Holding on to people I love.
I love.
The most reckless thing of all.
When we get closer to the edge we let go of each other. We need our hands for the ropes.
The second canyon is a true slot canyon—tiny and narrow—smaller than the farmers’ canyon. After we’ve all arrived at the bottom of the cliff, Cassia points to a long smooth surface. It looks like sandstone but there is something odd about it. “That’s where we noticed the entrance,” she says. Her lips tighten. “The boy’s body is over there, under those bushes.”
The freedom I felt earlier is gone now. The feeling of Society hangs in this canyon like the torn and streaming clouds that linger after a thunderstorm.
The others notice it too. Hunter’s face turns grim and I know it’s the worst for him because he feels the Society in a place that used to be his.
Hunter leads us to a tiny cave in a spot where the canyon wall folds back in on itself. All five of us can barely crouch inside. The back of the cave ends in a pile of rocks. “We made a way in through here,” he says.
“And the Society never found it?” Indie asks, sounding skeptical.
“They didn’t even know how to look,” Hunter says. He lifts up one of the rocks. “There’s a crevice behind all these stones,” he tells us. “Once we’re inside, we can go through to a corner of the Cavern.”
“How do we do it?” Eli asks.
“Move the earth,” Hunter says. “And hold your breath in the tight spots.” He reaches for one of the boulders. “I’ll go first when it’s time,” he says over his shoulder. “Then Cassia. We’ll talk each other through the turns. Go slowly. There’s a place where you need to lie on your back and push yourself through with your feet. If you get stuck, call out. You’ll be close enough to hear me. I can talk you through. It’s the tightest just before the end.”
I hesitate for a moment, wondering if this is a trap. Could the Society have set it? Or Indie? I don’t trust her. I watch her help Hunter with the rocks, her long hair flying wildly around her in her eagerness. What does she want? What’s she hiding?
I glance over at Cassia. She’s in a new place where everything is different. She’s seen people who died in terrible ways and she’s been hungry and lost and come into the desert to find me. All things a Society girl should never have had to experience. I see a glint in her eye as she looks at me and it makes me smile. Hold our breath? she seems to say. Move the earth? We’ve been doing that all along.
Chapter 32
CASSIA
The crevice is barely wide enough for Hunter to climb into. He disappears without looking back. I’m next.
I glance over at Eli, whose eyes have gone wide. “Maybe you should wait for us here,” I say.
Eli nods. “I don’t mind the cave,” he says. “But that is a tunnel.”
I don’t point out that he’s the smallest of all of us and the least likely to get stuck because I know what he means. It seems counterintuitive, wrong, to worm our way into the earth like this. “It’s all right,” I say. “You don’t have to come.” I put my arm around him and squeeze his shoulders. “I don’t think it will take long.”
Eli nods again. He already looks better, less white. “We’ll be back,” I say again. “I’ll be back.”
Eli makes me think of Bram and how I left him behind, too.
I’m all right until I think too much, until I start calculating how many tons of rock must be above me. I don’t even know how much one cubic foot of sandstone weighs, but the total amount must be enormous. And the ratio of air to stone must be small. Is that why Hunter told us to hold our breath? Does he know that there’s not enough air? That I might breathe out and find nothing left to breathe back in?
I can’t move.
The stone, so close around me. The passage, so dark. There are only inches between the earth and me; I’m pressed tight and lying on my back with blackness ahead and behind and the immovability of rock above and below and on every side. The mass of the Carving presses all over me; I’ve been afraid of its vastness and now I’m afraid of its closeness.
My face is turned to a sky that I cannot see, one blue above the stone.
I try to calm myself, tell myself it’s all right. Living things have flown from tighter spaces than this. I’m just a butterfly, a mourning cloak, sealed inside a cocoon with blind eyes and sticky wings. And suddenly, I wonder if the cocoons sometimes do not open, if the butterfly inside is ever simply not strong enough to break through.
A sob escapes my throat.
“Help,” I say.
To my surprise, it’s not Hunter who speaks from ahead. It’s Ky’s voice from behind.
“It will be all right,” he says. “Push along a little more.”
And even in my panic, I hear the music in his deep voice, the sounds of singing. I close my eyes, imagining my breath is his own, that he is with me.
“Wait a moment if you need to,” he says.
I picture myself smaller even than I am now. Climbing into the cocoon, pulling it tight around me like a real cloak, a blanket. And then I don’t imagine myself bursting out. I just stay tucked inside, trying to see what I can.
At first, nothing at all.
But then I feel it. Even hidden away in the dark, I can tell that it is there. Some small part of me is always, always free.
“But I will,” I say out loud.
“You will,” Ky says behind me, and I move, and then I can feel space above me, air to breathe, a place to stand.
Where are we?
Shapes and figures form in the darkness, lit by tiny blue lights along the floor of the cave that shine like small raindrops. But, of course, they are too orderly to have fallen.
Other lights illuminate tall clear cases and machines that hum and moderate the temperature within the stone walls. What I see before me is Society: calibration, organization, calculation.
Someone moves and I almost gasp before I remember. Hunter.
“It’s so huge,” I say to him, and he nods.
“We used to meet here,” he says softly. “We weren’t the first. The Cavern is an old place.”
I shudder when I look up. The walls of the vast space are embedded with shells of dead animals and bones of beasts, all caught in stone that was once mud. This place existed before the Society. Perhaps before people lived at all.