The rock on my left slides ever so slightly farther to the left. Kol’s ankle writhes under the pressure of my hand. I feel a tiny shiver of movement, the smallest advance toward our goal. Kol pulls his knee just a hair toward his chest.
My heart gallops. I feel the weight of a hundred running mammoths. They stampede by, breaking my selfish will against these rocks as they pass. My will to save myself, my will to escape at any cost. Those things are torn and broken, splintering into pieces that sink to the bottom and disappear.
I let go of it all. I let go of the fear, I let go of the instinct to save myself, to scramble up through the hole overhead and say that I tried my best. I open my clenched heart, and let go of everything that won’t help us both get out of here alive.
I see Kol’s legs pinned against the rocks, and I know that I am pinned here too. I feel his bruised and broken knee, and I know that I am bruised and broken too. I turn over and slide my leg under his leg, wedging myself in as tightly as I can, pushing the heel of my foot against the rock that pushes on his.
Because I know this is the end, one way or another.
I wriggle my leg deeper into the chasm, and my face angles upward toward the surface. I see his chin, his mouth, the back of his tilting head, already under the water. My leg wedges deeper still into the rock, and I twist my knee, driving it into the boulder until I feel like it will shatter into dust.
A heavy weight crushes down on my chest. The water around me grows a little bit darker. Not breathing becomes a little bit easier.
And then the boulder gives.
It rocks away, tilting and tumbling, sending a wave through the water that forces us both up, bobbing away from the floor and up to the surface.
For the first few moments, air fills my gaping mouth and dim light fills my eyes. But then a choke rises in my throat. My chest refuses to rise. My vision fills with a murky smudge of silt, growing darker as I sink farther down.
My eyes sweep the cave floor. Bubbles rise from the shifting rocks, but Kol is gone. He made it out.
Now I need to make it out, too.
The floor of the cave comes up as I sink, and I feel my shoulders, my back, my head settle against the stones. I stare up at the surface, at the small circle of light that floats just above me, when all at once I see Kol’s face come into view.
An arm wraps around my waist, a hand slides down my back, and I am rising. My face warms, my chest aches, and my knee throbs as Kol pushes me up through falling water into the open air. Someone grabs me under the arms and hauls me onto the grass.
I roll onto my side and gag, water pouring from my mouth and my nose. I tremble all down my body, my eyes pressed closed, when someone touches my hand.
A second shudder runs from head to foot, and the hand tightens around mine. A third, and an icy, wet arm sweeps me into an icy, wet embrace.
I open my eyes. The harsh sun is cold and bright at the edges of my vision, but then my gaze warms. Everything about Kol is warm, but his eyes burn. The sun sets a fire in each of them, and I can feel their heat.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he says. His lips are close to my ear and his breath heats my skin. I turn my face toward him and bring my lips to his.
At first his kiss is soft, but like the light in his eyes, it’s filled with its own warmth. Heat runs down my spine. With each beat of my heart it spreads—into my chest, down my arms, over my legs, all the way down to my toes.
Fighting against my will one more time, I pull back from him and tip my head to look him in the eyes. “I will do it again—”
“That was foolish, Mya. You could have died—”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“I do thank you,” he says. “But—”
“Whatever you intend to say, please don’t say it.” I pull back a little more. “You smiled at me—just after we got me free—”
“I was happy. I knew you were safe.”
“Yet you would deny me the same happiness? You would deny me the satisfaction—the joy of saving you? No. That’s something you can’t take from me.” I kiss him once more, and his lips are already dry and hot with fever. Fear flickers back to life at my core, where I had almost extinguished it. I’m reminded that I haven’t saved him at all.
Not yet.
I roll onto my side and find Pek and Seeri kneeling beside us. Behind them, the creek splashes in and around newly exposed rocks, following a fresh-cut course across the ground.
Pek’s eyes sweep over Kol. “I’m going to give you my tunic,” he says. “You’re too sick to be wearing wet clothes—”
“Pek—”
“Yours will dry quickly on me, once we’re moving again.”
Kol doesn’t offer another word of protest. He knows his brother is right. Pek pulls his tunic over his head while I tug Kol’s up over his shoulders. The skin across his chest is bright red with cold.
Pek squats beside me and I’m suddenly in the way. Reluctantly, I leave Kol in Pek’s hands and climb to my feet. Seeri jumps up with me and pulls me into an embrace. “If I’d lost you, too . . . ,” she whispers into my ear. But then she pulls back, shivering with cold. “Your skin feels like ice.”
“I’ll warm up,” I say. “Like Pek said—as soon as we’re moving again—”
“Kol won’t be able to walk on his own,” Pek says, still squatting beside his brother. “We’ll have to carry him.”
Seeri’s eyes drop to the ground. They sweep over Kol and she covers her mouth with her hand. I drop my eyes to his face and all at once I see him the way she sees him.
How can those bone-white lips be the lips I just kissed? How can those dim eyes be the eyes that just warmed me to my toes?
“He’s getting worse,” Seeri says, and something in her words flares up anger in me that I have to tamp back down. It’s not an accusation, I tell myself. She is not saying that you failed. I want to scream, to defend myself, to shriek that I am doing everything that I can. But I know better. I know I can’t let this be about me. Defensiveness is just a distraction, and I can’t indulge in even the smallest distraction right now.
Seeri drops to her knees and picks up Kol’s hand. “If only we had a fire . . .” Her eyes scan the ground, as if searching for firewood, but then she looks up and meets my gaze.
And there it is. I find in her eyes what I was dreading to find there. Fear. A fear that matches my own. A fear that tells me that my panic is justified—the panic that at this moment runs over my skin like a thousand tiny spiders.
“We need to go,” I say as Seeri scrambles to her feet. “Even if we have to carry Kol, we need to get out of the open.” I look around, realizing that I’m not sure where we are. “Lees and Noni said we would come out near the beach,” I say.
“We’re not far,” Seeri answers. “I think just beyond this cliff is the sea.”
The sea.
Of course. My mind has been a jumble since Kol and I climbed out of the water, but I remember now the purpose of crawling through the rock. It was a passage to the sea.