She lay on her back beside the small boulder she’d used.
“Everything’s spinning,” she mumbled. They knelt at June’s side. Abigail took her hand, laced their fingers. In the poor light, only the volume of blood hinted at the extent of damage June had managed to self-inflict. She groaned, her lips moving, searching for the strength to form words. “I couldn’t . . . stand it. They were all around me, trying to use me. Where’s Emmett?” She tried to call out to him, but his name miscarried in her throat.
“He’s not here right now,” Lawrence said.
“I’ll be with him soon?” she mouthed between wet breaths. “And Ty?”
“Who?”
“Their son,” Abigail said. “Yeah. Ty, too.”
“I wanna hear him laugh again.”
“You will, sweetie.” Abigail was crying, overcome by June’s deathbed desperation—wishful thinking and unanswerable questions begging answers, any semblance of truth be damned.
“He’s always been a little boy in my mind. You think he’s grown up into a—” She choked, then coughed, a mist of blood sputtering through the gaps between her teeth.
“Try not to talk,” Lawrence said.
“Will I still be his mom? I was for six beautiful . . .” She moaned, her eyes closing. Abigail placed her ear on June’s sternum, listening for the rise and fall of lungs expanding, deflating.
“I’m so sorry.” Lawrence wept. “This was my fault.”
June’s chest swelled, Abigail’s head lifting.
Then it fell—down, down—one long exhalation, all air expelled, and never rose again.
SIXTY-FOUR
A
t three in the afternoon, Abigail heard Lawrence say, “There’s light up ahead.”
The two of them entered the largest cavern yet, more than a hundred feet across, filled with enormous spires that rose from the floor. A spring bubbled out of a crack in the wall, speleothem deposits hanging like curtains from the high ceiling. They stood in the luminous shaft that angled down, bathing them in daylight. Forty feet above, a chimney bored through the ceiling, and Abigail saw a distant patch of gray at the end of it.
“Never get there,” Lawrence said. “Don’t even get your hopes up.” He walked over to the spring. “Abigail, bring your empty water bottle.” She went to her father and dug the Nalgene bottle out of her pack. Lawrence held the plastic lip against the rock, and with the bottle halfway full, he strode into the middle of the cavern and held it up to the natural light.
The water was cloudy, sediment already settling on the bottom. He sniffed it. “Potent sulfur smell.” He sipped the water, winced, and spit it out. “Very mineralized. Tastes bitter and acidic. Much stronger than the hot springs in Pagosa. I don’t know if this is even safe to drink.” Abigail gazed up at the window in the ceiling, beating back the despair. This was far worse than traveling through the dark zone, she decided. This was throwing it in your face, a glimpse of the unreachable—heaven from hell.
When they finally stopped for the day, a smothering depression had descended on them. It was suppertime, but there would be nothing more to eat than a nibble from the last granola bar, a sip or two of water. They would sleep in their damp and filthy clothes, in the cold, on a hard rock floor, and when they awoke, it would still be dark.
Abigail and Lawrence sat against the wall in a small room with a low ceiling, a space that resembled fifty other rooms they’d passed through during the last fifteen hours.
“We shouldn’t have left her there,” Abigail said.
“What could we do? Dragging her through the cave with us won’t bring her or Emmett back, will it?” Lawrence switched off his headlamp.
Abigail, desperate to hear his voice, anything to break the uncompromising black-hole silence, said, “You’ve found the remains of Abandon and you now know how they died, but you still don’t really understand what happened, do you?”
“Nope. And Quinn—if that’s really his name—throws a new wrench into the equation.”
“But knowing they all died in this cave?”
“My gut tells me that, like us, they were locked in here. Maybe by Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe. But the fact that the gold was locked in as well kind of refutes that theory.”
Sitting there in the dark, listening to him talk, Abigail felt shards of cold begin to prick her face, wondered if it might be the first sign of frostbite or hypothermia.
“Why do you think Quinn did this to us?” she said. “Any idea?”
“Beyond plain old greed? No. We should probably drink some water.”
Lawrence turned on his lamp, reached for the bottle. At first, Abigail mistook them for dust motes in the light beam, then realized these white things were actually snowflakes.
“Lawrence?” she said. “It’s snowing in here.”
He looked up. “Oh my God, I saw the chimney when we first came in, but it was already dark outside. I assumed it was just another blind shaft.” His headlamp spotlighted the hole in the ceiling, snow floating down through it, melting on the cave floor.
Abigail got up. “Lawrence, can you lift me up there?”
She straddled his shoulders and he stood slowly, his legs shuddering under the strain. “Scoot to the right. You’re crushing me into the ceiling.” Abigail peered up the narrow chimney, wondered how far to the surface, if it even stayed wide enough for her to get there. “Okay, let me down.” Lawrence bent his knees, eased back onto the
