crashing down and crush her at the first loud noise or brush of air. Being wired with a panic button on a hair trigger was not reassuring, but, with luck, it would never be pressed. If it was…
I'll burn that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. Until then she could think again; there was room to care for others. She could go on.
Rapidly she began paying out rope, descending to the bottom of Boulder Falls, where Iverson welcomed her with the light from a small battery-powered star.
3
The hellish pace set by Iverson was a godsend. Traversing the rugged subterranean landscape took all of Anna's concentration and all of her skills. The interior of the planet did not seem governed by the same laws of physics as its exterior. Or perhaps it was just that the route was non-negotiable. One couldn't pick and choose passes or climbs; one went where there was no dirt in the way.
Such were the demands of travel that majesty and grandeur were lost. Anna wasn't sorry. Hard physical work was a balm for her soul. Vast slopes of scree were painstakingly descended. Boxcars of stone, upended and angled in a hundred ways, stacked against each other until they formed smaller passages of their own. Hands were used like an extra pair of feet for balance. Chunks of stone slid underfoot, and ankle-breaking traps opened between rocks the size and stability of bowling balls.
Names went by with the black velvet-clad scenery: Colorado Room, seen as a series of slides framed by the limiting scope of headlamps; Glacier Bay, great pale glaciers calving in a sea of night. Windy City, Rim City.
Anna used her body in a way she seldom had since childhood. Though occasionally alarmed at being called out of an early and long retirement, her muscles gloried in the exercise. As she bent and stretched, hopped from boulder to boulder in faltering and moveable light, slid down talus slopes on butt and heels, hauled herself up rocks, scrabbling with fingers and toes for purchase, it came home to her how stultifying the dignified world of grown-ups had allowed itself to become. How limiting and unsatisfying to deny our simian ancestry by walking always upright and sitting in chairs, throwing away natural powers for some inherited code of decorum.
Wriggling through a narrow chimney, knees and elbows thrust against the rock, she remembered a story she'd been told by a friend who led canoe trips for Outward Bound in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. He'd taken a group of physically disabled people on a two-week trip. It wasn't a luxury vacation. Everybody did what they could, filling in the gaps for one another.
The story that stuck in Anna's mind was of a man who suffered from a crippling case of muscular dystrophy. In his late twenties, he'd been wheelchair bound over half his life. His greatest fear was that his house would catch fire. If he couldn't get to his wheelchair, he would burn to death.
During the trip this man was unable to carry canoes or gear on the many rough portages. But he chose not to be a burden to the others. He discovered an untapped talent. Clad in protective clothes, he crawled and inched and slithered, dragging his legs over fallen logs, across rocky beaches, and through weed-choked ravines.
By the end of his sojourn in the wilderness, his fear of burning to death in his own home was gone. 'I can crawl out,' he said. 'I never thought of it. Shoot, I could crawl the six miles to the fire station if I had to.' He'd regained some of his lost mobility.
The guy would have made a heck of a caver.
They'd been traveling ninety minutes, had gone less than three quarters of a mile, and had ventured into the earth four hundred feet, when they came to the North Rift.
The rift was a great crack running northwest to southeast, splitting the known world of the cave as a cleaver might halve a melon. Pointing with his light, Oscar picked out a hand line, threaded his rack, and descended. At the T-shaped junction where passage met rift, the cut was only fifteen feet deep. Moments later he was climbing up the far side. A cringing, spine-scraping crawl later they emerged next to a huge fissure. The Rift gone mad.
'Jesus,' Anna breathed as she cleared the last tumble of rock. Iverson was seated on a square block of breakdown the size of a refrigerator. The stone was sheared as neatly as if a gargantuan mason had done it with a chisel. Pieces, varying in size, clung to the edge of the precipice. She scratched her way up to sit gingerly beside Oscar, her hands hooked on the back of their limestone couch lest the pull of the deeps should suck her down. 'Shouldn't there be a sign here that reads 'Beyond This Point Be Monsters'?'
'Left goes up to the North Rift,' Iverson said. 'Right is the main route to the rest of the cave. We go right.'
The word 'impassable' came to mind. Above, stone vanished into the gloom. Blocks the size of rooms jutted from the walls. Where she and Iverson sat, it was about thirty feet wide, the far side smooth, vertical, offering nothing in the way of an inducement to cross.
'Right?' Anna said.
'Right.'
'How?'
Iverson smiled. 'There.' He painted a curved surface of rock above her with his light. The wall of the rift bulged slightly and bent around in a southwesterly direction. On closer examination, Anna could see where a rope had been strung. The trail-using the term loosely-was suspended along the wall eight or ten feet above where they sat. Pitons, bolts were frowned upon in wild caves. Driving these man-made anchors into living stone left scars. The rope above them made use of a motley assortment of natural anchors: BFRs, Big Fucking Rocks; jug handles, natural holes in the rock; and stalagmites.
Below, the rift fell away in a rugged canyon. Light served only to beckon forth the shadows and veil secrets. It struck her as odd that all of it-this tremendous gorge, the seeps and falls and spires-could continue to exist in the total absence of light and life. Like the philosophical tree falling in the theoretical forest, with no one to hear, not so much as a gnat or a dung beetle to take note, did it really exist? Apparently it did. 'How deep?' she asked.
'Here? Maybe one hundred twenty-five feet or so. It varies, of course. Nobody's ever really done much exploring down there.'
As far as Anna was concerned, that left it wide open as a habitat for impossible creatures from the underworld. It was no mystery why the ancients peopled caves with evil spirits and placed their hells deep within the earth.
'Definitely a No Falling Zone,' Iverson said mildly.
Anna turned her light on his face. He was smiling with what looked to her like genuine delight. 'You really are a creepy person, you know that, don't you?'
Holden Tillman eased up beside them and swung his legs over the edge. Anna kept all her appendages on solid ground, her legs folded neatly under her, tailor-fashion.
'So,' Holden said, uncapping his water bottle and pausing for a long pull. Anna followed suit, checking first to reassure herself there wasn't a 'P' scrawled on the cap.
'Freak-Out Traverse,' Holden said, and waved toward the roped cliff face with his water bottle.
'Gee, why do you think they call it that?' Anna asked.
Holden didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. 'Interesting story,' he said. 'See below the rope there? That great, big, old, solid-looking poke-outance, just exactly the right size to wrap your arms around and hang on to for dear life?'
He traced the rock outcrop he described with a golden finger of lamplight. It was the obvious place to make the traverse. Anna had wondered about the trail being set so high above the starting point.
'We got here. Me and a caver named Ron. I, being the gentleman that I am, insisted Ron have the first crack at it. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'After you, my dear Holden.' 'I wouldn't dream of it. After you,' says me. So he goes first. Ron gets to that big, old, friendly rock and spreadeagles himself across it like a love-struck starfish. And that sucker starts to move. The thing is on ball bearings. Hence 'Freak Out Traverse.' I let Ron name it. I'm just naturally generous that way.'
Even in the wandering half-light, Anna noted the twinkle in his eyes.
'Everybody rested and rejuvenated?' Iverson asked.
A sheer curtain of panic, like heat rising from the desert, quivered behind Anna's breastbone; panic not at the traverse but at going on instead of turning back. Gideon, the horse she'd ridden on backcountry patrol when she
