She smiled to herself, and slowed down.
At first, Zoe gazed straight ahead, moving quickly but carefully, listening for the telltale wind and the scary drumroll of the water. But then her father’s voice returned. She’d pushed him out the door, but he had climbed in through a window: “Zoe, you’re in a tunnel in the freakin’ four-billion-year-old mantle of the earth! Are you really not gonna look at the walls? Are you really not gonna check the place out? What you’re doing is epic, girl! Ponce de León only discovered Florida!”
Zoe shoved her father back out the window, and slammed it shut.
But he was right.
She lay still a second, and allowed some wonder back in. Yes, the air was sour with the smell of rotten eggs (she named the gas herself, so her father wouldn’t: hydrogen sulfide). Yes, her eyes stung from the sand in the tunnel. Yes, her clothes were getting shredded. But thanks to the gifts that Regent had given her, she was sliding over busted calcite like it was nothing. She was curling around stalactites, stalagmites, and snottites as if her body were liquid. (Zoe’s father had preferred, for the gooey strands of bacteria that dripped from the ceiling, the term “snoticle.”) Zoe remembered how much she loved exploring. And X was with her. Every so often, he put a hand on her leg to let her know that he was there. It reminded Zoe of her mother saving her when the snowbank fell in.
For the first time, she truly looked around. The ceiling of the tunnel sparkled with gypsum crystals. The walls were embedded with the fossils of sea creatures. One looked like a tiny Christmas tree, another like a squid with human teeth, another like a mutant shrimp, another like an inch-long bear with eight legs. Zoe ran her fingers along their spines, over their legs and snouts and tentacles. She’d never seen any of them before. Probably no living person ever had.
She was mesmerized.
She didn’t notice that the wind had come back.
Zoe had just enough time to thrust her palms against the walls and brace herself.
She’d never been hit by a car screaming down a highway.
Now she had.
The instant the water struck, she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. The wave pushed her head up and back, like someone had yanked on her hair.
She didn’t know the limits of her powers, didn’t know what she could withstand. A very specific fear shot through her mind: the water was going to break her neck.
Zoe forced her head back down again, amazed that she had the strength, and pushed even harder against the walls.
A new fear: the water was going to tear off her arms.
And how long would it be before she needed to breathe? Why hadn’t she tested her new lungs before now? Rock and sediment glanced off her. Something bigger—a stalactite, maybe?—broke off the ceiling, and flew past. Why had she wasted time on the fossils? Why had she listened to her father?
The last of the water raced past them and out of the tunnel.
Light reappeared. Air.
She felt X’s hand again. He had never let go of her.
Two hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered up steeply. Zoe wanted to get to it, and see what was up there, before the next flood. She moved faster. Occasionally, a jutting piece of rock, sharp as razor wire, would grab at her shirt and tear it—but the pain never reached her brain. Whatever happened to her body they could fix later.
A hundred and fifty feet to go before the tunnel swung upward.
She pictured X’s mother urging them on.
But what if the woman had lost her faculties, like Dervish said? What if she was feral, deranged?
An old story came to Zoe. A hopeful one.
It was about six Jewish families who hid from Nazis for 18 months in an underground cave called Priest’s Grotto. Zoe had done an oral report on them for school once. Half the kids in class rolled their eyes because of course Zoe Bissell would figure out a way to talk about caves, even in World History.
A hundred feet left to go.
The families lived in darkness, as the Germans marched over their heads. They dug toilets and showers. Foraged for food in the countryside at night. Nearly all of them survived, even when sadistic villagers blocked the entrance to the cave with dirt so they’d suffocate.
Fifty feet to go.
One of the people in Priest’s Grotto was a girl whose name Zoe loved: Pepkala Blitzer. She was four. When the families finally emerged from the cave after a year and a half, Pepkala shielded her eyes, and asked her mother to please put out the bright candle.
It was the sun.
Zoe got a B+ on her oral report. The teacher said there was too much about the cave.
Just before the tunnel swerved upward, there was a giant hole on the floor of the passageway. The rock, weakened by water, must have caved in.
From behind her, X said, “I will make a bridge of my body so you can cross.”
“No,” said Zoe, “I’ll make the bridge.”
“Someday I will actually win an argument,” he said.
She smiled, though he couldn’t see her.
“Not with me,” she said.
Zoe guessed they had maybe three minutes before the water returned. She pressed her palms against the walls, and leaned out over the hole.
Beneath her, there was a 50-foot drop.
She was feeling less invincible now. For a second, she thought she felt the wind coming. No, she was imagining it.
She walked her hands slowly forward. Her legs tightened as she stretched over the emptiness.
When she’d reached as far as she could, she inched her hands down from the walls and toward the far edge of the hole. She felt a rush of fear—but then her bones locked into place.
X slid over her back on his stomach. Her body held strong.
When they came to where the tunnel rose upward into a chute, Zoe saw that there was a small cove off to the right, where they could wait out the next deluge if they had to. Zoe shimmied up the chute. It was tighter than the tunnel. She had to contort her body, and grease her arms with mud to get up it. At last, she climbed into the chamber up above.
It was stunning. Snow-white crystals covered the floor in waist-high mounds. They looked like a dragon’s treasure or like flowers—chrysanthemums made of ice. There were bigger crystals, too. Massive ones. They were roughly blade-shaped—hence the name Cave of Swords—but to Zoe they looked more like toppled trees. The crystals tilted in every direction. Some stretched as high as the ceiling, as if they were holding it up.
Zoe was so surprised by the beauty of the crystals that it took her a moment to see the bodies chained to them.
There were a dozen prisoners.
All their heads were covered with black hoods.
X’s mother was here somewhere.
Zoe called down to X, just as he was reaching up into the narrow chute to follow her. It broke her heart to tell him that he was never going to fit. She’d have to find his mother alone.
X refused to believe it.
He started to climb, twisting his body.
Zoe felt the wind creep down from an opening in the rock over her head. She could hear the water gathering power behind it.
“Get out of the hole, or you’ll get stuck and drown,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”
He punched the wall to widen the chute. The rock shattered.
“Stop!” said Zoe. “You’re gonna cave it in! I’ll find your mother. Just tell me what she looks like.”
The first drops of water fell past.
“She will appear to be thirty-five, though she’s seen nearly a century,” said X. “And, according to Maud, she looks … She looks like me.”
“Okay,” said Zoe. “That’s all I need.”