to be careful, but in the dark I had to feel my way across. The fabric disintegrated, and bits of remnant flesh fell like scraps of leather. The bones cracked like dry twigs under my hands.
On the other side, Ben boosted me over a row of stalagmites, and we worked around a bend … and suddenly I knew where we were.
“I’ve been here before.” I looked up in disbelief at the cave opening, shaded with an overhang covered with bats. I’d been only twenty to thirty yards from the ghost’s remains two nights ago. “This is my bat cave.”
Ben stumbled on the uneven footing of the layers and layers of bat guano and followed my gaze to the mouth of the cave. It was a long way up. “But we’re still trapped.”
The rabbit warren of the cave carried Sparks’s voice to us, calling that he’d found our trail. How badly did they want to follow us? If they presumed the cave was a dead end, maybe they’d just let us rot, like the soldier without a grave.
But the voices were getting closer, and Mike Kelly was a small guy—he could probably worm his way right through. I backed up a step in spite of myself, edging up against the nearly vertical cave wall. Ben stepped forward, hands clenched into fists.
Then I felt a hard tug on the knot in my stomach, a wrench of warning.
Cuidado, breathed a voice in my head.
On instinct, I reached for Ben and yanked him against the wall. The phantom knot in my psyche gave a jerk and came loose, wrenched free by the force of what came next. There was a bang, and a whump that shook me to my bones, and the stone sky crumbled with a mighty crack that sent the bats into the air with squeals that made my teeth ache.
I’d pulled us to the one spot without rock overhead, and Ben swung around, putting his back to the thundering stone rain, pressing me against the wall, tucking my head against his chest as he covered his own with his arms. The shaking of the earth melded with the shaking in my bones and the quake of fear even deeper, in the part of me that wasn’t ready to die yet.
The roar went on and on, until I realized we were standing in sunlight, and the noise was in my head. Dust swirled in thick clouds around us, but it wafted up into open air. The roar became a ringing, and Ben raised his head to look around in amazement that must have mirrored my own.
“Are we alive?” I asked, still in the shelter of Ben’s arms, squashed between his body and the rock wall that had saved us.
“Seem to be,” he said, turning his head stiffly to look down at me, and wincing when he tried to smile. “I hurt too bad to be dead.”
The sinkhole was now the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and we stood at the deep end. The roof of the bat cave had collapsed, at least as far as the low cavern where the solider lay. It cut Kelly and Sparks off from us, but judging from the continued rumbles and curls of dust, it might have done worse than that. The cave-in might continue far into the mine, trapping the men … or their bodies.
I looked up at Ben. His hair was white with limestone and dust. Pale dirt clung to his face and caked in the places where he was bleeding. He had new cuts, and there were probably more where I couldn’t see them. And I didn’t even want to think about the bruises.
Very carefully I stretched up and kissed the unswollen side of his mouth. “Thank you.”
“For what?” He started to smile and thought better of it. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“For making sure that I didn’t end up spending the rest of my life with you.”
He laughed, then winced, then cursed. Then he said, “The hell with it,” and kissed me the best he could. It would be giving him too much credit to say it was as good as the night before, but it was still better than ninety-nine percent of kisses in the world.
“Great Caesar’s goat.” Phin’s voice floated down from the rim of the sinkhole. “The earth caves in, and you two are making out?”
I craned my head to squint up at her. “Tell it to me when you’ve had a near-death experience, Phin Goodnight.”
She put her hand