Chapter 10

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[n4biS]

I awoke. The smell of forest lingered from a fading dream. But how? I was lost, miles underground. Yet still, it lingered. I breathed in deep. The only sound in this damned cave was my own breath, but it touched my ears like birdsong, like the rain striking leaves, like the wind.

Maybe there was another way out. Seeing I was down here already, I had nothing to lose by trying to find it.

I advanced, slowly on my hands and knees, searching the humus for something out of place, sensing every texture, every fragment, every grain of sand. To soothe my isolation, I imagined Jarrad beside me, wondering the way he wonders: How could such fresh soil be down so deep?

Maybe it couldn’t, not without help. What else would my love wonder about this place?

I shouted again and guessed by how my voice bounced off the walls that I was in a space no bigger than the living room of the cottage. There was no way I could know for sure, but the idea was comforting. If I thought about it hard enough, I could see it around me—the rug, the fireplace, the table where we had dinner, the couch where I fell asleep, the kitchen where Jarrad prepared our meals. Spectres, all of them, but they were vivid enough in the dark.

I was in the living room, just the living room, and all I needed to find my bearings was an anchor along a wall. But I found nothing.

I shouted once more, and the walls seemed neither nearer nor further away, as if I hadn’t moved at all. I crawled faster still, expecting at any moment to collide head-first with bare rock. Then my knuckles grazed something solid.

Something that rolled away when I touched it. It moved too easily to be a rock.

My trembling hands searched the humus. Could it have been a pinecone? It sure didn’t seem like one, and something shaped like a pinecone wouldn’t roll away. Maybe it was the shell of a large nut. If there was stuff from the surface down here, I was sure to find a way out.

The object wasn’t far. My fingers gripped its cool, dry form and pulled it close, and it made itself known in a most disgusting way.