up on its paws and sniffed the air. With a lumbering growl, it stepped away from the grate and trotted off into the woods.
Crying and shaking, she grasped the slippery, dented grate and moved it out of the way as quietly as possible. Like a groundhog searching for predators, she lifted her head through the hole and scanned her surroundings. The musky stench of the bear still lingered, but there were no other signs of trouble.
Quickly and overwhelmed with relief, she climbed out of the shaft, replaced the grate and checked her watch. Her stomach dropped. She had less than four minutes to get to the spot she had picked!
Terrified the bear was out there waiting for her and worried that whatever had drawn him away might be a danger to her, she headed into the woods in a burst of speed. She snatched her backpack from the branch where she had left it and sprinted away. The threats to her life seemed to be mounting. The explosives. The bear. Whatever had caught the bear’s attention.
Sunrise had just started to lighten the horizon. From what Torment had explained to her, his men would already be in place by now. That meant Cipher was somewhere on this same mountain or hovering nearby in one of their invisible crafts. The concern she had for herself was only surpassed by her concern for him.
When she reached the old tree she had chosen as her lookout spot, she jumped as high as she could and grabbed the closest branch. Swinging up her leg, she hooked it over the branch and hauled herself up onto it. She stood on the branch, balancing precariously, and hopped to the next branch. The muscles in her arms and chest burned as she climbed to the correct vantage point, but she pushed away the pain and kept moving.
Seated on a thick, sturdy branch high on the mountain, she panted and checked her watch. Twenty-three seconds! She snatched her mine pack into her lap and grabbed the secondary switches. If the timers failed, she had to be ready.
She kept the blinking switches capped and glanced at her watch to check the countdown one last time. Eleven seconds!
Switches in hand, she stared down at the back end of the Drowning Door and counted silently. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…
The ground rocked beneath the tree. A few seconds later, another wave of rumbling struck and then another. She flicked off the secondary triggers and stuffed them into her pack. She retrieved a pair of small binoculars and trained them on the visible ventilation shafts. Smoke and dust billowed out of them.
She looked toward the front of the mine. Already, men were running out of the entrance. Clouds of purple and black dust followed them. She searched the distance for Cipher and his fellow sky warriors, but a sudden shift in the ground below had her scrambling to stay on the branch she had chosen.
When she had taken the job, she had warned Miss Kay that an explosion in an old death trap like the Drowning Door was a risk. There was no telling how much erosion the water had caused or how much destabilization her father’s blasts had caused years earlier. It was all a best guess scenario.
My best guess was wrong.
Somewhere in the mine, the blasts had triggered a cave-in. The amount of dust and smoke pouring out of the vents and the front of the mine could only be explained by a collapse in one of the sections. The top of the mine—the sloped hillside below, hadn’t shifted so the cave-in must have come from lower down in the second or third abandoned levels.
Panicked and worried for the one-eyed man, she turned her attention to the front of the mine. More of the Splinter terrorists were racing out of the mine now. She scanned them, desperately hoping to see the man who needed to be rescued.
There!
Stumbling between two Splinter men, he emerged from the mine’s entrance just as naked as the day he had been born. Bruised and bloodied and covered in soot, he struggled to stand on his own two feet. One of them looked badly swollen, and she ached for him, wondering how any person could be strong enough to survive that kind of suffering.
A blast of red shocked her. She gasped as the men on either side of the one-eyed sky warrior dropped to the dirt. Their heads had been obliterated by