My parents arrived with my sister and a locksmith. Mom said, “She’s divorced. She needs your house more than you do.” Dad held up a paper. “We already handled the legal part. Just give us the keys.” My sister smirked. “I’ll let you pick up your things later.” I stepped aside. “Go ahead. Open it.” Ten minutes later, Dad walked back out white as a sheet. “Who else knows?” / Chapter 37 / 40

Chapter 37 - The Current and the Clay

Darkness swallowed us whole.

The roar of the water was absolute, drowning out thought, fear, and breath. I was tumbling through a smooth, cold concrete pipe, bouncing off slick surfaces, my arms wrapped desperately around the steel box against my chest.

I couldn't tell which way was up. The freezing water was in my nose, my mouth, my lungs. Every instinct screamed to inhale, but I clamped my teeth shut, holding onto the single thought that Julian had given me: *four hundred yards.*

Suddenly, my back slammed against a heavy steel grating. The impact knocked the last pocket of air from my chest, and I saw white stars burst behind my eyelids.

The current pinned me flat against the iron bars, the weight of a thousand gallons of mountain water pressing down on my ribs like a concrete slab. Beside me, another shape slammed into the grate—Julian, coughing and spitting, his long gray hair plastered across his face.

"The... latch!" Julian roared over the deafening churn of the water. He reached behind his back, his fingers clawing at an emergency release lever welded to the side of the bypass casing. "Push with your legs!"

I drove the heels of my work boots against the slick concrete frame, throwing my entire body against the grate. Julian wrenched the lever downward.

With a metallic screech, the grate swung outward on heavy spring-loaded hinges. The rushing water threw us out into open space.

We didn't land in the gorge.

We landed on a steep, mud-slick embankment inside a vast, cavernous limestone cutting where the old narrow-gauge coal trains used to run before the line was abandoned in the 1950s. The water exploded around us, cascading down the rocky incline toward a dark, fast-moving creek that wound through the bottom of the hollow fifty feet below.

I hit the mud on my side, rolling over twice before coming to a stop against the rotting trunk of a fallen hemlock tree.

I lay there for a long moment, gasping for air that tasted like wet pine needles, coal dust, and night air. My entire body was bruised, my clothes soaked through and heavy with silt, but my fingers were still locked around the handle of the gray steel ammunition box.

A few yards above me, Julian hauled himself out of the drainage sluice. Behind him, clinging to the collar of his coat with a death grip, was Constance.

She was shivering violently, her face covered in gray mud, her wool coat ruined, but her blue eyes were wide open, staring up through the canopy of the hemlocks at the night sky.

"Did we... make it?" she croaked, her voice barely a rattle.

"We made it to the rail cut," Julian said, sinking onto his knees in the mud, breathing heavily. "Elm Ridge is directly above us. Listen."

I pushed myself up onto my elbows and listened.

Above the lip of the ridge, three hundred feet above where we lay in the mud, a siren was wailing—the high, mournful wail of the valley’s volunteer fire department. Through the gaps in the tall trees, the night sky was glowing with a sickly, pulsating orange light.