The distraction costs me my concentration, and I scream again. It’s a terrible sound—an awful keening, something you hear in the woods at night, prey being torn apart—and I try to muffle it, but it’s like trying to stop an avalanche. I spasm again, my whole body this time. With my last ounce of lucidity, I turn a bit so that one of my feet catches the support beam again.

It snaps.

Diaz shouts. Her footsteps scramble away from me. Something is rumbling all around us, grinding and shrieking, like the earth’s bones breaking.

I have to get up. Have to move. This tunnel opens into a bigger, better-supported tunnel a few yards down—but I don’t think I have a few yards left in me. I roll onto my side, still curled around the transmitter, but can’t manage more than that.

The earth around me groans and rumbles, growing louder. The ground beneath me trembles. Something heavy lands on my leg, pinning me: a fallen support.

I’m going to die in here. Alone. Without Ty, without even Elliott. I’ll be crushed in a cave-in, unable to escape because I’m incapacitated by the sting of a creature I created with my thoughts. In the end, I’ll have effectively been killed by my own fears. I would laugh if I could. How ironic. How absolutely, perfectly terrible.

Someone yells. Not Diaz.

A hand wraps around mine. It’s bigger than Diaz’s would be. It feels familiar. I remember this grip. But I remember it the other way around, I think—my hands over his, clamping down over taut tendons, white ridges of knuckles. Like trying to hold a grenade together. I thought he would let go. He didn’t. He doesn’t now, either.

He hauls me forward. My leg is trapped. Century-old dust fills the air, clogging my throat. He shifts his grip, hands under my arms, and pulls harder. I help as much as I can, trying to push with my other foot, and I finally come free. But the pain is still strengthening—too much, it’s too much. I close my eyes.

I’m dragged a few yards and then dropped back to the ground. Earth’s rumbling slows and stops, but the pain is still twisting, wringing, scorching. There’ll be nothing left of me soon.

Someone shakes me, not gently. “Don’t die, you jackass,” he says sharply. “I still have to kill you, remember?”

He picks me up. I fade out, in, out.

The clattering of feet against metal. A sense of swaying, like the floor is suspended over empty space. An old hydraulic elevator with a padlock on its back wall. Someone said that. Me?