A shape a couple of feet away from me, on the floor of the cave. A series of lumps. I pray it’s another mess of roots. But it’s pulpy. Warm, even though my knees are now planted on something rock-hard and frosted-over. Every cell in my body rolls off this plane and into the next.

“Teddy?”

I focus my light around it, and that’s when I see it.

A hand, sticking out. Swollen, flecked with dirt.

I follow it with my light and see that the chest and head are buried in dirt, too. I hold the cell phone in one hand and scramble with the other to dig debris away from the head. I finally glimpse skin peeking out from below.

A nose. The red pug Santa Claus nose.

“Teddy!”

I stifle a cry, and this starts a coughing fit; I keep scrambling to uncover his face, and my fingers reach for his neck. I find it, there, slick with blood, and immediately I know the angle is wrong relative to the nose, but I hold my fingers there and wait for the telltale pulse.

And I wait.

There’s no movement, no life; I convince myself for a second that there might be something, but then I realize it’s my own nerves, my own accelerated heartbeat. I hear another groan of pain, and it’s coming from me, and I’m crying now as I rake the soil away from his head, that neck, and I see that it’s him; it’s Teddy; one eye closed, the other half-open and crusted with dirt, as if in a horrible wink—I set my phone down for a second, and wretch into my hand, but my throat and mouth are too dry and dirt-packed for anything to come up.

He’s okay. He’ll be okay. I can’t think otherwise right now. I can’t.

But most of all I can’t be around him. I can’t look at him.

I heave again into the dirt beside him.

Have courage, Tai.

I force myself to dig through his pockets for a cell phone. I find a wallet and nothing else.

I take two, three breaths. As deep as I can, though I feel like I’m getting more fiber than air. It’s hard, my throat burns worse with each one; if I could rip it out of my neck, I would. I shine my light around and force myself to crawl on my hands and knees to search for an exit of some kind, a variation in the cloddy walls of the den. I try to focus on the technical realities of the situation so I won’t melt down—I try to observe and analyze, like Nons would. Noni. I stifle a cry again because now it hurts too much. I throb.