I coughed, clinging to the ledge as West came up behind me. The sound of his ragged breath filled the empty silence. I could hardly see. Only the reflection on his blond hair was visible, and I reached out, feeling for him until his hands found me.

“All right?” he panted.

I answered between breaths. “All right.”

Above us, a thin vein of moonlight was drawn in a narrow opening at the top of the cave. The space was only twelve feet wide at most, and the walls tapered as they rose to what looked like a tiny sliver thirty or forty feet above us.

I swung one leg up out of the water onto the smooth stone. My heart was a sprinting, angry thud in my chest, my throat burning all the way down to my stomach. West came up beside me, lifting himself from the water. As my eyes adjusted, the shape of him formed in the dark.

“You’re bleeding.” West’s hand reached up, and he touched my forehead gently, tilting my chin so that the light fell on my face.

I felt the slick skin where it was throbbing. When I looked at my fingers, they were covered in blood. “It’s nothing.”

The call of seabirds sounded above us, and I looked up to the slice of sky, where their shadows flitted over the opening in the earth.

I got to my feet. The cave was silent except for the sound of water dripping from my fingertips and hitting the stone and I froze when a glint of something blinked in the darkness. I waited, staring into the emptiness until I saw it again. A flash. Like the sweep of a lighthouse. I took a step toward it, reaching out before me.

My hands drifted through the diffused moonlight until I found the wall and I felt up its face until my fingertips caught the sharp, glassy points of something hidden in the shadows.

The vibration of the gemstone coursed through me.

Midnight.

West looked up, turning in a circle, where the facets of the stone winked in the shifting light above us. It was everywhere.

“This is where she found it,” I whispered, pulling the chisel from my belt.

I felt the rock before I fit the edge beneath a crease and took a hold of the mallet. It came away in a clean piece with three strikes, falling heavily into my hand. I held it in the beam of moonlight between us.

The violet inclusions danced beneath the surface, and I froze when their reflections lit the cave walls like a sky of purple stars.