The type of earth does change as I wander deeper into one corner of the hole, but then I find myself at a dead end, an impenetrable corner. How can a sinkhole so deep exist? My fingers are frigid, broken-feeling from their scrabbling, and that’s when I realize. My body is cold-hot. I’m shivering, and my extremities are frozen but my skin is scraped clean off and my forehead’s a stovetop and—

The ice caves.

It has to be a forgotten path of the ice caves.

I remember the girl in the visitors’ center—what was her name? Mikki, she was Mikki—telling us that they were closed because the heat wave had caused some portions to melt.

I know where I am. They’re massive and spread out, but that knowledge is enough to give me a feeling of agency. Or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I scrape openings with my fingers, wearing them down to slashed nubs, and sniff blindly at every new type of earth in my path. I rub at my nose with the edge of my wrist—my ruined fingertips now too numb to help—and wipe away a crust on my face that feels an inch thick, not that I could really know, in this most private darkness. My air pipe feels chunky with the stuff, too, and I’m suddenly aware of how thirsty I am. I could seriously die of thirst. Forget it. I almost try to find a wet clod of earth to suck some moisture out of, but when I get it close to my mouth it smells like death, and I spit with a shiver and paw at my tongue like a cat. It’s a thirst that cannot be slaked.

Windmilling into a colder corner, I feel a rush—not so much air as a raw emotion, with claws and teeth that crunch down on me. I no longer feel completely alone, but this deep melancholy floods into the space that was occupied by panic.

A sudden chill rips through me. A draft from the ice caves? But there’s no movement, no gusts of air, not even faint. There’s a presence here. And I wonder if it’s Teddy’s spirit. My heart catches in my throat, one no more raw than the other.

Unless it’s me, and I’m dead already, I think. I push deeper into the cold with wild punches and swings through the branches of dirt. I take great jagged breaths. Dead people must be aware of their condition, right—

The earth shifts.

My stomach falls as I realize I could plummet even farther.

I could be buried forever in this cemetery in the backyard of the home where I was born.