We woke Zander and M.K. once the cavern was light again and got going as soon as we’d packed everything back into the vests and had some water to drink. It felt good to have had a little sleep, but we were even hungrier than we’d been the night before and we were now on the lookout for whatever it was that had been following Zander last night. I was still thinking about what Sukey had told me the night before, but I’d decided not to say anything to Zander and M.K.
M.K. seemed a little better after sleeping, though her arm looked worse than ever, and we were quiet as the boat wound its way through the cavern. Now that we could see our surroundings better, we saw that we’d entered a magical section of the network of tunnels and caverns. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites everywhere we looked and the minerals in the water showed up pink and yellow and green in the strange, dappled light. I was lightheaded from hunger and I almost wondered if I was imagining it, but when I looked at the others, they were staring, too.
We were so mesmerized by the formations in the caverns that we didn’t notice at first that the current was moving faster and that the light in the tunnel had increased, even though there didn’t seem to be any more of the holes drilled in the ceiling.
“Hey,” I said all of a sudden, when the scenery had started passing by so quickly I couldn’t ignore it anymore, “the current’s really picked up.” I got the map out of my vest and checked it. “We should be coming around a bend in the river up here and then…”
“And then what?” Zander asked nervously.
“Hmm. That’s strange.” It was hard examining the map in the bottom of the boat.
“Why’s the water moving so quickly?” Zander asked. “Wait. What’s strange?”
“Well, I haven’t been able to look at the map in really good light since I put it together about the secret canyon, but the contour lines are… This is very strange.” I was trying to do the calculations in my head, but the lack of sleep and food was making me slow. “There’s some sort of big drop in elevation up here.”
“Drop in elevation? What does that mean?” Sukey was sitting up now, holding her pistol.
“It could mean some sort of geologic event that changed the shape of the caverns,” I said, still looking at the map, trying to figure it out.
“Pucci, go see what you can see,” Zander said, and Pucci rose into the air, his black feathers shimmering, his helmet of silver feathers pewter in the light, and disappeared into the cavern ahead.
As we came around the bend, we were blinded by the bright sunlight coming in the open end of the cavern.
“It’s the end,” I said. “But here is where it should…” I didn’t need to say drop because suddenly all we could see was sky, way out in front of us, and all we could hear was rushing water.
“Waterfall! Waterfall!” Pucci cried out.
“It’s a waterfall!” I shouted.
“You think?” Sukey had to shout to be heard.
“There’s no need to be sarcastic!” I shouted back.
Sukey yelled, “What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do,” I told them as the boat was swept closer and closer to the edge of the falls. “Hold on tight. Stay in the boat. It’s our only hope.”
But M.K. was fiddling around with the buttons on the back of her vest.
“M.K., stop that! Just hold on!” I screamed at her as we came closer and closer.
“I’m just going to see what this one does,” she yelled over the noise of the water. “It’s the only one left.” I turned and watched as she poked at the back of her collar, just as I felt us being pulled into the center of the river.
There was a loud whoosh and light blue fabric streamed out of the back of her vest, covering us in the boat and momentarily blinding us.
“What are you doing?” I screamed at her. “We can’t see. We’re going over!”
With a loud snapping sound, the fabric billowed and filled with air.
It was a parachute, a huge parachute, blue as the sky.
“There are two hooks on it!” Zander called out to us as the parachute jerked and M.K. started to lift off her seat in the bottom of the boat. “Hook them onto those rings on the boat!” We did as he said, hooking the long ropes dangling from the parachute onto the D rings on either side of the boat and felt ourselves lift off the surface of the churning water and into the air.
We must have been 150 feet over the ground, out in front of the waterfall now in our strange airship, the inflatable boat hanging beneath the giant blue parachute and the four of us in it staring out with enormous, entirely surprised eyes. It was an incredible feeling, just hanging there in mid-air for a moment before we started to drop, and we sailed gently down, mist in our faces as we looked around at the incredible place where we’d arrived.
We bumped gently to the ground.