Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1 - Simon
When I’m hundreds of meters underground, I dislike hearing unusual noises. They tend to mean trouble—tunnel cave-ins, chasms opening, or the worse thing possible: people.
I know the sound of Wes behind me. His presence is a constant—his breathing steady, the scrape of his palms on the rough rock, the low grunt of effort, how his body moves through the narrow tunnel.
After three years of him in my bed, I know his body—his breathing—as I know my own.
The sound ahead, though, isn’t him. It’s softer—sounds like music, low, echoing through the dark. Human. Female.
I ease forward through the narrow cleft, limestone rasping against my sleeves, grit falling from the walls in tiny clicks. The air is cool, metallic—carries the damp smell of minerals and slow decay. When the passage widens, I push myself upright, boots grinding into the loose scree, and stop.
Across the cavern, a single light moves. Not white. Green.
My pulse shifts a notch faster.
White beams are for amateurs—bright, ruinous to night vision. Green means someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone trained. Someone intentional.
“Wes,” I murmur.
He slides out behind me, brushing dust off his hand, shifting as he sees the light to. His hand unconsciously goes to the gun on his hip.
“Who the fuck is that?” His voice is low, but the acoustics carry it far.
The singing stops. The green light stills—then turns.
A pinpoint glare flares across the cavern, landing on us.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The voice echoes through the cavern—feminine, dulcet, and very clearly irritated.
“You first,” Wes calls back, stepping forward, angling himself slightly between me and the approaching light.
Not that I require protection. Physically, we’re evenly matched—perhaps I’m stronger—although his years in the military have given him a kind of reflexive vigilance I don’t possess.
He stands between us because, historically speaking, I don’t interact well with people.
Especially not unauthorized people inside cave systems marked as restricted access.
And these caves are mine—at least academically speaking. It took nine months of paperwork, risk assessments, and groveling to the Park Service to secure research rights here. Pristine karst formations, unspoiled ecosystems, untouched sediment layers—rare and irreplaceable.
Whoever this trespasser is, she shouldn’t be here.
The green light bobs closer, its glow rippling across pools of clear water that mirror the vaulted stone ceiling. Footsteps splash softly, echoing through the chamber in a syncopated rhythm that sets my teeth on edge.
Then she appears.
Female, confirmed. Climbing harness, helmet, headlamp. The light refracts across the droplets on her face and makes her eyes catch the green—bright as stars in the gloom.
Objectively, she’s attractive—symmetrical features, lithe, but athletic build, strong posture. A practical sort of beauty, the kind born from function rather than artifice.
She strides forward with an authority that doesn’t match her intrusion, boots striking sharp against stone, until she stops in front of us and plants her hands on her hips.
“You’re not supposed to be down here,” she snaps. “It’s restricted.”
Wes’s mouth twitches. “No shit. We have permission.”
One of her eyebrows arches. “Oh!” She tilts her head, as though trying to dislodge a memory. “Wait, are you that geology professor and—uh—the other guy? The dude at the Park Service office told me your names, but I forgot.”
Wes exhales a soft laugh. “The dude at the Park Service?”
“Yeah. Talks real slow. Sounds like his nose is always stuffed?”
Wes chuckles outright. “Elton Myers?”
Elton Myers. Our Park Service liaison. Responsible for access permits, safety briefings, and an endless stream of emails about federal protocols. And yes—he always sounds as though he’s one sinus infection away from collapse. I once asked Wes if we should recommend a doctor who might assist him with that, but Wes said it would be rude. I fail to see why; we would only be offering help. Still, I trust Wes’s judgment in these matters.
The woman snaps her fingers. “That’s him! Anyway, he said I might run into a professor and his partner down here. That you?”
“Am I to understand you were granted access as well?” I ask, attempting to keep the edge from my voice. I fail.
“Yup.” She nods, unbothered. “But Myers told me not to tell you what I’m doing down here. Said you’d be pissed.”
My pulse tightens. “Why?”
She shrugs, the movement loose and fluid. “No idea.” With a quick swipe of her hand, she drags moisture and dust across her nose, leaving a streak of mud along her cheek. “I don’t give a shit if you get pissed I’m here,” she adds, matter-of-fact. “But he seemed to think it mattered.”
“Why are you here?” I press, the words clipped.
That earns me a grin—wide, defiant, a flash of teeth in the half-dark. There’s mischief in it, yes, but also something unguarded. A spark.
It lands in my chest like a flare. Unwelcome. Unfamiliar.
“Nice try, Doc.” She chuckles, the sound low and amused.
“Doc?”
“Professor, right? PhD or something fancy?” she says, already turning away, her voice echoing lazily through the chamber. “So, Doc.”
The beam of her headlamp sweeps over the stone, painting the walls in arcs of green light as she strides off.
Wes glances at me, faintly smiling. I can tell he’s entertained.
I, however, am not.
I stride after her. “That is an unsatisfactory answer.”
“Oh no!” she calls over her shoulder, voice rich with mock distress.
Sarcasm.
It took me years to reliably identify sarcasm as a linguistic pattern, and even now I dislike it. The tone conveys ridicule while allowing the speaker to deny it—inefficient and dishonest by design.
“Wes,” I say, low, almost a growl. This is his specialty—getting people to talk.
“I got it,” he murmurs, just loud enough for me to hear. His hand brushes my arm—a light, grounding touch. He’s the only person whose touch doesn’t make me flinch.
The woman stops ahead of us. Her boots splash softly as she plants herself before the far wall of the cavern, head tilted back to study the rise of stone. The wall is sheer, slick with condensation, striations gleaming like ribs in the beam of her lamp.
Then she moves—careful, precise—dragging her fingertips across the rock. A soft scrape of skin on stone. It’s almost reverent.
Wes steps forward, cutting off her path.
She blinks, frowning. “Can I help you?”
“Where you headed?” he asks easily.
“What’s it to you?”
“Curiosity.”
Her sigh is audible even over the drip of distant water. Her mouth tightens.
“Look, if you want to follow me, I can’t stop you. But I’m not required to tell you what I’m doing or where I’m going. And I’m on a schedule.” She gestures vaguely between us. “So I don’t have time to sit here and wave around our dicks.”
Before Wes can answer, she steps around him, headlamp cutting a sharp green arc across the wall. Her fingers trail the stone again, then pause. She backtracks a step, touches something—small shift in the rock face, almost invisible in the low light—and stills.
She clips a carabiner to her harness and pulls a coil of rope from her pack. The metallic jingle echoes through the cavern. Then, without preamble, she drives a piton into the rock with the practiced rhythm of someone who’s done this a thousand times.
The sharp clang rings out, reverberating down the stone throat of the cave. She tests the hold, weight shifting easily, then reaches for the next anchor.
It dawns on me what she’d been searching for—the solid band of limestone, denser and less fractured, capable of bearing her weight. She’d mapped it by touch alone.
As a researcher, I find that annoying. As a geologist, I find that impressive. Few people can do that. I know. I’m one of them.
“You don’t need to climb there,” I tell her. “There’s a natural shelf on the opposite wall that leads upward. Easier and safer.”
She glances down at me, one brow raised beneath the edge of her helmet. The corner of her mouth lifts. “I’m not going that way.”
“That way?”
“The right tunnel,” she says, nodding toward the path we took in. “I’m headed left.”
“There isn’t a left tunnel,” I reply, frowning.
Her grin widens—bright in the green glow of her lamp. “Yes, there is,” she says, firmly, like it’s an objective fact.
“How do you know?”
“The rock told me,” she says, adjusting her grip and looking up at the wall again.
For a moment, I can’t speak. The sentence hangs in the air, strange and impossible, like a fault line I hadn’t seen until it cracked open beneath my feet.
“The rock told you,” I repeat slowly.
She glances down again, smirking. “You heard me, Doc.” Then she plants her boot, tests the rope, and starts to climb—sure and graceful, as if the stone itself were guiding her hands. I watch her climb, the muscles in her arms and back working in fluid rhythm beneath her harness. She moves like she belongs here—like the cave isn’t an obstacle, but a conversation.
Her lamp casts sweeping arcs of green across the walls, catching the wet sheen of mineral veins and ancient water trails. Each motion of her hand seems precise, intentional. Calculated—but not in any way I understand.
“The rock told you,” I repeat under my breath. I mean it as a criticism, but it doesn’t sound like one.
Wes glances at me, smirking faintly. “She’s damn good.”
“She’s going the wrong way,” I counter, but even to my own ears it sounds hollow.
He doesn’t answer. He’s watching her too.
Her boots scuff, sending dust and a few small stones raining down. I tilt my head back, tracking her ascent, trying to make sense of it. The left wall should terminate in solid limestone. I’ve scanned this section—laser mapping, ground-penetrating radar, every available method.
There is no tunnel there.
And yet she climbs with the confidence of someone following a path only she can see.
A faint vibration hums through the stone under my boots—so subtle I almost miss it. The sound of her pitons, echoing through the layers. The whisper of metal meeting the pulse of the mountain.
Something tightens in my chest. Curiosity, yes. But something else too—a flicker of unease I can’t classify.
The scientist in me wants to call her bluff. To tell her she’s wrong, to wait for the inevitable collapse of her certainty.
But another part—the part I dislike, the one that responds to pattern and rhythm and the unexplainable—leans forward.
Fascinated by a confidence built on instinct rather than science.
Curious to see if she’s correct.
And, more disturbingly—curious about her.
