She pricks her fingers, and the pain seizes her attention, drags it back to the present. She dips her fingers into the little pot of reeking sulfur, then swallows down sludgy saliva and hums the opening note to “On Breath,” wavering and embarrassed, and pinches her bloody fingers to the wick.

Heat springs to life between them, and Treila snatches her hand back, stunned.

It works.

It fucking works.

A candle is not a pick is not a door, but it is real, and it shouldn’t be, and Treila can’t look away.

She stays there, kneeling on the cold stone, for several minutes, staring until she sees that light burned into the inside of her eyelids. Then, and only then, does she remember what she’s here to do.

She wriggles out of her clothing once more, but this time remembers to pack food in the bundle she makes of it. Nothing to do about the water, though. She will have to move quickly.

The light should help with that.

She lowers onto her belly on the cold floor, picks up the candle once more, and places it as far inside the gap as she can. Then she clasps the bundle between her calves, and wriggles her way in after it.

The candle burns without protest. It illuminates jagged stone, fractures in the earth that she hadn’t noticed with just her fingers before. It both comforts her and makes her skin crawl; the earth feels so much closer and heavier, now that she can see it. In a brief fit of panic, she tries to blow the candle out—and it refuses.

So Treila squeezes her eyes shut, and continues forward by touch.

You’re acting like a child, she scolds herself, but it’s easier in the dark. There aren’t any turns, anyway, and without sight, the walls that press in on her feel only like boundaries, not like the tons of rock above her. They are simply lines she cannot cross, not because of man-built walls but because there simply is nothing on the other side.

She wriggles forward, legs grasping tight to her bundle, a rat in a nest. With only one hand free, she drags herself along, loses track of herself in the dark. She makes the trickiest turn without issue, barely noticing it. She’s through almost before she realizes it, reaching for the ground and finding nothing beneath her. She pitches forward, drops the candle, eyes snapping open. Carefully, Treila rights herself and drags the bundle up her body. She clutches it to her chest and picks her way down to the ledge below.