Panic welled up in me, threatening to break loose. But I pushed down the hot, worrisome emotion, smothering it with cold logic. I was still alive, still breathing. Which meant I still had a chance, however small it might be.

I didn’t know how long I’d huddled there under the lip of rock, with the earth shaking below my body and the cavern collapsing in on top of me. Minutes had passed, maybe hours, for all I knew. But it was quiet now. The earth had quit trembling, and the stones had quit falling, which meant it was time to come back to myself.

I opened my eyes to blackness. Again, panic filled me, and once again, I forced it down. I hadn’t been afraid of the dark since I was a child. Besides, Tobias Dawson and his giants were dead. They couldn’t hurt me anymore.

There was nothing down here but me and the rocks and the water. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

So I began to blink, focus, and strain my eyes. Slowly, the blackness lessened to a midnight gray, and the world came back into focus. What I could see of it, anyway.

Which was nothing more than a big pile of rocks. They partially blocked the entrance to the small recess where I’d taken shelter from the cave-in. I stopped a minute to assess my body. Wiggled my fingers and toes, and went through the whole routine I’d done when I’d first woken up in the cavern. Sore, scraped, raw, aching, bone-weary.

Same as before, but everything was more or less in working order.

I reached down, searching for my purse and the healing supplies Jo-Jo Deveraux had given me. But the purse was long gone. So was my blond wig, and I didn’t feel the blue contacts in my eyes anymore. They’d popped out somewhere along the way. The only thing I had left were my black dress and stilettos, which were no help at all. So I blew out a breath, crawled forward, put my hands out, and shoved.

To my surprise, the rocks moved. Bits and pieces broke off like eggshells where I touched them, and I got to work. I don’t know how long I crouched there, half under the recess, scooping rocks out of the way so I could wiggle forward and get to my feet. Slow going given my various aches and pains, but eventually I cleared a space large enough for me to worm my way through. I got up on my knees first, then lurched forward, and used my legs to push myself up and out of the hole. The rocks tore into the thin fabric of my dress and scraped my stomach, but I didn’t care.