“Don’t look at it,” Hope said. “Do not look at its face.”
She had her eyes squinted half closed. The stick was stretched ahead of her. The cloth wrapped around its end was burning up fast; charred remnants scattered across the floor.
The Stitcher lurched away from Rhys. Its lamp-like eyes fixed on Hope.
The fire had hurt it. Smoldering threads curled up from the side of its face and its neck. The patchwork skin began to peel back as their connections were lost.
The Stitcher’s mouth stretched wide and the horrendous, inhuman howling filled the cavern, shaking the stones and burning in Abby’s bones.
Hope refused to shift. She stood, her eyes closed and legs planted, the makeshift torch extended like a sword.
The Stitcher’s glowing eyes bore into her for a final heartbeat, then it crept backward, its enormous hands dexterously sliding across the stones as it vanished into the darkness licking at the edges of the cavern.
The fire burnt out. Hope lowered the stick, slumping.
“Hope,” Abby managed.
Her sister looked almost unrecognizable. She’d been saturated in red-tinted liquid that had dried in rough streaks. Her clothes and her hair’s colors had vanished under it. The only part of her skin that wasn’t colored were the lines under her eyes where tears had washed it away.
She took a step closer, and the flickering headlamp showed the space where her left arm belonged. It ended not far below the shoulder in a line of red threads.
Hope dropped her stick. She wore a vest that didn’t belong to her and looked four sizes two big, and reached her right hand into one of the pockets. She brought out a lighter. “Hold still,” she whispered to Abby, and clicked the flame to life before holding it beneath the threads. “I found these in one of the passageways. The original owner didn’t need them as much as I did, I guess.”
The threads shriveled, blackened, and snapped in just seconds. Hope moved quickly, burning through the lines that held Abby immobile.
“You’re alive.” Abby couldn’t tear her gaze off her sister’s face. It looked pinched and drawn and older somehow. But then a tentative smile grew, and it was so quintessentially Hope that Abby thought she was going to cry.
“You came for me,” Hope said.
“I wasn’t going to leave you. Never.”
“Maybe it would have been better if you had.” Hope’s smile quivered.
A bunched tangle of threads snapped as the flame cut through them, and Abby’s arms were freed. She lurched up and pulled Hope into a hug. She clung to her for just a second, savoring it, before pulling back and wrestling the pocketknife out from her jacket.
“I can take care of this,” she said, indicating to the threads still around her chest and legs. “Start on Rhys.”
He still hadn’t made a sound. She could barely hear his breathing, but it was there, low and ragged.
Abby sawed through the threads furiously. She thought she could still hear the Stitcher at the edge of the cavern. Cold, dead flesh scraped over the rocks as it crept through the ring of darkness.
Don’t look.
The temptation was almost overwhelming. Just a glance, thrown over her shoulder, to make sure the elongated hands weren’t reaching for the back of her throat.
But she remembered the way she’d felt under the floodlight eyes. The way everything had faded into numbness.
She thought she understood why the Stitcher only took victims when they were alone. Its eyes could freeze its prey like deer in headlights, but it could only focus its gaze on one person at a time. A second party might be able to scream, or attack it, or run. And the Stitcher had long ago learned to avoid that.
Though Abby doubted any of those complications would keep it at bay for long here, in the depths of its labyrinthine maze.
The final clump of threads snapped as she jerked her knife across them. She scrambled forward to reach Rhys. He was pale. Perspiration beaded on his forehead and dripped toward the floor.
Abby turned to his leg. It wasn’t gone. But a deep cut had been made in it, and blood flowed freely.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and used her knife to slice off the sleeve of her jacket. “This is going to hurt.”
“Do it,” he said.
She wrapped the fabric around the ankle, tied a knot, and cinched it as hard as she could. Rhys grunted. His other leg twitched. He pushed himself up to sit, but the movement seemed to cost him.
The headlamp fluttered one final time, then blinked out.
The depth of the darkness was overwhelming. She could feel Rhys’s body under her hands, and Hope’s shallow breathing at her side, but except for that she could have believed the world no longer existed.
She could no longer hear the Stitcher. She didn’t know if he’d slunk away to repair his wounds, or whether he might still be at the back of the cavern somewhere, watching.
“Hold still,” Abby said. She felt around Rhys to get the backpack off him.
It was drenched from going through the subterranean pool. Abby, blind, fumbled to get the zipper open and sifted through the contents. She found one of the candles and placed it on the floor ahead of herself, then continued searching for the matches.
Her fingers closed around a small plastic bag. Riya had had the forethought to waterproof them, and Abby’s fingers shook as she took out a match and struck it.
Two drawn faces were briefly visible on either side of her before she lowered the match to light the candle. The wick was damp and took two more matches before it caught. Even then, the light didn’t reach far. Just enough to give them a moment of relief from the oppressive dark.
Abby found herself staring at her sister again. Hope stared back, her eyes huge and intense. She’d been formidable when she’d stood between Abby and the Stitcher, but now, Abby couldn’t overlook just how fragile she was. Her face was pinched. Her hand, braced on the floor, trembled. Her breathing was labored in a way that frightened Abby badly. She didn’t know how much blood Hope might have lost, but she knew it had to be substantial.
Then she glanced down at Rhys’s leg. The fabric she’d tied around his ankle was already drenched. Abby swallowed. He was losing too much, too fast. She reached into the bag for the first aid kit, but Riya had only been able to get one, and it had been in Abby’s backpack. A backpack that was now irretrievably lost.
Abby swallowed, then fumbled for a water bottle instead.
“Yes,” Hope gasped when she saw it. She grabbed it, and her other shoulder twitched. She was trying to use her lost arm to open the cap.
“Here,” Abby said, reaching for it, but Hope just shook her head. She clamped the bottle between her knees and used her right hand to unscrew the top, then tipped the bottle back and drank deeply.
“There’s puddles of water here,” she said as she surfaced, breathing heavily. “But they taste so foul, you have no idea.”
Abby managed a smile. She remembered tasting the pool she’d plunged into. “I can imagine.”
Hope drank again, and trickles of water trailed down her jaw, washing tracks through the red staining. Abby’s heart ached.
“What happened?” she asked. “After he took you.”
Hope lowered the bottle. Her breathing seemed rougher as she slumped. “He just…let me free. He didn’t try to tie me up, like he did with you. I guess because he didn’t need to. He found me pretty easily when he wanted my arm.”
Abby repressed a shudder.
Hope’s smile twitched, then vanished again. “I think he uses the threads to tell where you are. He can feel when you bump into them. And they’re everywhere… I got tangled in some, once. I thought they were going to kill me before I got free. How long have I been down here?”
“Two days.”
“It feels longer.”
That was what Bridgette Holm had said about her time in the tunnels, too. The lack of light had to distort time.
“I’ve been walking this whole time,” Hope said, and lifted her head again. Her jaw trembled. “I got lucky and tripped over the remains of some other poor person. This is their jacket and their lighter. And I just burnt up their shirt.”
Abby glanced behind them, to the remains of Hope’s weapon. She’d thought the fabric had been wrapped around a stick. Now, she saw, the cloth had been wrapped around a human femur.
“You bought us some time,” she said. It was hard to be sure when the cavern was so dark, but she was fairly sure the three of them were alone. “It burnt some of the threads holding the Stitcher together. I get the feeling he’s retreated to repair himself.”
“Possibly back to the cutting room,” Rhys agreed.
She didn’t know how long that would buy them, but it would probably be less than they wanted.
“I can walk,” Rhys said, as though guessing her thoughts. “Hope, are you okay to keep moving?”
“It’s better than staying here,” she said. Her eyebrows furrowed. “But I don’t know how to get out of here. I’ve been walking for so long, but it never seems to end.”
“We have maps.” Abby tipped the backpack onto its side to sift through its items. She found their paper printouts, folded and completely soaked, and began picking them apart. “They won’t cover the natural caves or the tunnels the Stitcher made, but if we can find the mines, we should be able to figure out where we are.”
And then they only had to find their way back to the tunnels leading into Vickers’s house. If they could get close enough to the surface for their phones to get service, they could call Riya, who would call the police, who would get them out.
Hope passed the empty water bottle back to Abby. “Let’s go, then.”
Abby zipped up the backpack, then slung it over her shoulders. Rhys began to rise. A small pool of blood had spread around his leg, and movement seemed to make it worse. Abby reached out to help him up. “Lean on me,” she said, and draped his arm around her shoulder.
Hope took up the candle. She stretched it out, searching the shadows, then sent one final glance back to Abby. The whites of her eyes shone uncannily in the flickering light. “Hold onto my jacket. Just in case.”
Just in case the light goes out. Just in case the Stitcher tries to tear us apart. Just in case we’re not able to find one another in this labyrinth a second time.
Abby hooked her spare hand into the grimy jacket and held on tight as Hope led them out of the chamber.