She was alive. Kneeling on the stone floor, the massive lantern beside her, unlit. In her hands, she held a match. Her face was calm, almost serene, as if she’d been waiting.
“What? No!”
Now there was only the dark.
Leo threw his phone into the right passage. It sailed end over end, screen still glowing, and the creature whipped around, drawn to the brighter, more frantic source. Mira dropped the match into the lantern’s wick.
It wasn’t the soft dark of a bedroom or the blue-black of a stormy night. This was pitch —absolute, solid, velvety nothing that pressed against his eyeballs. He tried to wave a hand in front of his face and felt only the resistance of cool, still air. No breeze. No scent of soil or rot. Just the sterile, suffocating taste of absence. Into pitch black
He fumbled for his phone. The screen flared to life, a tiny rectangle of desperate blue. Battery: 4%. No signal. He swept the light in a slow arc. He was in a tunnel, roughly hewn, the walls a mosaic of wet-looking stone and twisted roots. The beam caught something ahead—a fork in the path. Two throats of pure black, identical and unlabeled.
“Great,” he muttered. “Fifty-fifty.” She was alive
“Mira?” His voice came out flat, absorbed instantly by the void. No echo. As if the darkness was a sponge.