I RELEASED MIRANDA’S HAND and placed it on her stomach, tidying her final posture.
“I’m sorry,” I said. There was more I wanted to say, of course, but there wasn’t time—not with a fuse racing for explosives.
I ran back the way we came, scrambling through the pitch-black tunnel, hurtling over piles of corpses as best I could. At one point I slipped and fell, doing a face-plant into a disintegrating corpse. I threw up, disgusted, and started running again.
However long it had taken Red and Flush and me to get through the tunnel from the other direction, it seemed to take me twice as long from this end. The stench, the blackness, the echo of my chugging, heavy breaths made it seem like a race through hell itself.
“Come on,” I heard Flush yell, and when I looked up toward the ceiling, I saw his face poking through the hole.
A moment later I was at the ladder, the wood creaking beneath my weight. I climbed as fast as I could, smelling my own sweat and vomit.
The ladder sagged, the nails screeched, and I prayed it would hold out long enough for me to climb to the top. My heart slammed against my chest, just waiting for the awful explosion I knew would come at any second. Every so often my eyes traveled above me, to that small hole in the earth and the oval of shining sky.
Argos was up there, barking his head off. Hurry up, he seemed to be saying. As if he knew the dangers even better than the rest of us.
I was nearly three-quarters of the way up when my foot slipped out from under me. Before I knew it, I’d lost my balance and was sailing backward through air, plummeting to earth, legs and arms splayed.
When I landed with a thud against the hard-packed ground, the air rushed out of me, and I thought I’d never breathe again. I lay there, stunned, like a swatted fly. Panic gripped me as I struggled to inhale.
I rolled to the side, my body damp from perspiration. Nausea rushed through me like a wave. Somehow I had to get up the ladder. With stiff legs and tingly hands, I once more began to climb.
The going was slow, molasses-like. When I glanced up to the distant opening, I saw the heads of Red and Flush, looking down and urging me on.
“Come on, Book!” one of them yelled. “You can do it!”
Argos barked his head off.
I could do it . . . as long as there was time.
But there wasn’t time.
Not five feet from the top, I felt it—an enormous whoompf. The fuse had reached the explosives.
Other muffled explosions followed, each louder than the first. Whoompf! Whoompf! WHOOMPF!
I thought maybe that was it. Just the central chamber had felt the blast. Maybe I’d been spared.
But then a wave of furnace heat slammed into me, pushed forward by a cannonball of flame, racing down the tunnel, its orange and red flames molded by the cave itself. It was consuming everything in its path, searching for oxygen and a way out—and it was on me before I had a chance to blink. I grabbed the ladder, tucked myself into it, and said a single word.
“Hope.”
And then it hit.
The heat from the inferno in the Brown Forest had been unbearable; this was worse. It was a scalding blast of furnace air—like being dropped onto a sizzling griddle. Heat and fire consumed me.
But it was more than just heat—it was wind, too. A fiery tornado ripped me from the ladder’s rungs and carried me along like some insignificant speck. Breath was impossible—the air way too hot to inhale—and my arms flailed as the flaming whirlwind spun me around and vomited me through the escape hole like lava from a volcano. Like Jonah from the whale. I shot up straight in the air, hovering for what felt like forever, kept aloft by the rushing wind and scorching heat, reaching for the sky itself.
And then I landed. Hard.
The world was suddenly muffled, encased in a thick blanket, and I saw the racing footsteps of Red and Flush as they hurried toward me.
Their mouths were open, but I couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand.
They helped me sit up. Argos was there, too, licking the side of my face, cooling me with his slobbery tongue.
My eyes landed on my two friends. Their faces were scorched—but they were laughing and patting me on the back. We were alive. Somehow, against the odds, we survived.
But when the earth began to rumble, I realized it was too soon to celebrate.
Far behind us across the frozen field, puffs of white lifted to the sky. And then the fields themselves seemed to disappear from view. It took us a moment to understand what we were seeing. The ground was falling into the Compound, the earth collapsing like a row of falling dominoes.
And coming right for us.
Red and Flush helped me to my feet, and we took off in a dead sprint, racing atop the frozen corn stubble. Three charred figures in a field of white.
Our feet kicked up the snow. My right side radiated pain, and my body screamed with every footfall. Red and Flush were far ahead. A glance over my shoulder told me the ground was gaining, racing after us like an incoming wave. The sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard; the heavy thwump of earth slamming earth. It tossed me like an exploding kernel of popcorn.
This time I landed on my stomach and chest. Argos stayed with me, pressing his snout against my face and neck, making sure I was alive.
“Good boy,” I said, although I couldn’t hear my own words.
I sat up and looked around. We were submerged in an enormous crater. Before us, the earth continued to roll and buckle, collapsing in on itself, erupting snow and dirt. My arms encircled Argos, waiting for the shaking to stop.
When the ground stopped roiling and finally settled to an uneasy rest, Red and Flush came running back and knelt by my side.
“I’m okay,” I said.
We took off in a hurry, heading for the closest ridge.
Reaching the bluff, we allowed ourselves a moment of celebration, marked with deep breaths, drinks of water, and the occasional hug. We walked down to the frozen river and crossed its icy pavement. And I knew, in that moment of escaping certain death, in my final seconds of life, I had uttered one word: Hope’s name.