep into Bridget’s eyes, weighing every crease on her worried face, every dark strand of loose hair, every moment the two had ever shared.
“We’re out of options,” Milo whispered. “There is something at work down here that we don’t understand. Seeing this through is our only shot at staying alive. Could you really turn around, so close to learning what lies on the other side?”
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