Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,28

rock and concrete steps, with a hand rail to assist them. The steps went down at least twenty feet, and probably more.

Kelsa and Raven waited till the tourists had climbed up before they started down, and at the bottom Kelsa strode eagerly into the cave. It was much larger than she'd expected a lava tunnel to be, and rounder. The crumpled flowstone of the floor was amazingly level for a natural surface, but it was by no means smooth - a sprained ankle begging to happen. Kelsa kept her eyes on the ground when she was walking and stopped to look around.

Ragged holes in the ceiling, almost thirty feet above her head, lit piles of rubble below them. They'd gone several hundred yards down the tunnel when they confronted a rock pile more than twice Kelsa's height that completely filled the lower half of the cave. No one else was in sight.

"How about here?" Kelsa asked. "We're certainly surrounded by earth."

Raven shook his head. "It's too open. There's too much of the world above."

Kelsa looked around. She could hear pigeons cooing in a crack in the basalt where they'd nested. Water dripped. Although the light had dimmed in the middle of the tunnel, she hadn't turned on her flashlight - her night vision had more than compensated for the darkness.

"Onward, then."

Sunlight poured over the collapsed rock, showing the slightly worn places where other people had climbed the barrier. Kelsa chose a path and worked her way up the rock fall without much difficulty.

"I can see the exit from here," she told Raven, who was clambering up behind her. "It gets even more open."

"One of the other caves then."

By the time they scrambled up the final slope and out the exit, Kelsa was feeling the pull in her calf muscles.

"This is fun!"

Raven scowled at her.

"Oh, come on, there's no reason not to enjoy this. I'm on vacation!"

She led him back to the fork in the trail. Hiking out the other branch, they passed several groups of children being herded back toward the buses by harried adults. Only a handful of tourists remained.

"That helps," Raven commented. "A little bit."

"What are you so nervous about?" Kelsa demanded.

"Nothing. I'm certain this will work."

He didn't sound certain. She raised her brows and waited.

"Almost certain," he admitted. "This is more important than you know."

"Well, that makes me feel better." In truth, she didn't much care. She would drop a pinch of dust, say the words he told her to say, and then he could go find another human to finish what's-his-name's quest. Preferably an adult who had the whole summer off and enough money to travel all the way to Alaska.

The much narrower collapse of stone that led down into Boy Scout Cave was blocked with a neat sign, Closed Due to Ice/Snow Hazard.

"Lovely," Kelsa said blankly. The brochure on the back of the trail map said that ice remained in some caves all year long, but this was the beginning of June!

"We'll try the next cave" was all Raven said.

Several hundred yards later the trail ended at the entrance to Beauty Cave. The opening was huge, but unlike the entrance to Indian Tunnel, there were no steps. And when Kelsa made her way to the bottom of the rock fall, there was no light in the tunnel beyond.

"Better?" she asked.

"We'll see."

Kelsa wasn't ten yards into the tunnel when she switched on her flashlight. The cold made her grateful for therma knit. The tunnel was huge, the walls and ceiling beyond the reach of Kelsa's lolar-charged light. Without enhanced night vision, she could barely have seen the floor.

She'd been in caves before, and should have expected it. Still..."This is dark."

"According to the map, the tunnel curves up ahead." Raven's voice was hushed, as if he didn't want to disrupt the cave's stillness. "If we go around the bend, we shouldn't even be able to see the entrance."

"Wonderful."

Kelsa moved onward, both her light and her attention fixed on the rough floor. The glitter of crystals around its edge warned her about the first ice patch, but she slipped a little anyway.

"To the right," Raven murmured. "The floor rises. There's no ice there."

They picked their way between the frozen puddles for another dozen yards before a long stretch of floor coated with a thin gleaming skin brought Kelsa to a stop.

"I can't see any way around it."

"We haven't passed the bend yet," Raven protested. "We can still see light from the entrance."

Kelsa looked back. The white circle behind