I try Tai’s and Teddy’s phones as I run, knees cut up and lungs breathless. Neither of them answers—Tai’s phone rolls to voice mail. I’m almost by the cabin, hearing firemen shouting over the blaze, when Saxim runs toward me. She settles a hand on my shoulder. Her face is badly bruised.

It’s then that I try Teddy’s satellite phone again and someone picks up.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

I would know her voice anywhere, even if it’s ragged and flat. Tai.

Because someone has followed her, we find her.

We track the phone signal and are led to a spot that looks like any other: brambles, roots, packed dirt. First the police question their geolocation. But then a detective notices the disturbed soil, and after speaking with a man from the Ministry of the Environment, they tell me there’s a risk the floor will cave in and flood the pocket below. Suffocating Tai and the others.

There’s nothing I can do then but sit and wait.

They bring in a team of people dressed in neon and tethered to long ropes to delicately excavate. It takes hours before the area is stable enough for someone to venture down there and find Tai. Special representatives from the Viloxin fire department and the ministry of the environment pull her, packed in dirt, out of the mouth of this unknown, unexplored artery of the ice caves.

For once in my life, she looks utterly unfamiliar—like a small animal, her fine bones covered in uneven swaths of flesh and blood and soil. But then she opens her eyes, those navy-blue eyes, and I lunge to go hug her, only for five men to try to stop me.

“She’s dead,” I hear her say, before breaking into wet sobs. That’s when I begin to understand.

“I need to talk to my sister.”

“We must treat her injuries first,” a man in a suit with a white clipboard explains.

He pulls me back up to the house, to a triage tent they’d set up beside a couple of vans. It looks just like it did after Mama disappeared— or ran, I should say.

I am definitely eight years old again, shivering in the strange heat on the messy lawn.