Tank suddenly dropped from view. Shit! Alex’s mind snapped back into focus. He covered the distance between them in less than a second—an abyss; the cave floor had abruptly ended.

Tank was just over the lip of a drop off into a black chasm, dangling with his back to the wall. The toughened fingertips of his caving glove were buried in the top of a small shelf, the other holding his knife as he tried to reach up and dig it in behind his head for higher purchase. In one smooth motion Alex leaned out over the rim of the cliff and took the knife from Tank’s hand. Swinging it around in an arc, he embedded it six inches into the cave floor with the sound of a sledgehammer striking a rail spike. His hand now secured by the deeply wedged knife, Alex grabbed the front of Tank’s reinforced caving suit and lifted. Tank, fully kitted out, must have weighed over 250 pounds; Alex lifted him up and over the lip like he was little more than a laundry bag full of linen. He sat the big man down next to him.

“Watch that first step, big fella.”

Tank looked at Alex, then at his knife sunk into the stone of the cave floor. “Been working out, boss?”

“Nah, we were lucky—just got an adrenaline rush when I saw you go over. You OK?”

“Fine now, but praise the Lord, Ms. Jennings was right about these suits—you don’t need to take them off to use the bathroom.”

They stood on the edge of an abyss that dropped away into impenetrable darkness. Raising her chin and breathing deeply, Aimee could feel a slight breeze blowing up from the depths, carrying with it a hint of rich mosses and humidity. She stood a little back from the edge; there were two things that made her feel uneasy—swimming in the ocean at night and darkened heights. Even though it was much warmer now, she shivered as she remembered the time five years ago when she attempted to leave a downtown building late one evening. While waiting for an elevator to take her back to the lobby from the fourteenth floor, the double doors had slid open to reveal a shaft without the car. An empty black doorway which led into nothingness. Aimee, daydreaming, had stepped forward and had only been stopped from plunging hundreds of feet to her death by a watchful security guard. She had been nauseous for days afterwards.

Twenty feet across the gap the cave continued. Aimee watched Monica crack a glow stick, shake it to get maximum illumination and then drop it over the edge. They all held their breath and waited—and waited. After a while, when the stick had obviously passed out of range of their vision, and no sounds of it hitting bottom could be heard, Monica turned to the group.