The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(63)

“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!”