Zoe and X stood by the round canyon in the center of the stadium. The screaming head loomed in front of them. The neck, which was all muscles and veins, disappeared into the water about 150 feet down.
“This is the part where we go over a cliff together,” said Zoe.
She checked to see if X smiled. He didn’t.
“That was a movie reference,” she said.
“From which particular movie?” said X.
“Do you know any movies?” said Zoe.
“No,” said X.
Zoe squeezed his hand fondly. The prisoners must have been watching from their cells because they’d started banging again. Zoe wasn’t sure if they were encouraging them to jump—or warning them not to.
“Do you know how to fall?” she asked X.
“Is there a trick to it?” he said. “My plan was to take one step forward.”
“I can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny,” she said. “Keep your hands at your sides, okay? You can cover your mouth, but don’t hold your nose or you’ll break it when you hit the water.” She paused. “Were you trying to be funny?”
“A little,” he said.
They stared into the canyon. The rivers flung themselves into it, as if going to their death. The white noise of the water was weirdly lulling, like the currents wanted to pull them in, too.
“This journey we undertake,” said X, “is it suicidal?”
“Dallas would say yes,” said Zoe. “Val would say yes. Ripper would say, ‘So what?’ ”
“And what do you say?” said X.
“I say let’s go meet your mom,” said Zoe.
X breathed out slowly.
“You make meeting her sound an easy matter,” said X.
“Are you nervous?” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said X.
Tree had told them that X’s mother was imprisoned in a hole in the canyon called the Cave of Swords. When he said it, Dervish flared, broke away from Regent, and raised his hand. The belt from Tree’s tunic slithered up his body and began strangling him. It took even Regent a few moments to tear it away.
“Listen—” Zoe said now.
“You need not tell me that we don’t have to do this,” said X.
“I wasn’t gonna say that,” said Zoe. “We totally have to do this. She’s in a cave. I’m a caver. I think it might be why I’m here.” A thought came to her. “Are you afraid you’re going to be disappointed?”
“By my mother?” said X. “No. Just wait until you hear the story Maud told me. My mother is loyal, kind, and brave. It cannot be a coincidence that I was so drawn to you.”
Zoe waved away the compliment.
“Ripper is all that stuff, too,” she said. “So is Banger—it’s just that he’s also drunk a ton of beer.” She paused. “So if you’re not afraid of your mother being a disappointment to you, what are you afraid of?”
X considered the question. A cold mist rose off the water, like a cloud coming to swallow them.
“That I will be a disappointment to her,” he said.
“Shut up,” said Zoe.
“I’m entirely serious,” said X. “When I am with you, I feel like … I feel like I’m worth something. Other times, I wonder if I have ever done anything that was not violent or selfish. I dragged fifteen souls to the Lowlands—and enjoyed their suffering sometimes.”
“Stop,” said Zoe.
“I endangered Maud,” said X. “I endangered Regent and my friend Plum. I endangered you. I endangered a cat! I watched the Ukrainian get pulled down a burning river. If I did not love you so much, I would wonder what my life was for. When I stand in front of my mother, what can I tell her that I am not ashamed of?” He paused. “I apologize for the soliloquy. I do not expect you to answer.”
“Oh, I’m gonna answer,” said Zoe. “You can tell your mother that your heart survived this place. You made Jonah really happy when we lost our dad and nothing could make him happy. You kissed me like I always secretly hoped to be kissed.” She stopped for a second. “Your mother is going to be so proud of you she’s never going to stop crying. Trust me. I know what moms are like.”
X smiled in a way that told her he believed her.
“Thank you,” he said. “Your soliloquy was superior to mine.”
“It was really good, I’m not gonna lie,” she said.
“And I truly did kiss you like that, didn’t I?” he said.
“Don’t get cocky,” she said.
What neither of them had said was that even if Zoe got out of the Lowlands alive, there was no reason to think he’d be coming with her. Zoe remembered what it was like to sit in her weird room at Rufus’s with the torn posters and busted trophies. She remembered what it was like to miss X—and to worry about him—so much that it dug into her, hollowed her out. Standing close to him now, she tried to record every sensation. His skin smelled so much like his skin.
“I have to ask you,” said Zoe. “When you say you’re going to rescue your mother—do you mean just from the Cave of Swords? You don’t think you can get her out of the Lowlands completely, do you?”
“In truth?” said X. “What I want most dearly, most fiercely, is for you to leave this wretched place. Then my mother. And then? If I have not used up all my wishes? I will happily go myself.”
Zoe wanted X to have everything he hoped for, but feared he was asking too much.
She looked to see if he was ready to jump.
“Keep your knees bent when you fall,” she said.
They plummeted down, sliced the surface, and kept falling. The water was frigid. Zoe waited for the shock, but it never came. Her body was now immune to the cold. She was 30 feet under before she stopped shooting downward. Ordinarily, she would have fought her way back to the surface, but her lungs weren’t aching. She wasn’t desperate to breathe. She opened her eyes, and could see everything in high-definition. The statue’s shoulders and torso lay in front of her, like a sunken ship. Its legs disappeared into the dark.
X waited for her at the surface. Because of all the rivers falling into it, the water was wildly choppy—a cauldron. But the chaos didn’t frighten Zoe. It energized her. She gestured for X to follow her, and they swam the circumference of the canyon, threading in and out of the waterfalls and searching for the Cave of Swords. Tree hadn’t known exactly where it was or what it looked like—when he and Dervish took X’s mother, he had waited up on the canyon’s edge. The water was so cold that, without powers, he’d have drowned within minutes.
Zoe assumed the name Cave of Swords had something to do with stalactites or stalagmites. Her father’s voice, which always came to her when she went caving, bubbled up in her head now: “The name could also refer to ice formations, Zo. Don’t forget all the cool freakin’ stuff our friend ice can do!” Zoe hated that her father could still insinuate himself into her thoughts. She pictured herself pushing him out of a house, swearing at him, slamming the door on his fingers.
There were dozens of fissures in the rock along the waterline. Any of them could have led to caves. Zoe and X took turns crawling into the bigger ones and looking for something, anything, that looked like swords. Zoe didn’t know the extent of her powers, but found that when she needed a particular ability it would appear, as if she had willed it into being. She’d never felt anything as weird and cool and exhilarating as the sensation of light pouring out of her palm.
For an hour, they found nothing. Then, as Zoe ducked behind one of the last waterfalls, she found an oval opening in the rock. There was a handprint beneath it. It had to be a sign.
Zoe swam back to X. She thought about how the powers that Regent gave them protected them from everything around them. She wished there was something that could protect X from everything inside him, too: the fear, the pain.
X treaded water, waiting.
She showed him the palm print on the rock.
Judging from the size and the elegant way that the fingers tapered, it was a woman’s hand—and it was made of blood.
The tunnel was only four feet wide and had a low, jagged ceiling. X didn’t want to let Zoe go in first. They argued. X pointed out that if he was behind her and got stuck, she wouldn’t be able to get out. Zoe pointed out gently—okay, maybe not that gently—that she knew how to cave and he didn’t and that he should suck it.
As they talked, a wind rolled out of the opening in the rock like a cold breath, followed by the unmistakable sounds of something approaching. By the time Zoe figured out what it was, there was no time for words. She pulled X under the surface with her as a torrent of water and debris shot out of the wall.
X hadn’t realized it was coming.
“Who’s going first?” said Zoe, when they surfaced again.
“Perhaps you should,” said X.
It turned out that water blasted out of the tunnel every five minutes, flinging dirt and rock like buckshot. Zoe lit the passage with her hands and gazed inside. It’d be a straight belly-crawl for 500 feet. She’d never crawled more than 75. There was no way she and X were going to get in and out between the blasts of water, and they had no ropes, no drills, no bolts, no Survival Sh*t to anchor themselves. They’d have to press against the walls when the current came, and hope it didn’t blow them out of the tunnel.
She didn’t say any of this. It was obvious from X’s face that he knew.
Zoe slipped into the tunnel on her stomach. The flood was muddy and slick, which would actually be an advantage: it’d be easy to glide. The first time she pulled herself forward, she forgot to factor in her new strength, and shot 50 feet without stopping. Behind her, X, who’d been unconsciously picking up bits of her vocabulary, shouted in a mash-up dialect: “Seriously? Is that indeed how it’s gonna be?”
She smiled to herself, and slowed down.
At first, Zoe gazed straight ahead, moving quickly but carefully, listening for the telltale wind and the scary drumroll of the water. But then her father’s voice returned. She’d pushed him out the door, but he had climbed in through a window: “Zoe, you’re in a tunnel in the freakin’ four-billion-year-old mantle of the earth! Are you really not gonna look at the walls? Are you really not gonna check the place out? What you’re doing is epic, girl! Ponce de León only discovered Florida!”
Zoe shoved her father back out the window, and slammed it shut.
But he was right.
She lay still a second, and allowed some wonder back in. Yes, the air was sour with the smell of rotten eggs (she named the gas herself, so her father wouldn’t: hydrogen sulfide). Yes, her eyes stung from the sand in the tunnel. Yes, her clothes were getting shredded. But thanks to the gifts that Regent had given her, she was sliding over busted calcite like it was nothing. She was curling around stalactites, stalagmites, and snottites as if her body were liquid. (Zoe’s father had preferred, for the gooey strands of bacteria that dripped from the ceiling, the term “snoticle.”) Zoe remembered how much she loved exploring. And X was with her. Every so often, he put a hand on her leg to let her know that he was there. It reminded Zoe of her mother saving her when the snowbank fell in.
For the first time, she truly looked around. The ceiling of the tunnel sparkled with gypsum crystals. The walls were embedded with the fossils of sea creatures. One looked like a tiny Christmas tree, another like a squid with human teeth, another like a mutant shrimp, another like an inch-long bear with eight legs. Zoe ran her fingers along their spines, over their legs and snouts and tentacles. She’d never seen any of them before. Probably no living person ever had.
She was mesmerized.
She didn’t notice that the wind had come back.
Zoe had just enough time to thrust her palms against the walls and brace herself.
She’d never been hit by a car screaming down a highway.
Now she had.
The instant the water struck, she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. The wave pushed her head up and back, like someone had yanked on her hair.
She didn’t know the limits of her powers, didn’t know what she could withstand. A very specific fear shot through her mind: the water was going to break her neck.
Zoe forced her head back down again, amazed that she had the strength, and pushed even harder against the walls.
A new fear: the water was going to tear off her arms.
And how long would it be before she needed to breathe? Why hadn’t she tested her new lungs before now? Rock and sediment glanced off her. Something bigger—a stalactite, maybe?—broke off the ceiling, and flew past. Why had she wasted time on the fossils? Why had she listened to her father?
The last of the water raced past them and out of the tunnel.
Light reappeared. Air.
She felt X’s hand again. He had never let go of her.
Two hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered up steeply. Zoe wanted to get to it, and see what was up there, before the next flood. She moved faster. Occasionally, a jutting piece of rock, sharp as razor wire, would grab at her shirt and tear it—but the pain never reached her brain. Whatever happened to her body they could fix later.
A hundred and fifty feet to go before the tunnel swung upward.
She pictured X’s mother urging them on.
But what if the woman had lost her faculties, like Dervish said? What if she was feral, deranged?
An old story came to Zoe. A hopeful one.
It was about six Jewish families who hid from Nazis for 18 months in an underground cave called Priest’s Grotto. Zoe had done an oral report on them for school once. Half the kids in class rolled their eyes because of course Zoe Bissell would figure out a way to talk about caves, even in World History.
A hundred feet left to go.
The families lived in darkness, as the Germans marched over their heads. They dug toilets and showers. Foraged for food in the countryside at night. Nearly all of them survived, even when sadistic villagers blocked the entrance to the cave with dirt so they’d suffocate.
Fifty feet to go.
One of the people in Priest’s Grotto was a girl whose name Zoe loved: Pepkala Blitzer. She was four. When the families finally emerged from the cave after a year and a half, Pepkala shielded her eyes, and asked her mother to please put out the bright candle.
It was the sun.
Zoe got a B+ on her oral report. The teacher said there was too much about the cave.
Just before the tunnel swerved upward, there was a giant hole on the floor of the passageway. The rock, weakened by water, must have caved in.
From behind her, X said, “I will make a bridge of my body so you can cross.”
“No,” said Zoe, “I’ll make the bridge.”
“Someday I will actually win an argument,” he said.
She smiled, though he couldn’t see her.
“Not with me,” she said.
Zoe guessed they had maybe three minutes before the water returned. She pressed her palms against the walls, and leaned out over the hole.
Beneath her, there was a 50-foot drop.
She was feeling less invincible now. For a second, she thought she felt the wind coming. No, she was imagining it.
She walked her hands slowly forward. Her legs tightened as she stretched over the emptiness.
When she’d reached as far as she could, she inched her hands down from the walls and toward the far edge of the hole. She felt a rush of fear—but then her bones locked into place.
X slid over her back on his stomach. Her body held strong.
When they came to where the tunnel rose upward into a chute, Zoe saw that there was a small cove off to the right, where they could wait out the next deluge if they had to. Zoe shimmied up the chute. It was tighter than the tunnel. She had to contort her body, and grease her arms with mud to get up it. At last, she climbed into the chamber up above.
It was stunning. Snow-white crystals covered the floor in waist-high mounds. They looked like a dragon’s treasure or like flowers—chrysanthemums made of ice. There were bigger crystals, too. Massive ones. They were roughly blade-shaped—hence the name Cave of Swords—but to Zoe they looked more like toppled trees. The crystals tilted in every direction. Some stretched as high as the ceiling, as if they were holding it up.
Zoe was so surprised by the beauty of the crystals that it took her a moment to see the bodies chained to them.
There were a dozen prisoners.
All their heads were covered with black hoods.
X’s mother was here somewhere.
Zoe called down to X, just as he was reaching up into the narrow chute to follow her. It broke her heart to tell him that he was never going to fit. She’d have to find his mother alone.
X refused to believe it.
He started to climb, twisting his body.
Zoe felt the wind creep down from an opening in the rock over her head. She could hear the water gathering power behind it.
“Get out of the hole, or you’ll get stuck and drown,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”
He punched the wall to widen the chute. The rock shattered.
“Stop!” said Zoe. “You’re gonna cave it in! I’ll find your mother. Just tell me what she looks like.”
The first drops of water fell past.
“She will appear to be thirty-five, though she’s seen nearly a century,” said X. “And, according to Maud, she looks … She looks like me.”
“Okay,” said Zoe. “That’s all I need.”
The prisoners had been left standing, their arms pulled back and chained around the crystals. Zoe moved among them as quietly as she could. Their hooded heads hung low. They made no sounds at all. If Zoe hadn’t seen their chests moving, she wouldn’t have known they were breathing. Only two of them were women.
She thought about how far away her own mother was. She pictured her and Jonah on the living room floor, begging Uhura to eat. The pain of missing them was so sudden and sharp that she had to force them into the Do Not Open box in her brain. They didn’t want to go.
The first woman wore a pale green, medieval-looking linen dress that had been embroidered with pearls, though most had fallen off or been stolen.
“I’m a friend,” Zoe whispered.
She went to remove the woman’s hood so she could see her face, but her hands were shaking. She calmed herself, and tried again. The woman’s silver-white hair fell down past her shoulders. She was in her seventies.
She wasn’t X’s mother.
The woman had a soft, round face and gray-blue eyes, which she immediately closed against the light. There was a reason she hadn’t spoken: there was a large gray stone wedged in her mouth.
Zoe wished she could have freed the woman—she wanted to free all of them—but she had no idea what the repercussions would be if she did. She touched the woman’s hair on impulse. She couldn’t imagine what someone like her had been sent to the Lowlands for. Without opening her eyes, the woman tilted her head and rubbed Zoe’s hand, like a cat.
Zoe was close to tears when she walked away. It was partly because she missed her own mother. But it was mostly because there was only one woman left in the Cave of Swords.
Zoe had no doubt that this was the one: she could see her pale hands in the manacles and her black hair trailing down from her hood.
When Zoe got to her, she swept the crystals on the floor aside, making a clearing where she could stand.
“It’s okay,” she told the woman, as if she were calming a frightened horse. “I’ll be gentle.”
She pulled up the hood.
She saw a face so much like X’s that, for a second, she couldn’t breathe.