He trains the flashlight on me, and I snap a couple of glow sticks, giving them a shake to make them light up. The mine is pitch-black, and I can hear water dripping somewhere in the distance. It’s chilly already, without the sunlight on our backs.
“Let’s go,” I say, taking the lead. I stop every couple of minutes to listen, and occasionally I hear a scrape or the sound of a pebble scattering along with the water, but it’s all very faint. It’s most likely from whatever animals have made this place their home. I try to remember if bears are native to this area. I sincerely hope not.
I’m trying to walk as fast as I can, but there’s a tremendous amount of debris in some places. The Greaver mine was closed down sometime after the Great Depression when a collapse took the lives of over two dozen men and rendered the mine unusable. The owners lost everything between the collapse and the charges of negligence that faced their business afterward. The Greavers were all but run out of town at the time, ruined financially and socially. The mine has been boarded up ever since, with nothing done beyond the recovery of the bodies—the ones they were able to recover, anyway. I shudder at the thought of the ones that are still in here. Oh please, don’t let me see any bodies. And don’t let any of them be Finn.…
I’m so lost in that thought that I round a bend in the tunnel and a second later, I’m pulled backward as Ben grabs a fistful of my sweatshirt and yanks me toward him.
I start to let out a shout and immediately cover my mouth, hoping I didn’t alert Eversor, if she’s somewhere behind us. Ben steps forward carefully, peering over the edge of what looks like an elevator or maybe a ventilation shaft. I peer down with him, but it’s completely black. I take one of the glow sticks and drop it down. It takes a few seconds before I hear a muted splash and a very faint glow lights up the shaft. Well, at least we can see it now.
“You need to be more careful,” Ben urges. “We’re getting into the working areas now. There are going to be shafts and maybe even old explosives lying around. Watch your step.”
I nod, moving away from the edge. I won’t be any good to Finn if I’m dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.
We’re traveling more slowly now, and it’s maddening. Every second we take is another second that she can be closer to us. Or another second that Finn could be bleeding his life away. Ben stumbles over a pile of twisted metal that blended right into the rock and goes staggering, falling heavily into one of the posts. I grab him, steadying him before he falls any farther, and a rain of fine dust and tiny bits of rock falls all around us. I can see the outline of another shaft ahead. They must have them at certain intervals throughout the mine. I break open another glow stick, tossing it down the shaft so we can see it on the way back.
No wonder she chose this place. It’ll be easy to dispose of the bodies.
I suppress a shudder and we keep moving, and we’re doing fine for a while until I catch my arm on something sharp that’s sticking out from a wall. I let out a startled sound that seems to echo through the place in an astonishingly loud way.
It only takes a second, and I hear him.
It’s the faintest, strangled kind-of sound. One someone would make with a gag in their mouth.
“Finn!” His name bursts out from my lips, along with a sense of relief that it’s not too late. We find him a few hundred feet ahead, around another bend and just past another shaft. Ben grabs my glow stick to mark it as I rush over to yank the gag off Finn’s mouth. She’s tied his hands and feet, and he’s sitting against a wooden column that’s warped far more than I’m comfortable with.
“I need some light!” I crouch down next to him as Ben shines the flashlight on Finn’s wrists.
“Jessa,” Finn says quickly. “It’s Eversor! She’s—”
“She’s working for Rudy, I know.”
“Careful,” he says urgently. “Don’t yank too hard—this is a load-bearing column.”
“How did she get you?” I ask as I pull at the ropes, leaning down to get my teeth in them so I can untangle them. After a few moments, one of the knots starts to slip free and I’m able to tug it loose. Once his hands are free, Ben focuses the light on Finn’s ankles and Finn starts to work at the knots, but his fingers are too numb and much larger than mine. I push his hands aside and take over, conscious that every second we waste is one less second to get far away from here.
“She was watching your house. When she saw me, she knew we were both back.”
“Back?” Ben looks confused.
“How?” I ask.
“Because I wouldn’t have disappeared if you were here,” Finn says. “When I left to get coffee, she followed me to Mugsy’s. She came inside, told me she had a flat tire, and asked for my help to change it.”
Ben gave him a look. “That’s what you get for being a good guy,” he says.
“So I see you got my message?” Finn asks me, smiling. The action pulls at a cut on his cheek, and I see him grimace.
“Yes, and hopefully she doesn’t know that,” I answer him. I help him to his feet a bit clumsily, and then I slip my arms around him.