She snagged the regulator and handed it to Marty, who stuck it back in his mouth. She flashed him a thumbs-up, meaning they should surface immediately, and they ascended quickly. They broke through the surface of the water into a domed area roughly twice the size of the first air pocket in which they had surfaced an hour earlier.

They removed the regulators from their mouths and gasped the stale air. Elsa’s heart was pounding far too fast for her liking, and she said, “It knew what it was doing! It tried to drown you!”

Marty said, “It couldn’t possibly know—”

“It did! And we need to get out of the water right now.” She aimed her light around the dome and discovered a flow ledge carved into one wall. “There!”

“Shite! My bag! I dropped my bag!”

“To hell with your bag! That thing might be right below us!”

Without waiting for a reply, she swam toward the ledge.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

MARTY

Knowing there was nothing he could do about his bag right then, Marty followed Elsa, reaching the rocky rampart a few moments after her. The edge of the rock was a little distance above the water table, and he needed all of his might to haul himself up and onto it. He suddenly felt as heavy as an elephant without the buoyancy of the water to lighten the load of his scuba gear. Elsa, he noticed, was also struggling to get herself out of the water. As he reached for her hands, her eyes went wide and her body shuddered, as if something had tugged at her.

In the next instant she was dragged beneath the surface of the black pool.

“Elsa!” Marty cried, shining his light into the water where she had vanished. He couldn’t see anything but a flurry of bubbles, and he was contemplating jumping in after her (suicidal likely, but you can’t just stand there doing nothing, can you?), when she crashed through the surface, panting for air, her face a mask of terror, her dive knife gripped in her right hand. He snatched her wrists and lugged her up onto the ledge with so much force he stumbled backward and landed hard on the steel tanks still strapped to his back. His skull whip-cracked against the rock, the sharp pain lasting only a split-second before he blacked out.

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

RAD

Rad and Jacky were sitting on boulders that had once been part of the cavern’s roof. Legs crossed, right foot tapping anxiously, Rad glanced at her wristwatch again. The butterfly wings in her stomach beat a little faster. “They should have been back ten minutes ago.”

“Relax,” Jacky said. She was scrolling through the pictures that she’d taken of the cave art. “They’ll be back any minute.”

“I can’t stop thinking about them swimming through pitch-black tunnels with no way to surface if something happened. Who would ever want to do that?”