“Is that it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She looked down at the flare on the ground below her. It was still at least six or seven meters away. If she fell wrong, she could easily break a leg. But the journey down was only half the problem. It was the journey back up that worried her. It would take too much time to get another rope. She tried to look around the room to see if there were any visible exits. She figured there had to be one down there somewhere. Surely they didn’t just drop the treasure in from above.

“I’m going to let go!” she yelled.

“What?”

“I’m going to . . . oh, forget it,” she said. She unfastened the rope from around her waist and plummeted toward the ground. As luck would have it, her fall was broken by the soft, pillowy gut of Jorgenson, whose dead body lay faceup on the floor. Xandria pushed herself off the grotesque figure, her head feeling like it had just taken a hit from an aluminum baseball bat. But she was alive. And as far as she could tell, fully intact.

“Are you okay?”

Xandria pulled out her radio, tired of fatiguing her voice. She hit a button. “I’m fine.”

A moment later Barber’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Forgot we had these.”

“I’m glad we do,” Xandria said. She tested the ground with her foot. “It’s solid dirt down here, thank goodness.”

“Do you see anything?”

She fished Jorgenson’s flashlight out of her pocket and shone it around the room. “It’s weird,” she said. “The light just disappears in the distance, like it’s going straight into a fog.”

“Can you hear any water? Maybe there is fog down there. We saw those little trickles heading down this way in the tunnel. It’s got to go somewhere.”

Xandria listened. She did hear something. A rushing sound, like a waterfall. “I’m going to go take a look,” she said. “Call me every minute or so to make sure I’m still alive.”

“Roger that.”

Xandria headed out from the island that was Jorgenson’s body into the murky outer perimeter. She closed her eyes and listened for the sound again. Where was it coming from? She pivoted on her heels until she thought that her feet were pointed in the right direction.

The radio burst to life. “Cornelius wanted me to tell you to hurry up. There’s no telling how unstable the environment is down here.”

“Cornelius is welcome to come down here if he’d like to speed things up.”