They waited it out. Kanani shifted her weight, wiggled her toes. Worst thing was to have a foot go asleep. Jock pivoted and peed on the spot, into the trunk of the bush for quiet.

Soon Jock showed her his watch: five minutes gone by. He’d stopped blinking. He gazed as if watching all things at once, as if able to look through the lava rock with X-ray vision.

He held up a hand. “Did you hear that?”

She hadn’t. She shook her head.

He nodded anyway, to himself. This made her start to worry. She touched him on the shoulder but he didn’t react. He felt as rigid as the rock before them, all around them, one with it.

“You okay?” she said.

“I’m okay. I just . . . I don’t always love tunnels.”

“Oh.” He didn’t look okay. She knew locals who feared the lava tubes, and nothing a person could say would get them to think otherwise. So she hugged him instead, on pure instinct, and that seemed to scare the ghost. He grimaced at her, still from somewhere else, neither smile nor scowl but an otherworldly sort of wonder. It chilled her again. She only smiled back.

“Zero hour,” he said.

“Yep. Go for broke.”

He grasped her hand. He led her into the lava tube. He didn’t need his flashlight. She trusted that. His breathing deepened and strained and it wasn’t from the exertion.

About fifteen yards inside they reached a concrete wall, which held a gray metal door. Jock had the right key out, fisting the rest for silence, and inserted the key in one fluid motion and turned it. He pulled the door open, into near darkness, the only light coming from far down the slightly bending corridor.

Down concrete corridors they moved. They reached a mess strewn about the main corridor floor—cigarette packs, pouches and bags, a towel, a watch, a phone receiver and cord as if ripped from a wall, a notebook, map, a bashed walkie-talkie; two drawers of silverware and kitchen utensils; a bloody knife; and a set of keys, dark with the blood. The blood was inky red and sticky along the keys and knife and floor. Kanani gasped under her breath, but seeing the fresh living blood seemed to bring a calmness to Jock, she saw, regulating his panting, and she felt the bloodlust coming off him like steam.

Jock gazed up from the mess and locked his stare on the shut door just beyond, on which a sign read, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He nodded at the door. This was the break room.

“Give me your revolver,” he whispered.

She hadn’t told him about it, but of course he would know. She handed it to him. He grinned at how small it was in his fist.