Part of the ceiling ahead is caved in, blocking the way, but there is a narrow gap. I’ll have to crawl through the half-frozen water on my elbows, flashlight clenched between my teeth, Julian held up so that he doesn’t get wet, mud slicking up over my knees and that shock of pestilential cold, a cold to reach out for your heart and ensnare it in the grip of death.

I make it to the other side and pause, adjusting my grip on the baby, knowing I’ve gained myself a few moments, or perhaps I’ve thwarted him altogether if he doesn’t fit through that small opening.

As I push on, I hear him grunting and heaving behind me, and I turn as the tunnel curves before I can tell if he’s made it through.

And I think to myself, if the exit is caved in or a dead end, I am doomed.

Upstairs and perhaps a mile away by now, Elizabeth lies bleeding on a bed that came from nowhere, in a room that is on no blueprint, a room that gave birth to itself from the void. This is a moment I will forever regret missing. Someday I will wish I had just handed Julian off to his father and let Donovan whisk him away from us while I helped my mother care for Elizabeth. If I had, everything might have turned out differently. And, of course, I would not have lost the three toes that the cold water in the tunnels took from me—along with everything else.

The passageway snakes around and fills me with the presentiment that I have gone too far into the earth to ever resurface. Julian and I will become ghosts, wandering the eternal tunnels, lost forever in the dark.

Panic begins to set in when the water is almost up to my knees. I slosh through it; I hear Donovan call out behind me, and I know he has followed. He will always follow.

And then I come to a solid wall of earth.

My breath freezes in my throat, and I turn the flashlight all around to make sure there isn’t another path going in some new direction, but the walls are solid and the only branch of this tunnel is the one I took to get here, and from down its long black length, even the flashlight’s glow vanishing in the dark, come the wet sounds of Donovan getting closer.

In my despair I cannot even sink to my knees or give my tired legs a rest, for the water is too high and the idea of sitting down in that icy stagnant pool is like death. Leaning back against the rocky wall at the end of the tunnel, I look up, shining my flashlight toward the ceiling—and there I see a square of thatched wood.

The ceiling is low; I can reach it if I stretch up toward it. But I have no free hand, so I bang the flashlight against the wood, and it rattles, pushing slightly upward before crashing back down. Holding the flashlight once again in my mouth, I reach up—but the flashlight is bigger than my jaw will comfortably allow, and it slips from my teeth with a splash, shining its white beam into the dirty water before it sputters out. The flashes of pure underground darkness send my heart into my throat.