She didn’t answer. Dallas would hear the shakiness in her voice and tell her to come out. She was fine now. She was fine. But for a sliver of a moment it’d felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and she was hurtling downward.
She took the glove off her right hand, tearing at the Velcro with her teeth. She dropped it into the darkness.
She inspected her harness and her brake. The metal was so cold it seemed electrically charged. She brushed the ice off everything as best she could. Her heart was galloping.
She couldn’t get the thought of her father out of her head.
This is how he died.
She found herself staring at her bare right hand, weirdly fascinated by it, as if it didn’t belong to her.
There’d been blood and skin on her dad’s rope. Was it from his hands? From his neck? Had the rope wound around his throat? Had it choked him—suffocated him—like he was a baby trying to be born?
She was sobbing now. She would have made an awful noise if there hadn’t been a torrent of water spilling along with her tears.
The walkie-talkie rang again, and she answered it angrily: “Can you please leave me alone, please!”
“Can I (what)?” said Dallas.
The explosions of static were worse than ever.
“Can you please leave me alone for a second!” she said.
“Can I what for a what?” said Dallas.
Screw it, she thought.
Zoe dropped the walkie-talkie now, too. She didn’t hear it land, but pictured it smashing on the rock down below, the battery springing out and skittering across the floor of the cave. She turned off her headlamp. She just wanted to hang in the dark a moment. She didn’t care about the spray from the waterfall. She couldn’t get any wetter.
The darkness was absolute. It was as if the water, with its astonishing noise, had decimated all her other senses.
She thought of her dad. She thought of X. She thought of how they’d both be extremely concerned about the borderline-crazy adventure she was embarked on. It was so strange that they would never meet. One had exited her life just as the other entered it. They’d brushed past each other, missing each other by moments.
Zoe twisted slowly on the rope in the dark. She concentrated on the water now. She tried to pick it apart, tried to hear every tiny sound in the middle of the roar. She let the relentlessness of the noise drive all thoughts out of her head—to douse them like fires, one after the other. Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing got deeper.
Later—she couldn’t have said how long it had been—she switched her headlamp back on, and continued her descent. The ice in the rock sparkled all the way down.
The Chandelier Room was breathtaking—Zoe’s eyes didn’t know what to devour first. In the middle of the chamber, there was a giant boulder encased in translucent ice. The waterfall struck it dead center, then splashed in every direction like a demented fountain. The walls were coated in ice as well. Here, though, the ice was as thick and wavy as cake frosting, and it glowed with the sleepy, blue-green light of an aquarium. Every 20 feet or so, there were massive, almost melted-looking columns of rock. (Her father wouldn’t shut up today: “They’re not columns of rock, Zoe! They’re limestone pillars! Come on—respect your rocks!”)
Zoe stepped carefully on the frozen floor, running her bare hands along every surface, then shoving them inside her jacket to warm. She was transfixed. Everything in the chamber seemed as ancient as the earth, yet somehow still evolving, still breathing, still being formed. And just when Zoe thought the Chandelier Room couldn’t get any more mesmerizing…
She looked up.
The ceiling was hung with icicles of every conceivable size. It looked like an upside-down forest, like some massive musical instrument that had yet to be invented. It was gorgeous. She swept her eyes along the ice, greedily. Her headlamp made the whole thing glow.
It was only when Zoe felt something crunch under her feet—a shard of plastic from the walkie-talkie—that she remembered Dallas. He’d be up there, pacing around with his injured hand in his pocket, possibly freaking out. The walkie-talkie was busted beyond repair but she collected all the bits she could find and stuffed them in her pack.
She returned to where the rope hung down the shaft. It was covered with ice, so she thwacked it against the wall like she was beating a rug. Looking up, she could see fragments of the water—little jets and beads—catch the light of her headlamp as they fell.
She hooked herself onto the rope once more, and began to rise.
Zoe crawled out of the cave 20 minutes later, dizzy and drenched. The crystals of frost at the entrance floated down on her shoulders like a good-bye present.
She struggled to her feet, dropped her pack in the snow, and gulped in as much air as her lungs could hold. Her legs felt rickety. She wobbled like a newborn colt for the first few steps. Otherwise, she felt lighter in every way. She felt lifted.
Dallas stepped toward her, beaming and offering an orange towel from his pack. He seemed not to know if he should hug her, so Zoe threw her arms around him and squeezed gratefully.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Zoe.
She worried it wasn’t sufficient so she added, in his own language, “You’re a full-on baller and a boss—thank you!”
She felt exhilarated. The air was lighting up her blood.
“Okay, okay,” said Dallas, breaking off the hug. “You’re starting to feel attracted to me. I warned you.”
“How long was I down there?” she said. “Half an hour?”