The Ruins

will-'

'We're not supposed to leave for another week,' Amy said.

Jeff nodded.

'And then they'd have to come searching for us.'

Again, he nodded.

'So you're talking-what, a month?'

He shrugged. 'Maybe.'

Amy looked appalled by this. Her voice jumped a notch. 'We can't live here for a month, Jeff.'

'If we try to leave, they'll shoot us. That's the one thing we know for certain.'

'But what will we eat? How will we-'

'Maybe the Greeks will come,' Jeff said. 'They could come tomorrow, for all we know.'

'And then what? They'll just end up trapped here with us.'

Jeff shook his head. 'We'll keep someone posted at the base of the hill. To warn them away.'

'But those men won't let us. They'll force them-'

Again, Jeff shook his head. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'It wasn't until you stepped beyond the clearing that they made us climb the hill. In the beginning, they were trying to keep us away. I think they'll try to stop the Greeks from coming up, too. All we have to do is figure out a way to communicate to them, to let them know what's happened, so that they can go get help.'

'Pablo,' Eric said.

Jeff nodded. 'If we can get him to understand, then he can warn them off.'

They all turned and stared at Pablo. He'd emerged from the blue tent and was wandering around the hilltop. He seemed to be talking to himself, very softly, muttering. He had his hands in his pants pockets, his shoulders hunched. He didn't sense them watching him.

'Planes might fly over, too,' Jeff said. 'We can signal to them with something reflective. Or maybe pull up some of the vines, dry them out, start a fire. Three fires in a triangle-that's supposed to be a signal for help.'

He stopped talking then; he didn't have any more ideas. And neither Stacy nor the others had any ideas at all, so they just sat without speaking for a stretch. In the silence, Stacy gradually became aware of a strange chirping sound-steady, insistent, barely audible. A bird, she thought, then knew immediately she was wrong. No one else seemed to notice the noise, and she was turning to track its source when Pablo started yelling. He was jumping up and down beside the mine shaft, pointing into it.

'What's he doing?' Amy asked.

Stacy watched him pressing his hand to his head, to his ear, as if he were miming talking on a phone, and she sprang to her feet, started quickly toward him. 'Hurry,' she said to the others, waving for them to follow. She'd realized suddenly what that steady chirping was: somehow-miraculously, inexplicably-there was a cell phone ringing at the bottom of the hole.

Amy didn't believe it. She could hear the noise coming from the hole, and-along with the others-she had to admit it sounded like a cell phone, yet even so, she had no faith in it. Jeff had told her not to pack her own phone before they left; it would be too expensive to use in Mexico. But that didn't mean there weren't local networks, of course, and why shouldn't it be possible that what they were hearing was a phone linked to one of these? It should be possible-there was no reason for it not to be possible-and Amy struggled to convince herself of this. It wasn't working, though. Inside, in her heart, she'd already dropped into a place of doom, and the plaintive beeping coming from the darkness wasn't enough to pull her free. When she peered into the hole, what she imagined was not a phone calling out to them, but a baby bird, open-beaked, begging to be fed-chirrrp…chirrrp…chirrrp-a thing of need rather than assistance.

The others were enthusiastic, however, and who was Amy to question this? She stayed silent; she feigned hope along with the rest of them.

Pablo had already uncoiled a short length of rope from the windlass. He was wrapping it around his chest, tying it into a knot. It seemed he wanted them to lower him into the hole.

'He won't be able to answer it,' Eric said. 'We have to send someone who speaks Spanish.' He reached for the rope, but Pablo wouldn't relinquish it. He was tying one knot after another across his chest: big, sloppy tangles of hemp. It didn't look like he knew what he was doing.

'It doesn't matter,' Jeff said. 'He can bring it back up, and we'll try calling from here.'

The chirping stopped, and they stood over the hole, waiting, listening. After a long moment, it started up again. They all smiled at one another, and Pablo moved to the edge of the shaft, eager to begin his descent. The flowering vine had twined itself around the windlass, growing on the rope, the axle, the crank, the sawhorse and its little wheel; Jeff pulled much of it off, careful not to get the sap on his skin. Mathias had vanished into the blue tent. When he reappeared, he was carrying an oil lamp and a box of matches. He set the lamp on the ground beside the hole, scratched one of the matches into flame, and carefully lighted the wick. Then he handed the lamp to Pablo.

The windlass was a primitive piece of equipment: jerry-built, flimsy-looking. It sat beside the shaft on a small steel platform, which appeared to have been bolted somehow into the rock-hard dirt. Its barrel was mounted on an axle that was rusting in places and in definite need of greasing. The crank didn't have a brake to it; if it became necessary to hold it in place midway down or up, this would have to be accomplished by brute strength. Amy didn't believe the apparatus could support Pablo's weight; she thought he'd step into the open space above the hole and the entire contraption would give way. He'd drop into the darkness-fall and fall and fall-and they'd never see him again. But, after the exchange of many hand signals and gestures and pats of encouragement, when he finally began his descent, the windlass groaned, settling into its mount, and then started to turn, creaking loudly as Jeff and Eric strained against its hand crank, slowly lowering the Greek into the shaft.

It was working. And, despite herself, Amy felt her heart lift. Maybe it was a cell phone after all. Pablo would find it down there in the darkness; they'd hoist him back up and then call for help: the police, the American embassy, their parents. The beeping had stopped once more, and this time it didn't resume, but it didn't matter. It was down there. Amy was beginning to believe now-she wanted to believe, had given herself permission to believe-they were going to be saved. She stood beside the hole, peering over its edge, with Stacy on her right and Mathias across from her, watching Pablo drop foot by foot into the earth. His oil lamp illuminated the walls of the shaft: the dirt was black and pitted with rocks toward the top, but it became brown and then tan and then a deep orange-yellow as he descended. Ten feet, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and they still couldn't see the bottom. Pablo smiled up at them, dangling, one hand reaching out to steady himself against the shaft's wall. Amy and Stacy waved to him. But not Mathias. Mathias was staring at the slowly uncoiling rope.

'Stop!' he shouted suddenly, and everyone jumped.

Jeff and Eric were straining against the crank, both of them sweating already, their hair sticking to their foreheads. Amy could see the muscles standing out on Jeff's neck-taut, tendoned-and it gave her a sense of the immense tension on the rope, gravity grasping at the Greek, dragging him downward.

Mathias was growing frantic now, yelling, 'Pull him up! Pull him up!'

Jeff and Eric hesitated, uncertain. 'What?' Eric said, blinking at him stupidly.

'The vine,' Mathias shouted, his voice urgent, waving for them to start reeling Pablo back up. 'The rope.'

And then they saw it. Jeff had stripped most of the vine off the windlass, but not all of it. The tendrils he'd left behind had burrowed their way into the spool of rope and now, as the windlass turned, they were being crushed, their milky sap oozing out, darkening the rope's hemp, eating away at it.

Pablo shouted up to them, a short string of Greek words, a question, and Amy had a brief glimpse of him, swinging gently back and forth there, twenty-five feet down the shaft, the oil lamp in his hand; then she was rushing with Stacy and Mathias toward the crank, all of them struggling to help, getting in one another's way, putting their weight into it, the sap visibly burning into the rope now-implacably, too fast, faster than they could work. Pablo was just beginning to bump his way upward when there was an abrupt, gut-dropping jerk, and they fell forward onto one another, the windlass spinning wildly behind them, free of its weight. There was a long silence-too long, far too long-and then a thump they seemed to feel more than hear, a jump in the earth beneath them, which was followed an instant later by the shattering pop of the lamp. They scrambled to the hole, peered into it, but there was nothing for them to see.