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.
“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.