Emmett

Emmett always wanted to have and eat his cake. The prestige of academia and the corporate salary. His freedom and his parents' approval.

His secrets and the girl.

Sometimes he got everything he wanted, but when it really mattered, he always lost the thing he cared about most. A hundred paces into the rock-crusted tunnel, his only guidance the weak beam of his flashlight, he knew the same thing could happen now.

If answers were at the end of this tunnel—if he could lay whatever was going on to rest—then maybe he could find Isaac and Cam, and all of them could stay and finish their work. For once on this trip, he'd be respected.

The other side of the coin? Safety. His life. The tunnel was only getting narrower, and he had no evidence that whatever lay at its end could be handled with a rifle.

And if the worst happened to him and the other two never returned, then Siena would be all alone. He couldn't let that happen. Protecting her was the only way he could make up for the pain he'd caused her.

Before he could second-guess himself, the tunnel walls bloomed wider. Behind the stalactites, a faint light reflected against the artery wall until it shimmered. He reached to the side, the hand that held his light grazing jagged rock, moisture, and the slime of algae. The mist from the air clung to his body and beaded down his face and neck.

He tilted the light upward. A dense weave of roots covered the tunnel's ceiling, and he followed it forward to the protrusions.

Not stalactites. Spruce.

Right in the middle of the path, tiny saplings stretched from the ceiling toward the ground, shimmering water collecting in their needles. They grew upside down, defying biology like it was nothing.

His eyes flickered down to the largest of the evergreen cave teeth, a spruce more disfigured than the others. Emmett swallowed back bile when he saw why.

One of the sapling's branches threaded right through the cracked eye socket of a jawless human skull. It hung there like a Christmas ornament.

He reached out to touch it and then stopped himself. The skull could belong to anyone. One of the missing hikers from seven years ago. He could stumble upon their bodies right beneath the research cabin.

The air smelled of rot. There had to be more.

Leaving the skull, he ducked through the upside-down spruce. A few more steps and the tunnel fanned out into a large chamber. More than five bodies' worth of bones lay strewn across the ground. It was like he'd entered the lair of a human-hungry monster, the stagnant air so dense with the stench of death that he could taste it in the back of his throat.

Emmett gagged, pulling the neck of his t-shirt up over his mouth. It hardly helped. Desperate for a palate cleanser, he focused on the light above that permeated the foggy space. It came from an opening at the very top of the cavern.

The sinkhole. It looked so small from all the way down here.

He followed the soft beam of light to a grotto in the cavern wall. A stone statue of a woman stood at three times his height, her head adorned with a massive rack of antlers dripping with lichen. One arm stretched upward, and she held a skull that looked as real as those littering the ground. A thick tendril of carved obsidian began at the statue's sandaled feet and twisted up around her torso once, ending at her raised hand, where it also cradled the skull.

Atop the bones, a man lay prostrate at the statue's feet, recently dead. The body hadn't decomposed at all.

The man's back rose and fell.

Emmett's gut clenched. "Hey," he called hoarsely, but the man didn't move.

The pulse beating in his ear was surreally loud as he stepped over bones, creeping closer to the man. He'd never passed out from fear before, but if ever there were a time for him to faint, it would be now. He raised his rifle but kept the safety on, aiming it at the man, who was too low to the ground for Emmett to see his face, or anything other than his long filthy hair and the patchwork of furs and fabric he wore.

"Hey," Emmett said again. He lifted his foot and nudged the man with his boot.

The man stiffened and then shuddered an exhale, long and pained, like a dying breath. "Is it time?" he asked the ground.

"Time?" Emmett repeated.

The man slowly sat and stretched, his spine popping. He craned his neck to look at Emmett.

Shock stole the warmth from Emmett's body.

The gun slipped from his fingers, the surrounding bones clattering as it hit the ground.

A scar cut clean across the man's weathered face. He was sallow. Starving. A set of haunted eyes stared at Emmett without a single spark of recognition, even though they'd last seen each other only hours ago.

Isaac.