Zoe shook her head and smiled. Her helmet did its dance.
She'd already lost track of how long she'd been in the cave. Time had a way of shattering underground. The waterfall roared even louder now. She kept crawling in the dark, telling herself to focus.
The tunnel finally widened, then stopped at the edge of the giant drop that led down to the Chandelier Room. Zoe rolled onto her stomach. She lowered her head to the ground, and exhaled gratefully, like a swimmer who had just barely made it back to the beach. Her neck ached. The left side of her body felt ravaged. She dreaded looking at the bruises. Were superheroes supposed to get this tired?
She rotated her head slowly, her headlamp sweeping the walls. There were bolts on either side of her that another caver had left in the rock-a primary and a backup. She unspooled her rope and rigged up with loops like bunny ears. She struck the bolts with a buckle and leaned close to hear the solid, reassuring ping.
There were still five feet between Zoe and the giant shaft that plunged down to the Chandelier Room. She pushed herself up into a sort of Gollum-like crouch, and inched toward it, hoping the waterfall wouldn't be as ferocious as it sounded.
The shaft was roughly circular. Its walls were jagged and embedded with pockets of ice that glinted in the light of Zoe's headlamp. Off to her right, an underground river burst through an icy hole in the wall, then tumbled down, like Rapunzel's hair. It wasn't the trickle that she and Dallas had hoped for. She was glad he wasn't there to say, Forget it, dawg, this is waaaay too intrepid. She was sure that if she rappelled straight down, she could avoid most of the spray.
She tested the bolts in the wall again, though it didn't tell her anything definitive: if they were going to pop out, they were going to pop out when she was hanging in midair. She hooked herself onto the rope. She took a deep breath and turned around.
She stepped backward off the edge.
She could have cried with joy when the soles of her boots found the wall. She began to descend. Slowly. Cautiously. Just a couple of feet at a time. Her right hand never left the brake. A cold cloud of mist from the waterfall enveloped her. The noise was immense. Her heart thumped even louder. It was like she was being chased.
She tried to ignore the waterfall, but it was shooting out of the wall with the force of a fire hydrant. Water splashed her boots as she descended. The spray crept up her body, drenching her legs, her arms, her chest. She was grateful for the wet suit beneath her clothes. She fought the impulse to drop faster, to drop farther, to free-fall to the bottom.
The water found her neck now. Her face. It was so frigid it felt like a claw against her skin. She twisted away. She needed a new plan. She needed to get farther away from the falls.
Zoe began inching sideways, away from the torrent. She was descending at an angle now, like a pendulum. The muscles in her legs were objecting, tensing up, sending out warning shots of pain. The rope was scraping against the rocks. Zoe crept five or six feet sideways, but still the spray lashed at her. If she could just make it a couple more feet. She reached out with the toe of her right boot.
It landed on ice.
She slipped. Her heart flew into her mouth.
She felt herself being yanked back toward the falls, her body twirling like a top. She couldn't stop-couldn't find anything to grab. Up above her, the rope sawed against the edge of the cliff.
Zoe was swinging so hard she was pulled under the falls. The water pounded her back, furious and cold. It banged on her rickety helmet. It soaked every part of her. She tried to move, to push off the wall, to do something, anything, but her body was rigid with shock, and suddenly there was a terrible flower blooming in her head.
This is how my father died-terrified and swinging on a rope.
At last, the rope pulled her back out of the water, as if it had all been gravity's way of telling her that the only way down was straight. Zoe hung suspended for a moment, tears clouding her eyes. She felt shaken, stupid, humiliated. The walkie-talkie trilled in her pack. Did Dallas somehow know what had happened? Had she shouted and not known it? Had he heard her? He couldn't have.
She didn't answer. Dallas would hear the shakiness in her voice and tell her to come out. She was fine now. She was fine. But for a sliver of a moment it'd felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and she was hurtling downward.
She took the glove off her right hand, tearing at the Velcro with her teeth. She dropped it into the darkness.
She inspected her harness and her brake. The metal was so cold it seemed electrically charged. She brushed the ice off everything as best she could. Her heart was galloping.
She couldn't get the thought of her father out of her head.
This is how he died.
She found herself staring at her bare right hand, weirdly fascinated by it, as if it didn't belong to her.
There'd been blood and skin on her dad's rope. Was it from his hands? From his neck? Had the rope wound around his throat? Had it choked him-suffocated him-like he was a baby trying to be born?
She was sobbing now. She would have made an awful noise if there hadn't been a torrent of water spilling along with her tears.
The walkie-talkie rang again, and she answered it angrily: "Can you please leave me alone, please!"
"Can I (what)?" said Dallas.
The explosions of static were worse than ever.
"Can you please leave me alone for a second!" she said.
"Can I what for a what?" said Dallas.
Screw it, she thought.
Zoe dropped the walkie-talkie now, too. She didn't hear it land, but pictured it smashing on the rock down below, the battery springing out and skittering across the floor of the cave. She turned off her headlamp. She just wanted to hang in the dark a moment. She didn't care about the spray from the waterfall. She couldn't get any wetter.
The darkness was absolute. It was as if the water, with its astonishing noise, had decimated all her other senses.
She thought of her dad. She thought of X. She thought of how they'd both be extremely concerned about the borderline-crazy adventure she was embarked on. It was so strange that they would never meet. One had exited her life just as the other entered it. They'd brushed past each other, missing each other by moments.
Zoe twisted slowly on the rope in the dark. She concentrated on the water now. She tried to pick it apart, tried to hear every tiny sound in the middle of the roar. She let the relentlessness of the noise drive all thoughts out of her head-to douse them like fires, one after the other. Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing got deeper.
Later-she couldn't have said how long it had been-she switched her headlamp back on, and continued her descent. The ice in the rock sparkled all the way down.
The Chandelier Room was breathtaking-Zoe's eyes didn't know what to devour first. In the middle of the chamber, there was a giant boulder encased in translucent ice. The waterfall struck it dead center, then splashed in every direction like a demented fountain. The walls were coated in ice as well. Here, though, the ice was as thick and wavy as cake frosting, and it glowed with the sleepy, blue-green light of an aquarium. Every 20 feet or so, there were massive, almost melted-looking columns of rock. (Her father wouldn't shut up today: "They're not columns of rock, Zoe! They're limestone pillars! Come on-respect your rocks!")
Zoe stepped carefully on the frozen floor, running her bare hands along every surface, then shoving them inside her jacket to warm. She was transfixed. Everything in the chamber seemed as ancient as the earth, yet somehow still evolving, still breathing, still being formed. And just when Zoe thought the Chandelier Room couldn't get any more mesmerizing …
She looked up.
The ceiling was hung with icicles of every conceivable size. It looked like an upside-down forest, like some massive musical instrument that had yet to be invented. It was gorgeous. She swept her eyes along the ice, greedily. Her headlamp made the whole thing glow.
It was only when Zoe felt something crunch under her feet-a shard of plastic from the walkie-talkie-that she remembered Dallas. He'd be up there, pacing around with his injured hand in his pocket, possibly freaking out. The walkie-talkie was busted beyond repair but she collected all the bits she could find and stuffed them in her pack.
She returned to where the rope hung down the shaft. It was covered with ice, so she thwacked it against the wall like she was beating a rug. Looking up, she could see fragments of the water-little jets and beads-catch the light of her headlamp as they fell.
She hooked herself onto the rope once more, and began to rise.
Zoe crawled out of the cave 20 minutes later, dizzy and drenched. The crystals of frost at the entrance floated down on her shoulders like a good-bye present.
She struggled to her feet, dropped her pack in the snow, and gulped in as much air as her lungs could hold. Her legs felt rickety. She wobbled like a newborn colt for the first few steps. Otherwise, she felt lighter in every way. She felt lifted.
Dallas stepped toward her, beaming and offering an orange towel from his pack. He seemed not to know if he should hug her, so Zoe threw her arms around him and squeezed gratefully.