pounding.
“What happened up there?” asked Bronwyn. “Did you catch the pigeon?”
“We got it,” I said as Emma and Horace reached the bottom, and a cheer went up among our friends. “That’s Melina,” I said, pointing up at her, and that was all the time for introductions we had. Melina was still at the top of the steps, fooling with something. “Come on!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Buying us time!” she shouted back, and then she pulled shut and locked a wooden lid that capped the well, closing out the last rays of light. As she climbed down in darkness, I explained about the hollows that were chasing us. In my panicked state, this came out as “
“How can we run if we can’t see?!” Enoch shouted. “Light a flame, Emma!”
She’d been holding off because of my warning back in the attic.
Now seemed like a good time to reinforce that, so I grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t! They’ll be able to pinpoint us too easily!” Our best hope, I thought, was to lose them in this forking maze of tunnels.
“But we can’t just run blindly in the dark!” said Emma.
“Of course,” said the younger echolocator.
“We can,” said the older.
Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me—it’s Melina!”
Joel-and-Peter said:
“We thought you were—”
“Dead every last—”
“One of you.”
“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”
So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.
We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.
“They’re in!” I shouted.
I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels—not enough to lose
