She twisted her legs so she could push with both feet. She dragged her body over the rubble and calcite. Even through a wet suit and four layers of clothes, she could feel them bite.
When the tunnel grew even narrower, she filled her lungs with air, then released it so her chest would shrink and she could keep crawling. She made it another five or six feet. She had to crane her neck to see where she was going. Her helmet bobbled and scraped along the ground. Every so often it scooped up a stone and she had to shake her head until it tumbled back out. In the distance, the waterfall grew louder. She’d forgotten how ferocious water sounded in an enclosed space—how it got your heart drumming even if you weren’t afraid.
And then it struck her: she didn’t have to be afraid. She was cold, her body was tense as a wire, she felt like she was crawling into an animal’s throat—but she didn’t have to be scared. She knew how to do this. She loved doing this.
And she wasn’t even alone, not really. She had a whole support team in her brain: Dallas, Jonah, X. Even her dad, in a way.
Especially her dad.
“You’re freakin’ awesome! You can do this! You’re my girl!”
She arrived at a bend in the tunnel and wriggled around it. She imagined she was a superhero who could transform into water or molten steel—who could flow through the rock and then reconstitute at will.
Her stupid grin was back.
Suddenly, the walkie-talkie trilled. By the time Zoe finished the laborious task of taking off her glove and fishing the thing out of her pack, it had stopped. Annoyed, she called Dallas back.
“I’m being molten steel!” she said. “What could you possibly want?”
There was a pause during which Dallas presumably tried to figure out what the hell she was talking about. When he answered, his voice was so distorted that she had to work to fill in the missing words.
“Where (you) at?” he said. “You killin’ it? Can you (hear the) water?”
“Of course I’m killin’ it,” she told him. “Go away!”
She slid the walkie-talkie back into her pack, wiped her nose, and put her glove back on. Even in that brief interval, her hand had become stiff with the cold, and she had to flex her fingers to get some life back in them.
Just ahead, a thousand daddy longlegs hung from the ceiling in a clump, their legs packed in such a dense mass that they looked like dirty hair. Zoe was used to spiders, but she was surprised to see them so late in February. She slid under them and squinted up. She heard her father’s voice again: “Daddy longlegs aren’t spiders, Zoe! They’re Opiliones! Come on—this is Insects 101!”
When she was small—five, maybe? six?—her dad gave her an ecstatic lecture about this stuff. There were two things she’d always remembered. The first was how her father’s face glowed with excitement. The second was a gruesome tidbit about how daddy longlegs could play dead by detaching one of their legs to trick predators. They’d leave it behind—still twitching!—while they crawled in the opposite direction. Only her father could have thought that was a cool thing to tell a little kid. And yet it kind of was.
Zoe shook her head and smiled. Her helmet did its dance.
She’d already lost track of how long she’d been in the cave. Time had a way of shattering underground. The waterfall roared even louder now. She kept crawling in the dark, telling herself to focus.
The tunnel finally widened, then stopped at the edge of the giant drop that led down to the Chandelier Room. Zoe rolled onto her stomach. She lowered her head to the ground, and exhaled gratefully, like a swimmer who had just barely made it back to the beach. Her neck ached. The left side of her body felt ravaged. She dreaded looking at the bruises. Were superheroes supposed to get this tired?
She rotated her head slowly, her headlamp sweeping the walls. There were bolts on either side of her that another caver had left in the rock—a primary and a backup. She unspooled her rope and rigged up with loops like bunny ears. She struck the bolts with a buckle and leaned close to hear the solid, reassuring ping.
There were still five feet between Zoe and the giant shaft that plunged down to the Chandelier Room. She pushed herself up into a sort of Gollum-like crouch, and inched toward it, hoping the waterfall wouldn’t be as ferocious as it sounded.
The shaft was roughly circular. Its walls were jagged and embedded with pockets of ice that glinted in the light of Zoe’s headlamp. Off to her right, an underground river burst through an icy hole in the wall, then tumbled down, like Rapunzel’s hair. It wasn’t the trickle that she and Dallas had hoped for. She was glad he wasn’t there to say, Forget it, dawg, this is waaaay too intrepid. She was sure that if she rappelled straight down, she could avoid most of the spray.
She tested the bolts in the wall again, though it didn’t tell her anything definitive: if they were going to pop out, they were going to pop out when she was hanging in midair. She hooked herself onto the rope. She took a deep breath and turned around.