“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!”
When she was small—five, maybe? six?—her dad gave her an ecstatic lecture about this stuff. There were two things she’d always remembered. The first was how her father’s face glowed with excitement. The second was a gruesome tidbit about how daddy longlegs could play dead by detaching one of their legs to trick predators. They’d leave it behind—still twitching!—while they crawled in the opposite direction. Only her father could have thought that was a cool thing to tell a little kid. And yet it kind of was.
Zoe shook her head and smiled. Her helmet did its dance.
She’d already lost track of how long she’d been in the cave. Time had a way of shattering underground. The waterfall roared even louder now. She kept crawling in the dark, telling herself to focus.
The tunnel finally widened, then stopped at the edge of the giant drop that led down to the Chandelier Room. Zoe rolled onto her stomach. She lowered her head to the ground, and exhaled gratefully, like a swimmer who had just barely made it back to the beach. Her neck ached. The left side of her body felt ravaged. She dreaded looking at the bruises. Were superheroes supposed to get this tired?
She rotated her head slowly, her headlamp sweeping the walls. There were bolts on either side of her that another caver had left in the rock—a primary and a backup. She unspooled her rope and rigged up with loops like bunny ears. She struck the bolts with a buckle and leaned close to hear the solid, reassuring ping.
There were still five feet between Zoe and the giant shaft that plunged down to the Chandelier Room. She pushed herself up into a sort of Gollum-like crouch, and inched toward it, hoping the waterfall wouldn’t be as ferocious as it sounded.
The shaft was roughly circular. Its walls were jagged and embedded with pockets of ice that glinted in the light of Zoe’s headlamp. Off to her right, an underground river burst through an icy hole in the wall, then tumbled down, like Rapunzel’s hair. It wasn’t the trickle that she and Dallas had hoped for. She was glad he wasn’t there to say, Forget it, dawg, this is waaaay too intrepid. She was sure that if she rappelled straight down, she could avoid most of the spray.
She tested the bolts in the wall again, though it didn’t tell her anything definitive: if they were going to pop out, they were going to pop out when she was hanging in midair. She hooked herself onto the rope. She took a deep breath and turned around.
She stepped backward off the edge.
She could have cried with joy when the soles of her boots found the wall. She began to descend. Slowly. Cautiously. Just a couple of feet at a time. Her right hand never left the brake. A cold cloud of mist from the waterfall enveloped her. The noise was immense. Her heart thumped even louder. It was like she was being chased.
She tried to ignore the waterfall, but it was shooting out of the wall with the force of a fire hydrant. Water splashed her boots as she descended. The spray crept up her body, drenching her legs, her arms, her chest. She was grateful for the wet suit beneath her clothes. She fought the impulse to drop faster, to drop farther, to free-fall to the bottom.
The water found her neck now. Her face. It was so frigid it felt like a claw against her skin. She twisted away. She needed a new plan. She needed to get farther away from the falls.
Zoe began inching sideways, away from the torrent. She was descending at an angle now, like a pendulum. The muscles in her legs were objecting, tensing up, sending out warning shots of pain. The rope was scraping against the rocks. Zoe crept five or six feet sideways, but still the spray lashed at her. If she could just make it a couple more feet. She reached out with the toe of her right boot.
It landed on ice.
She slipped. Her heart flew into her mouth.
She felt herself being yanked back toward the falls, her body twirling like a top. She couldn’t stop—couldn’t find anything to grab. Up above her, the rope sawed against the edge of the cliff.
Zoe was swinging so hard she was pulled under the falls. The water pounded her back, furious and cold. It banged on her rickety helmet. It soaked every part of her. She tried to move, to push off the wall, to do something, anything, but her body was rigid with shock, and suddenly there was a terrible flower blooming in her head.
This is how my father died—terrified and swinging on a rope.
At last, the rope pulled her back out of the water, as if it had all been gravity’s way of telling her that the only way down was straight. Zoe hung suspended for a moment, tears clouding her eyes. She felt shaken, stupid, humiliated. The walkie-talkie trilled in her pack. Did Dallas somehow know what had happened? Had she shouted and not known it? Had he heard her? He couldn’t have.