Zoe shoved the story into the Do Not Open box. It didn't want to go in-it wrestled with her-but eventually it did. She imagined herself sitting on the box to keep the thing trapped.
But still she felt unsettled as they trudged through the wilderness. Between the silence and the snow and the burned-out forests sliding past, Zoe felt like she and Dallas were characters in some postapocalyptic movie-survivors of a deadly virus that only they were immune to.
Dallas didn't seem remotely nervous. He never did. He seemed stoked, giddy almost, oblivious. They were within arm's reach of each other, but still miles apart.
"It's this way," said Dallas, who'd been staring down at his GPS. He thrust a fist in the air: "Woot!"
He led her to the side of the road, and down the steep embankment. If there had ever been a trail, it was buried now. The slope was piled with fallen trees, which plows had shoved off the road. Their trunks were charred and blistered.
Zoe struggled to climb over the logs. The weight of her pack kept pulling her off balance.
Getting to the cave was supposed to be the easy part.
Dallas was just ahead of her. She tried to step exactly where he stepped. She started to sweat under her clothes. She was near the bottom of the embankment when her snowshoe landed on a rotten log.
She had a sick feeling, like the ground was disappearing.
It was.
She pitched forward, her arms churning helplessly.
Dallas was still babbling. He had no idea. Zoe fell toward his back, arms outstretched and grabbing at the air. A branch shot past her face. It missed her eye by an inch.
She crashed against Dallas.
He gave a grunt of surprise, then fell forward, too. The whole thing took only an instant. Less than an instant.
The sky spun above Zoe's head. She landed on her side in the snow. She heard a sharp, dry crack-the sound of a bone splintering-and waited for the pain, but it never came.
Dallas lay in a heap a few feet away. He'd tried to break his fall with his hands. He was clutching his wrist. His mouth was an O, and he was about to scream.
Dallas insisted that Zoe could crush Silver Teardrop without him. He was not going to wreck the day for her. It was too huge. He popped some Advil from his pack, and sat on his butt at the bottom of the embankment, his wrist plunged in the snow to stop the swelling. He swore he was fine-that it was probably just a sprain and that he'd only screamed because of the shock. Zoe argued with him, and lost.
They followed the creek bed awhile, and soon the GPS informed them that they'd arrived at their destination. Zoe saw nothing resembling a cave. The entrance had to be deep under snow.
She and Dallas removed their snowshoes and climbed down to the frozen creek. A couple hundred feet up, it ran into a rocky hill and slipped underground. Zoe helped Dallas off with his pack, took out a folding shovel, and began to clear the mouth of the cave. Dallas insisted on helping. He'd filled a pocket with snow, and he kept his right hand buried in it as he hacked away at the entrance with an ice ax. They worked slowly to conserve their energy. They didn't talk much, although at one point, Dallas looked at Zoe's yellow rubber gloves, shook his head, and said, "Can I please give you a better pair? I promise to give yours back if we have to wash any dishes."
Zoe's fingers were already so cold they seemed to be burning. She nodded so forcefully that Dallas cracked up.
When they'd cleared the snow, they found a dense wall of ice blocking the mouth of the cave, as if defending it from intruders. They chipped at it for half an hour. Zoe's arm began to ache. Shards of ice flew up at her face. But as the entrance of the cave emerged from the ice, she found she was grinning like an idiot. She locked eyes with Dallas. Even injured, he had the same loopy, blissed-out expression.
"Right?!" he said happily.
The map hadn't done justice to how narrow the entrance was. It was shaped roughly like a keyhole, and not much more than two feet wide.
"Man, that's tight," said Dallas. "I couldn't have gotten in there without scraping my junk off."
"Thank you for that image," said Zoe.
She and Dallas crouched down, and their headlamps flooded the tunnel. The ceiling was slick with condensation, the floor littered with broken rock and bubbles of calcite that cavers called popcorn. But none of this was as troubling as the fact that the tunnel never seemed to widen. Zoe would have to crawl down a meandering, 50-foot corridor on her side. Neither of them spoke, and while they were not speaking, a giant wood rat wandered into the light and stared up at them indifferently.
"You got this," said Dallas.
"I know," said Zoe. She thought of the tattoo on his shoulder. "'Never don't stop,' right?"
"Exactly!" said Dallas. "'Never, ever don't stop!'"
He hesitated.
"Unless," he said.
Zoe had never seen Dallas hesitate.
"Do not mess with my head two seconds before I go in there," she said. "Or I will scrape your junk off myself."
"No, no, no, you got this," said Dallas. "But. If you get in there and there's a shit-ton of running water, you gotta get out. Promise me you won't get all intrepid."
Zoe promised, but they both knew she was lying.
She put on her seat harness and descender. Dallas double-checked them so carefully it actually made her more nervous. He was acting like she was about to jump out of a plane.
Zoe tested her walkie-talkie. All she had to do now was stop stalling.
She took a last breath of fresh air.
The first ten feet of the cave were furry with ice. Her father's voice popped into her head, like a cartoon bubble: "That's hoarfrost, Zoe! Also known as white frost. Come on-know your frosts!"
She ducked into the tunnel, and lay down on her side. She shimmied forward like a snake, pushing a fat coil of rope and a small pack in front of her.
The passage was insanely claustrophobic. The walls were like a clamp.
She made it about five feet before the back of her neck was slick with sweat. She could already hear the waterfall pounding up ahead. She thought of the British cavers who drowned-she couldn't help it-and of the men who rushed from their pubs and tried to save them.
"Go back, Jim. They're dead."
She had to focus. That's the first thing you learned as a caver-you focus or you get hurt. Actually, the first thing you learned was that it was nuts to go caving without at least two other people. That way, if someone got injured, one person could stay with her and the other could run for help.
She twisted her legs so she could push with both feet. She dragged her body over the rubble and calcite. Even through a wet suit and four layers of clothes, she could feel them bite.
When the tunnel grew even narrower, she filled her lungs with air, then released it so her chest would shrink and she could keep crawling. She made it another five or six feet. She had to crane her neck to see where she was going. Her helmet bobbled and scraped along the ground. Every so often it scooped up a stone and she had to shake her head until it tumbled back out. In the distance, the waterfall grew louder. She'd forgotten how ferocious water sounded in an enclosed space-how it got your heart drumming even if you weren't afraid.
And then it struck her: she didn't have to be afraid. She was cold, her body was tense as a wire, she felt like she was crawling into an animal's throat-but she didn't have to be scared. She knew how to do this. She loved doing this.
And she wasn't even alone, not really. She had a whole support team in her brain: Dallas, Jonah, X. Even her dad, in a way.
Especially her dad.
"You're freakin' awesome! You can do this! You're my girl!"
She arrived at a bend in the tunnel and wriggled around it. She imagined she was a superhero who could transform into water or molten steel-who could flow through the rock and then reconstitute at will.
Her stupid grin was back.
Suddenly, the walkie-talkie trilled. By the time Zoe finished the laborious task of taking off her glove and fishing the thing out of her pack, it had stopped. Annoyed, she called Dallas back.
"I'm being molten steel!" she said. "What could you possibly want?"
There was a pause during which Dallas presumably tried to figure out what the hell she was talking about. When he answered, his voice was so distorted that she had to work to fill in the missing words.
"Where (you) at?" he said. "You killin' it? Can you (hear the) water?"
"Of course I'm killin' it," she told him. "Go away!"
She slid the walkie-talkie back into her pack, wiped her nose, and put her glove back on. Even in that brief interval, her hand had become stiff with the cold, and she had to flex her fingers to get some life back in them.
Just ahead, a thousand daddy longlegs hung from the ceiling in a clump, their legs packed in such a dense mass that they looked like dirty hair. Zoe was used to spiders, but she was surprised to see them so late in February. She slid under them and squinted up. She heard her father's voice again: "Daddy longlegs aren't spiders, Zoe! They're Opiliones! Come on-this is Insects 101!"
When she was small-five, maybe? six?-her dad gave her an ecstatic lecture about this stuff. There were two things she'd always remembered. The first was how her father's face glowed with excitement. The second was a gruesome tidbit about how daddy longlegs could play dead by detaching one of their legs to trick predators. They'd leave it behind-still twitching!-while they crawled in the opposite direction. Only her father could have thought that was a cool thing to tell a little kid. And yet it kind of was.