A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(6)

“So we stay?” I ask, when he says we’ll be safe.

“You okay with that?”

“I will be after I double-check the perimeter.”

He chuckles. “Good idea.”

He makes his way along the walls, ensuring we didn’t miss an opening. I crawl to the back passage and push my head and shoulders through.

I call, “It’s not big enough for a bear or cat. We’re—”

A voice echoes through the passage. I hesitate, thinking it’s my own. But the voice comes again, and it’s definitely not mine.

I withdraw quickly and whisper, “Listen.”

He pokes his head in. After a moment, he pulls back, swearing under his breath.

“I’m not imagining it, then,” I say.

“No. Guess we’re making a moonlight trek to Rockton after all.”

He’s right. Even if it’s only settlers, we can’t take a chance. Time to pack and go.

As I roll up my blankets, the voice comes again, and this time I catch “Hello?” It sounds like a woman.

I motion to Anders that I’m going to crawl farther along that passage. He nods. The voice is too far away to be an immediate danger.

I reach a turn and shimmy around it, which requires a move Petra calls “humping the wall.” In other words, rolling onto my side and, well, making that particular motion to wriggle around a ninety-degree angle. The moment I turn the corner, I can distinguish words.

“Hello?” she calls. “I heard voices. Please, if you can hear me, please, I need…”

The rest trails off. I lie on the floor, listening and considering. Then I shimmy past that corner again and back all the way out.

“It’s a woman,” I say. “She heard us talking, and I think she’s calling for help.”

“Shit.” Anders rubs a hand over his face.

“Have the hostiles ever lured people in like that? As a trap?”

“Not since I’ve been here. But there’s always a first time.”

I echo his curses.

“Either way,” he says, “we might not even be able to get to her. I say we see how close we can get and assess the situation.”





FOUR

First, Anders struggles to hump the curve. Then we hit a squeeze even I don’t dare try. We back up and resume packing to leave, but I still hear that voice, and even if I can’t make out the words, my imagination fills them in.

“There was a passage off the one we came in through,” I say.

“You want to give it a try?”

“I’m a chump, right?”

He smiles. “Then we both are, ’cause I was just going to suggest we try to find another way before we give up.”

“It’s probably a trap.”

“Yep.”

“That path up the hillside…” I say. “At the time, I was crowing about our good luck, finding a natural path straight to the cave entrance. Now I’m thinking it was a little too lucky.”

“Yep.”

“So we try to get closer?”

“Yep.”

We take the other passage. It’s slow going. We catch the occasional sound of a voice, but it echoes too much to track. Each time we try a new route, we mark it so we don’t get lost. We crawl around for at least an hour, and the woman has gone silent. I’m about to say we should just give up when I catch soft crying. Then I see light.

We flick our own light off fast. In front of me, Anders picks his way toward the crying until I see an opening ahead, and he stops so fast I bash into him. He drops onto his stomach so I can see over him. The passage ends in a cavern, and in that cavern, there’s a coiled rope and an old wooden crate. The light, though, seems too dim to be coming from there.

Anders motions that he’s going to check it out, and he crawls on his belly, knife in hand. Then he stops. At least a minute ticks by as I watch him leaning and peering before he inches through.

I creep along until I can see the cavern. It’s no bigger than the first one we’d stopped in. There’s the crate and the rope and … a hole in the floor. That’s where the light is coming from—that hole. Anders is edging around it, trying to peer down without leaning over.

As I crawl through, I realize the rope is attached to an old metal hook, driven into the rock. It’s knotted for scaling down the hole, but right now it’s coiled at the top. Yet that soft crying comes from below. From inside the hole.

It’s a trap. It has to be. Otherwise …

In the city, I’d think this was a hostage situation. But out here, that makes no sense.

If it’s not a trap, then someone is trapped. A settler or a hostile, or even just an adventurer, too naive to realize she’s a few months out of season for adventuring.

There. A logical explanation. Either a trap or an accident. As for that shiver up my spine, the voice whispering that isn’t what this looks like? Clearly mistaken.

I motion to Anders that I’ll take a closer look. I try to peer down that shaft without being seen, but there’s no way to position myself in shadow—the light is right in the center of the hole. When I peek over the edge, she sees me. And I see her, and the second I do, I know my brain has made a mistake. My gut did not.

She wears what looks like men’s clothing, oversized and ragged, and she’s standing at the base of a drop at least fifteen feet straight down to a cavern no more than five feet in diameter, the bottom covered in furs. There’s a crate, like the one up here. Hers has a candle burning on it. Nothing more. Just a woman and furs and a crate and a candle. Her long hair is matted, her face streaked with dirt, tear tracks running through it.