The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(62)

In the silence, Zoe’s anxiety began to seep back in. She tried to clear her mind, but couldn’t. A story her dad had told her when she was 10 or 11 came back to her and the minute she remembered it, she couldn’t shake it. The story was about British cavers in the ’60s who got caught underground when a freak thunderstorm flooded their cave.

She’d never forgotten the details: Rescuers came running from their pubs. They built a dam, but it kept collapsing so they had to hold it together with their bodies. They worked through the night to pump out the water. Finally, they wriggled into a small tunnel to search for survivors. Deep in the cave, the lead rescuer found the bodies of two dead cavers blocking the way. He had to crawl over them to find the others. They were just corpses now, too. The last of them had squeezed into a tight fissure in a desperate hunt for air. The lead rescuer began his retreat, knowing all was lost. The volunteers behind him were crying and throwing up in the passageway. He said to the first one he saw, “Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”

Dallas noticed that Zoe wasn’t talking.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

“The British cavers,” she said.

“The dead guys in the tunnel—those British cavers?” he said. There wasn’t a caving legend that Dallas didn’t know. “That’s a horrible thing to think about, dawg. Hit Delete right now. Seriously.”

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.