Still, relief barreled through me. But…wait. Wouldn’t Rose have called out if she’d heard them? God, what if she wasn’t even here? There were miles and miles of tunnels in this place. What if she’d stumbled into bad air?
“Stop,” Willow whispered, stepping farther into the chamber.
“Willow, they found it.” I held out my hand, already focused on heading toward Gid and Dad.
“It’s a door.” She looked over her shoulder. “Cam, it’s a door!”
Ignoring the logic in my brain screaming at me to get to the shaft with Dad, I moved farther back into the chamber to see Willow tug open a rusted iron door. It swung clear of the floor, and my heart stopped as she stepped through the doorway.
“Rose!” Willow cried.
I jumped over a fallen beam and caught the heavy door before it shut.
“It won’t open from this side!” Rose wailed, and I nearly let go out of sheer surprise and knee-weakening relief.
She stood at the ledge, her back to the ventilation shaft, looking at us with wide eyes and tearstained cheeks. She was alive. She was okay.
“Rose, step away from the edge,” Willow said softly. “Come here.” She held out her arms, and my heart rate dropped with each step Rose took from the shaft.
“I’m so sorry,” Rose cried as she reached Willow and collapsed against her aunt. “I just wanted to find your pin.”
“It’s okay,” Willow promised as she held her tight, resting her chin on the top of Rose’s head. “It’s okay.”
“I couldn’t find it. I did all of this, and it’s still not here.”
“Rose?” Gideon called from across the shaft. There was another entrance at this level?
“We’ve got her!” I confirmed. “Come on, ladies. Let’s get you out of here.” The need to get them as far away from that damned shaft as possible clawed at my gut.
Willow clasped Rose’s hand and then gently pushed her ahead, toward where the tunnel narrowed to the door.
“Hi, Cam,” Rose said softly as she squeezed by me.
“Hey, Rosie.” I wanted to scoop her up, but I wasn’t going to let go of the door and have it close on Willow.
A shaky, trembling smile graced her lips as she passed me next, kissing my cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Nothing to thank me for,” I replied, then let the door swing shut once she was through. It met the frame in a heavy slam of metal.
Then I grabbed Rose and hugged her. “You scared us.”
Her tiny shoulders heaved. “I’m so sorry. The door shut behind me, and there’s no handle.”
There were about thirty ways I wanted to yell at her for scaring us, for coming down here in the first place, for listening to the ravings of a man who’d already lost his mind—even if he’d actually known what he was talking about in this instance. But her mother could do that as soon as we got her back to the surface. I just needed to feel her breathe for a second.
“You’re okay,” I promised, but I wasn’t sure if it was to the little girl in my arms or to myself.
She nodded against my neck.
I looked at Willow, but her eyes were on the door, two lines forming between her eyebrows. “Pika?”
“I can’t remember, but I know I was here.” She’d been the same size as Rose but alone for so many more hours. Broken, bleeding, and so cold, her skin had felt like ice against mine.
“Give me just a second,” I said to her and carried Rose out to where Gideon and Dad had just made it to the chamber. “Keep her,” I told Gid, handing Rose over, then went back to Willow.
She stood with the door open, her headlamp illuminating the tunnel beyond. “I want to see it. Is that weird?”
“Understandable.” There was a hook on the wall, and when I took the door from Willow and pushed it wide, the iron slipped into the ring on the door, holding it open. “I’ll go with you.”
“Thank you.”
I took her hand and stepped through the door first, keeping contact as she followed behind. The tunnel widened and opened onto a small ledge that looked over the ten-foot-wide ventilation shaft, and Willow stepped up beside me.
“You know when you go somewhere as an adult, and you say, ‘It felt so much bigger as a child’?” she asked.
“This does not,” I said, looking up and up at the fifty feet or so to the next sublevel. It wasn’t vertical, thank God, or we both would have died, but the incline was steep enough that I wondered at my own bravery back then.
“No, it’s just as awful as I remember.” She stepped closer to the edge and looked down, focusing on the jagged outcropping I’d found her on about ten feet below us. “Cam, I didn’t fall the whole way.” She looked up the shaft at the tiny pinpoint of light that marked the surface. “That’s why I didn’t break more.”
Like her neck.
“You fell from here.” I put it together, watching one of the small rocks just past my feet give in to gravity and fall. It smacked the outcropping, then fell into the blackness. I tugged Willow’s hand and pulled her back a step. This thing was anything but stable.
“But you didn’t. You came all the way down.” She looked up again, shaking her head. “How did you do it? Get down here and get us both out?”
“Sheer willpower.” I clutched her hand even tighter.
“You’re incredible. Do you know that?”
I nudged her hard hat up so the beam didn’t hit me straight in the eye. “Not really.”
“Desperation and love make ordinary people do heroic things,” Dad said from behind us, moving to stand next to Willow at the edge of the unstable ledge. “You were never ordinary, and you had both.” He stated it like a fact, not a compliment, then glanced at me before surveying the space.
“I didn’t see this ledge,” I admitted. “Or the one across the way. We climbed all the way up for nothing.”
“This one wouldn’t have done you much good, seeing as the door can’t be opened from this side.” Dad thumbed back toward the door. “And the other opening is small, too. As dark as it is in here, you wouldn’t have seen it. We’ve got three headlamps, Camden, one of which is brighter than twenty of what we had back then.”
I kicked myself for not being more observant, for putting her through more than I had to when she was already so hurt.
“Stop,” Dad snapped, seeing my guilt. “You focused on the light and started climbing, just like anyone else would have.”