Page 68 of In Too Deep
He breathed in the scent of her hair beneath the dust and fear—something clean and uniquely her that he wanted to memorize.
Just in case.
“I’ll be back.”He pulled away, then cupped her face in his hands.“I promise.”
It was a promise he had no right to make.
But he made it anyway.
The passage Noah chose angled upward.Promising.He moved quickly, his headlamp cutting through the absolute darkness.His hands trailed along the walls to keep his bearings.
Every twenty yards, he tied a strip of fabric torn from his undershirt to a rock protrusion or wedged it into a crack.
Breadcrumbs leading back to Meg.A trail home.
The tunnel twisted and narrowed, then opened into another small chamber.
Three passages led away from it—left, right, center.
Noah chose the middle path, marked it carefully with fabric, and pressed on.
His watch told him he’d been gone fifteen minutes when he spotted a pale gray light filtering down from above.
Noah’s heart leaped.
He moved faster.His boots slipped on the wet stone as the tunnel angled sharply upward, nearly forty-five degrees.
The light grew brighter.
He stepped below the source and craned his neck.A vertical shaft, maybe six feet wide and irregular, cut up through the rock at a steep angle.
Not quite straight up, but close.
Sixty-five degrees.Maybe steeper.
Daylight poured down from somewhere far above.Fresh air.
Noah shone his headlamp up its length.
The walls were rough sandstone, pitted and pocked with handholds and narrow ledges.
Climbable.
For him?Definitely.He’d climbed worse.
But Meg?
He tried to picture her scaling this shaft, her arms shaking, reaching for holds she could barely see.
Possible, maybe, if he could help from above.
But Alex?Unconscious and deadweight?Impossible.
No way to haul an unconscious body up a shaft this steep without some serious gear he didn’t have.
Noah’s brief surge of hope deflated.
This wasn’t their salvation.
