The Lies They Tell(43)

“Which way, Hadley?”

“Left.”

“Then you lead.” He stood back to let her pass, training the Maglite on the left tunnel. Hadley went, stepping gingerly, slipping and catching herself more than once as she led them through the passageway eroded by wave action and time. There was a sound; Pearl could hear it now, somewhere up ahead, a rushing that cycled on and on.

There was a slight vertical pitch to the tunnel, and Pearl put her hands out, touching the cool, moist walls. “How did you guys find this place?”

Bridges: “Tristan read about it online. Some site on sea caves.”

Hadley stopped, glancing back. “I don’t”—she lifted a shoulder helplessly—“which way?” Again, two more fissures opened to their left and right.

Enough; Hadley reminded Pearl of a little kid, waiting for permission to move. “Okay, what’s this big challenge, if we choose to accept it?”

Tristan turned to look at her. “Finding your way out.”

He switched off his Maglite. In nearly the same instant, the other boys followed suit.

Absolute blackness. Hadley cried out—“You guys!”—but the only sounds were footsteps over stone, the rush of bodies brushing by. Pearl nearly fell, her shoulder landing heavily against the wall. She clung there blindly, counting the seconds until a light switched back on, until someone called off the joke.

Hadley shouted, “You guys! Come back!”

“Hadley, wait!” Pearl took a step, slipped again, cursed. “Wait for me, okay?” She walked with her hands out until she collided with Hadley, groping for her arm. “Do you have your phone? We can use the light—”

“No, it’s in my bag!” Back on the boat. Which was exactly where Pearl had left hers. Hadley sniffed, shouted, “Bridges!” to a cacophony of echoes.

“Shhh! They’re not coming back.” Pearl’s own panic came out as frustration, her airways choked with the smell of subterranean dankness, bringing with it claustrophobia, a feeling of being buried miles, not yards, from fresh air. “Look, we didn’t walk that far from the opening—let’s just turn around and—”

“How? We can’t see anything! Bridges!”

“Stop yelling!” Hadley yanked her arm free, and this time Pearl did fall, catching herself on her hands and knees with a whoosh of breath. The other girl’s footsteps moved away, shuffling and uneven. “Hadley, no—you don’t know where you’re going.”

The sound of Hadley’s hysterical breathing disappeared behind a wall of rock. She’d gone through one of the fissures ahead, and now Pearl was the one yelling, begging Hadley to stop, to stand still and she’d come find her. Somehow.

Nothing. Pearl sat up in the blackness, her heart trying to escape her chest. What if the boys were hiding up ahead, waiting for the moment to switch on their lights and laugh at her, sitting here, helpless, fighting tears? She folded her arms across her knees, the waterproof material rustling. Tristan’s jacket.

She dug into every pocket, and found something. Hard plastic, cylindrical. After some fumbling, hardly daring to hope, she hit the strike. A small jet of flame shot into existence.

A lighter. Now the clue seemed so obvious—what could be less Tristan-like than noticing when another person seemed cold? He’d planted the lighter in the jacket so she’d have it when the time came.

Almost giddy with her ability to see, Pearl went to the fissure on her right, peering in. The passageway stretched off to the right and left. She called Hadley’s name.

If there was an answer, it was so distant that it was covered by her own echoes. She didn’t want to go in there. She wanted to turn around and the follow the tunnel back to the cave arch, breathe clean air, wait for the boys to get bored with their game. But Hadley. She was down there somewhere, hysterical, totally blind.

Pearl chose left, still calling for the girl. Something crunched beneath her sandal, and she jerked the lighter down—a sea urchin, left behind by the tide.

The rushing sound was still there, growing louder. Whatever it was, she was heading right for it. At this point, anything seemed better than following an endless, curving rock wall, stumble-stepping over an unpredictable floor.

At first, she thought she was imagining the change in the darkness before her, the quality of pitch-black fading into deepest twilight. She let the lighter flame recede.

Another arch lay ahead. Pearl went through the opening. The chamber held a pool beneath the ledge where she stood, filling with tidewater from what sounded like a hundred unseen passages. As she watched, bluish light spread across the surface of the water, amorphous, fluctuating.

She sank into a sitting position, exhausted, for a time full of nothing but the light. She became aware of his presence gradually, a tightening of the skin at the back of her neck, an instinctive knowledge that she wasn’t alone.

The silhouette stood and made his way around the ledge to her, switching on his flashlight so that the beam swung at his feet. Tristan sank into a crouch beside her, and they both stared at the light below.

“What is it?” Her voice was hoarse.

“Bioluminescence. I think they’re ctenophores, comb jellies. They’ve been down there almost every time I’ve come.”

The light stretched and separated, living tissue pulling itself through the water by tiny cilia. She felt too exhausted to stand, too damp and chilled and sick of being underground. “We’ve got to find Hadley. She ran off before I could stop her.”