Where She Fell Page 6

  Another thing to consider: If the myth exists, that could mean someone really came here and made it out, couldn’t it?

  “You should talk to Mary about the center-of-the-earth thing,” Grayson says. He fidgets with a hole in his jeans. “Because based on her research, we’re deeper than should be possible to withstand for both temperature and pressure, and she thinks we’re in some sort of anomaly, that we could keep going, all the way through the earth’s crust to the next layer.”

  “That’s totally insane.”

  He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m not a scientist. But she’s explained it before, and it makes sense. You’re into this geology stuff, right? You’ll probably understand it way more.”

  Okay, I know it’s not that big a deal he remembered I’m into geology, because it’s one of, like, four things he knows about me, but my insides dance anyway.

  “I guess I’ll have to ask her about it. Not like I don’t have plenty of time, right?” I attempt a smile but it falls flat.

  My future used to be wide open. There are so many schools in this country where I can study geology. So many good schools. And after that, infinite career options. No matter how much Sherri and Meg teased me about being a nerd, I was hopeful about that. I knew eventually, there’d be other people like me and things wouldn’t be so hard. Now, suddenly, the only thing in front of me is unending blackness. And it’s not even metaphorical blackness. If I leave this cavern, it will inhale me.

  I’m trapped, and the bleakness is so all-consuming, I can’t even think about it.

  This community was started nine years ago. Its first resident was completely alone down here but had found evidence of an old camp. Colleen told me that, when I was still lying here helplessly in bed. But when I asked who the founder was, she deftly changed the subject in a way that made me suspect an unpleasant death. Seems like a lot of people who’ve lived here have died.

  I can’t imagine being here for nine years. I can’t imagine being here for nine weeks.

  “How do you … keep going?” I ask in a soft, hesitant voice.

  Grayson hangs his head and a silence yawns between us for several seconds before he answers. “It’s different for everyone. But the only way I’ve found is to believe with my whole entire heart that, eventually, something will change. That this isn’t forever. Because if this is forever …”

  He doesn’t finish the sentence. And I don’t try to make him.

  “How are your ribs feeling?” Colleen asks the next morning. Or, what they’re calling morning. I’m keeping track of time with a mark in my journal every time I wake up.

  I press a hand to my side. “Okay. Less sore than yesterday.”

  “Good. Because you need to start learning our routine.” She smiles warmly. “You can follow me around for a little bit, and I’ll show you—”

  “I need an intern,” Mary interrupts.

  Colleen rolls not only her eyes but her entire head in Mary’s direction. “This isn’t a college campus. You don’t need an intern as much as the rest of us need to eat.”

  “Oh really?” Mary folds her arms, nostrils flaring. “My work hasn’t helped us out with that at all?”

  “Of course it has, or you wouldn’t still be doing it.”

  “Oh really?”

  Colleen sighs. “That’s not even the point, Mary. Eliza is healing and she needs to start learning how to be part of our community. You know how it works.”

  Mary stands firm, her sharp-angled chin jutted forward. “Eliza’s scientifically minded. She can do the menial stuff sometimes, but other times, I need her to—”

  “The menial stuff?” Colleen’s eyes could shoot lasers.

  Watching these two adult women fight—about me?—turns the stress fractures in my brain into stress ravines. Especially as Mary clearly lacks any amount of tact whatsoever and I can see this thing escalating real fast.

  “That sounds like a compromise,” Eleanor interrupts, actually inserting herself physically between the two women. Eleanor’s tall, taller than either of them. “Not everyone has to help our community in the exact same way. Eliza can do more than one thing.”

  “Glenn isn’t going to like this,” says Colleen.

  “Screw Glenn,” says Mary.

  I just stay where I am, sitting uselessly, fingertips prickling with anxiety. Eleanor doesn’t seem to know what else to say, either.

  “You can have her for a little while in the mornings,” Colleen says, glancing down at me with a slight frown. I feel like I’ve disappointed her somehow, even though all I did was exist.

  “Works for now.” Mary looks down at me, too, only her expression is more victorious.

  And just like that, I belong to Mary.

  She doesn’t give me a moment to catch my breath, either. She steers me at once to her workstation, and the grilling she gave me yesterday about everything I’ve ever learned continues. My head aches like it does after a particularly grueling test. And then she gets down to the point.

  “Did you reread your journal last night like I told you to?”

  “Yes,” I say, even though it’s a lie. I’ve been keeping the journal for, like, three days. Everything in it is still very fresh.

  “Good. And you still feel like you want to go home?”

  “Of course.” But I get a weird feeling in my stomach when I say that. I do, of course, but something deep within me whispers, No, you don’t. The second I get back to my tent this evening, I’m rereading that journal.

  Mary leans toward me, brow furrowed. “What’s making your face look like that?”

  I startle. “That’s what my face looks like.”

  “No, your expression. When you answered my question, it changed.”

  “Oh, um, I don’t know. I had a feeling like I was lying even though I wasn’t.”

  She rakes her fingers through her hair, loosening her ponytail messily. “I knew it. I knew you didn’t have long.”

  “Long before what?”

  She frowns. “Have you ever heard of nitrogen narcosis?”

  “It happens to divers, right? When they go too deep and they start to feel kind of drunk and, like, hallucinate and stuff?”

  “Exactly.” She seems pleased that I knew the answer, but there’s something wild about her still. “I have a theory that we’re experiencing something similar here. Not the same, or we’d all be acting erratically, there wouldn’t be a pattern. But something in the air down here, it makes us odd. It makes us believe we are happy here, but it also makes us anxious, paranoid.”

  “Have you told the others this?”

  She laughs dryly. “Did I mention paranoid? People don’t want to believe their minds aren’t under their control.”

  “That’s why you told me to keep rereading my journal. So I’ll remember.”

  She nods. “It sets in pretty fast. But you’re the best chance we’ve had in quite some time, Eliza. Our best chance to escape.”

  “But how?” It’s a lot of pressure. An overwhelming amount. “Even if I somehow don’t get trapped mentally, aren’t we still trapped physically?”

  “Maybe.” Mary’s cagey all of a sudden. “Or maybe we just haven’t looked in the right direction.”

  She glances at the covered tunnel in the floor.

  “Deeper?” I ask, eyebrows raised.

  She shrugs. “Worked for Jules Verne, didn’t it?”

  Yeah, in fiction. “Has anyone tried going down that tunnel?”

  “Oh, you can’t. There was a cave-in a while back, before I came. That’s why no one’s allowed down anymore.”

  Now that she mentions it, I remember Colleen telling me that, on my first day. To stay away from that tunnel; it wasn’t safe. There’s something to what Mary’s saying right now that makes sense to me, though. That makes me want to go deeper into this cave and see what happens.

  As though reading my mind, Mary says quietly, “You barely know me, Eliza, and I’m sure you don’t particularly trust me, but please h
ear this. If you want to leave here, there isn’t much time to figure things out. It will be difficult and it will be dangerous. But people who stay, they don’t last. We’re all going to die down here eventually, inevitably. It feels safe in our little cavern, but it isn’t. It doesn’t take long before leaving is the last thing on your mind. And the only thing you’ll have as a reminder that you once wanted to go will be your journal.”

  “You have a journal, and you obviously know that you once wanted to leave.” I fold my arms tight across my chest, holding in a heart that feels like it’s trying to flee. “Why don’t you go?”

  Mary’s entire body shudders. “I … Things are different for me. I can’t explain it. I want to say ‘you’ll understand,’ but the whole reason I’ve told you all of this is because I hope you never get to that point. There are people who would leave, if someone led. I promise you that.”

  I glance at the hide-covered tunnel again. I don’t like the implication in her words. That I have to somehow be a leader, be a hero. Everything I’ve done to get here in the first place makes me feel like such a follower. What was I thinking? I’ve always been so completely my own person. Meg didn’t always like it, but she understood it. Yet ever since Sherri came into our lives, everything’s changed. I’ve felt them both leaving me behind and I’ve been desperate not to let them. I haven’t been me—and even when I was, I’ve never been a leader. I don’t have the charisma to get others lining up behind me. I can barely talk to people.

  But I feel the urgency in Mary’s words. The desperation.

  And I might be starting to feel a little desperate, too.

  After my morning working with Mary, she gives me “lessons” in what she calls sign language. She says there may come a time when we need to speak without words, and she’s tried to convince the others of this but none of them have maintained interest. To be honest, I get why. I’m no expert, but I’m positive that this is a language she made up. And I’m not convinced that it’ll ever come in handy within the dark bowels of this cave system.

  I’ve got a low-grade headache by the end just from the sheer volume of mental activity I’ve already engaged in this morning.

  Lunch is sitting with Eleanor and Alice—half the colony went “scavenging” this morning and they’re not back yet, so no Grayson.

  “Colleen wants you to shadow me after lunch,” Eleanor says. “She said it seems like a good idea to keep you on the same tasks I’m doing for now since we’ve bonded.”

  I slide right by that thing about our bonding because it makes me embarrassingly pleased. “I promise not to slow you down.”

  She laughs and hooks her arm in mine. “I guarantee you’ll be just fine. Most of our day-to-day tasks aren’t so difficult, just time-consuming. First up this afternoon, moving dry wood in here from the river cave.”

  The wood thing is a never-ending cycle.

  There’s almost always someone in the river cave, keeping an eye out for stray driftwood. We wouldn’t die without it. Probably. But the purity of darkness within the cavern would cause madness, after a while. And, eventually, blindness, if we lasted long enough.

  “Is there a plan for if we run out of wood?” I ask.

  “Not really.” Eleanor gathers an armful. “We’ve never run out of wood, though. We get it here and we find it sometimes and we keep our fires small. We also use animal fat. In the fires and in our torches. I don’t know. It’s worked so far, and we kinda don’t have another option.”

  I don’t press further on the topic because she clearly doesn’t have answers for me, and I’m starting to feel annoying. Instead, I mirror her as she carries dried driftwood from the river cavern to the main cavern, dropping it in a messy pile in front of the neatly stacked supply that’s already in here. After that, we break the wood into tidier pieces, using a hatchet crafted from stone.

  “We used to have a real hatchet,” Eleanor says. “But it broke last year.”

  I hack at a piece of driftwood with the ax. It splits neatly. “This one seems to do the job pretty well.”

  Eleanor smiles. “It does indeed.”

  We work in silence for a few minutes. I want to bring up the concept of leaving here, but I’m too chicken. The words form in my head—If I left, would you come with me?—but they won’t form on my tongue.

  “I made it, you know,” Eleanor says. “The hatchet.”

  “Really?” I look at it anew. It’s rutted, primitive-looking, but the edge is sharp and the whole thing is solid and easy to grip. Never in a million years would I have the patience to make something like this. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Oh, my dad was so into how people made tools back in the day. I’ve been to a million exhibits and whatnot. More than any human should go to.” She blinks several times. “I always thought it was a ridiculous thing to be so interested in, but I guess not, huh?”

  “Was it just you and your dad?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Most of the time. I mean, he had a couple girlfriends over the years but none that stuck. My mom left when I was three. I don’t really remember her.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  She shrugs. “I mean, yeah, it’s a pretty crappy thing to do, but my dad and I had a really good life without her. If she didn’t want to be with us, I’m glad she didn’t stay.”

  “I guess that’s true.” This is my opportunity. She clearly misses her dad, loves him a lot. Now is when I should ask her. If I were to leave, would you leave, too? It’s right there, lodged in my throat like a pill swallowed wrong. Why can’t I say it? So what if she tells me no?

  “You must miss your dad a lot” is what comes out when I finally do say something. Well, it’s better than nothing.

  “I do.” She snaps a piece of driftwood crisply in half. “He was a really great dad.”

  The courage finally finds me. “You could still—”

  And, of course, I’m interrupted. The scavenging party has returned. They drop down from one of the upper tunnels, which has a rope ladder attached.

  “Oh excellent.” Eleanor hops up. “Come on! Let’s see if they found anything good. Or, you know, anything at all.”

  Scavenging, apparently, is a weekly activity. Anyone who wants to come along can join, and the group scours the upper tunnels and caverns for anything useful. When Colleen explained this to me, I asked her why they don’t also look for a way out.

  She didn’t even answer.

  We all gather around the returned scavengers, who are headed up by Glenn. He’s loving the attention, clearly. He seems to thrive on being the focal point of the colony, on being a hunter and a gatherer, on being needed. He’s unreasonably intense, though, and he creeps me out.

  “It was a good trip,” Glenn announces with a wide grin. He sets down a backpack—my backpack, I realize with a possessive jolt—that he’s filled with items. He takes them out one by one and everyone oohs and aahs like we’re watching a fireworks display.

  A (dead) flashlight.

  Shirt, shorts, and (ew) underwear.

  A packet of matches.

  Hiking boots.

  A book.

  A bottle of water, mostly empty.

  A chocolate bar.

  As everyone descends for a closer look and a bite of the chocolate bar, I swerve, fake-casually, off to the side, where Grayson stands.

  “Have fun?” I ask, ignoring the claws in my stomach and the fizz in my fingertips.

  “It’s always fun.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “You didn’t want any of the chocolate?”

  “I ate chocolate, like, a week ago. I’d rather let everyone else enjoy it. You?”

  “Can’t. I am a true loser: allergic to cocoa.”

  “Wow. I can’t really think of a worse allergy.”

  He laughs. “At least it’s easy enough to avoid. Not like gluten or dairy or nuts or something.”

  “True.” I pause. “Where did you find that stuff, anyway?”

  “It was, um … a person w
ho didn’t make it.”

  That’s … unpleasantly dark.

  “I know it’s awful to think about,” he goes on hurriedly. “I found it awful at first, and I still do, if I think about it too much. But not everyone makes it, and if they have stuff we can use … We leave them with dignity. We prop them up into a sitting position; it’s kind of like our own funeral rites.”

  “Dignity?” I keep my voice quiet, but the pitch is octaves higher than normal. “Grayson, you take their clothes; you take their underwear. You don’t leave them with dignity, you—” I cut myself off, thinking of those two skeletons I found. Bare to the bone. “Do you take their flesh?”

  “God, Eliza, no.” He looks utterly horrified. “We haven’t stooped to cannibalism, thanks.”

  “Sorry.” I run my hands roughly through my hair. “I’m sorry, I just—came across a couple of your corpses on my way here, and they were pretty much picked to the bone.”

  “Yeah.” He frowns. “Things decompose pretty fast here. And sometimes … other stuff eats what we don’t.”

  I shudder, not wanting to think about that at all. We both fidget uncomfortably for a moment. Grayson, luckily, is better at this than I am. “How’re your ribs feeling?” he asks.

  “Oh.” I press a hand lightly to my side. “Not bad. I can breathe now without feeling like my lung is collapsing, so that’s a plus.”

  “Well, if you’re feeling so much better,” he says, “then you should come with us tomorrow when we go hunting.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Inside, I’m laughing hysterically at the very thought, but outside, I hold it together.

  “Come on,” he insists, facing me, staring at me intently with his lovely green eyes. I feel a little bit faint. “It feels really good to get out of the colony sometimes. I know you’re feeling stir-crazy here. Plus, you love caves, right? Don’t you wanna explore?”

  “I don’t know,” I hedge. “I’ll think about it.”