Lysa woke aching in the dark. She made an attempt to move, and it was a relief that her body responded. She sat up with a groan. Dimly, she remembered what had happened.

"Liam?"

At first, she hardly believed that her voice was working. Everything felt muffled. Unsure if her own eyes worked, she remembered the headlamp and slipped it back to her forehead.

A flick of the switch bathed her surroundings in a blue-tint. She winced at the brightness.

Then she winced at her own legs. One pantleg was ripped below the knee. Her calf was badly scraped, already dried with blood, and one of her tan leather boots had a gouge in the side.

Around her, everything was dangerously close. Everything had collapsed. Lysa called out again, louder, "Liam?"

Still, nothing.

She felt something burning in her chest. It was a weight, heavy and with a thickness of pressure that labored her breathing. Closing her eyes, she sought calm.

Panic would get her nowhere, she thought. Panic will get me dead, she reminded herself.

Yet pain came with a rising calm. She felt aches and scrapes and bruises up and down her body. She would be sore for weeks.

If you live, offered her mind.

She shook her head and surveyed the miracle of her collapsed shelter. She was surrounded by boulder-sized shards of rock, but there were craggy gaps of shadow that might lead elsewhere.

Hopefully, she could squeeze her way back toward the surface. That gave her pause. She tried not to think how far she'd hiked into the mountainside.

Lysa really hoped the tunnels were still intact. She didn't have the food or water to last underground for long.

She crawled toward a gap in the jagged stone walls. Dead end. The next gap showed promise, but it was too narrow. Hardly wide enough for an arm.

One by one, she checked possible exits. A few were feasible, but she only took note before checking the others. She had already resigned herself to the weariness of backtracking through a maze of crumbling paths.

There were four choices at the end of her exploration. None looked any better than the other. Digging through her pockets, she pulled out a compass.

She gritted her teeth at the sight of its dancing arrows. Something was interfering, so she had no idea which direction to take. "Shit," she muttered.

Lysa sighed, rubbed a throbbing bump on the side of her head, and chose a random entrance toward more darkness.

#

True silence, and true dark, were stifling absolutes. They pushed at the mind as if a physical presence. They wrapped Lysa in their emptiness. They stretched time and space so that each moment was an endless void of existence.

The only distraction was pain.

Lysa woke from the pain and tried to focus on the nothing of her surroundings. It took several moments to reorient, to remember, before she acknowledged her place in the world.

Still under tons of rock. Still wandering through the dark in a half-known mountain.

She flipped the switch on her headlamp and sighed from the relief of being able to see. Sleep had felt inevitable, but she had drifted off with nightmares of never waking.

Tired, dehydrated, and aching, she used the light to look for her next direction. It had taken four attempts, but she thought she had found the right path. The night before, or period before sleeping, she had passed a section of cabling that implied she was in the main tunnel.

Forward, then. Half-crawling, half-crouching, she moved toward a promising gap of collapsed debris.

Lysa winced as she scraped her shoulder on something overhead. A glance up, squinting in the glare of reflection, proved that the ceiling was getting lower. She dropped to her belly, wriggling, neck craned up to see forward.

The headlamp gave her a tiny slice of reality. The empty beyond was terrifying. It was hard not to imagine that all ended beyond the edge of light. So, she concentrated on moving forward toward the light that she projected.

Something, somewhere, gave a groaning pop. A faint rumbling drifted through the ground, but it ended within moments of starting. Nevertheless, the sound was nerve-wracking. Lysa had just enough space to inchworm through the opening of rock. If the cave-in shifted-

She turned her mind away from that thought. Instead, she focused on her knee and the sharp pain when it bent. She took note of the pulse of ache on her calf from the bruised scar.

Then she blinked. She was seeing things. It was faint, but she could swear that there was light ahead. A small pinpoint of blue.

Hopeful, she hurried ahead. Only to scrape both shoulders and knock her hip against an outcropping of rock. She hissed at the pain, but pushed past the obstruction.

Yes, it was there. The blue was something unnatural, something artificial, but it was light. She was so close to something different. It could be some old machine, or maybe it was a left-behind sensor, but it was a change from the nothing of her collapsed surroundings. That was enough to inspire a burst of eager energy.

One hand on the rough floor, one foot on the wall, she shoved herself onward. Twisted and rocked to escape the grasp of earthen fingers.

Until she couldn't.

She squeezed herself together by pulling in her shoulders. Kicked as if she could swim through the tunnel.

"Fuck," she whispered.

She was stuck. It took everything she could not to scream. With anger and anguish and terror. She wanted to anyway, but breathing suddenly felt impossible. Could she take a full breath? It felt like her lungs were compressed. Like she didn't have enough room to take more than gulp of air.

"Lysa?" asked Liam. He was somewhere ahead.

The voice almost made her scream anyway. She started to cry. She wasn't sure if it was relief or terror. "Liam? Oh, Liam, please! Help help help!"

That dot of blue stood up, and she realized what it was. His wireless headphones. Their little power light was going strong. There were footsteps, and then Liam entered the reach of Lysa's headlamp. "Gods! Lysa, you're alive! Thank goodness!"

She tried to extend a hand, but found she couldn't. She was wrapped up in wedged-together stone. Her elbows were pinned to her sides. "Shit, I'm so glad to see you. Help me! I'm so close to getting out of here!"

He crouched and twisted to get a closer look. "Can you go backward at all? Maybe change your angle?" He paused, eyeing the mouth of the passageway. "Might be you could come through on your back."

Lysa considered it, tried to feel where she could take hold. "One sec, lemme try." She shimmied herself away from the friendly face. It hurt, physically and emotionally, but it worked. She wanted nothing more than to burst through and give him a hug.

Another meter back, she found that she was less constrained. Free enough to twist herself around. "Okay. Coming back."

Knowing that she had a potential helper, she stretched out as much as possible. Extended her arms all the way forward. As if she could fly through the cramped space.

"Okay," said Liam. "I'm ready. I'll pull you out if I can."

Slowly, painfully, Lysa rocked from side to side. Centimeter by centimeter, she wriggled back toward the opening. She kept expecting to stop. She kept expecting the walls to close together and squeeze her, trap her, forever.

Then she felt Liam's hands close around her fingertips. Fumbling, then taking her wrists. "Okay, keep coming."

His help sped up progress exponentially. She still had to shift back and forth, but every bit of motion helped Liam pull her further into the open chamber beyond.

Finally, she was free. She lay in the dark, breathing too heavily, staring at a ceiling that was thankfully at standing height. It was all she could do not to shake herself apart.

"Hey, you okay?"

Rolling onto her side, Lysa got up and fulfilled her need for a hug. She half-tackled him in the glaring light of her headlamp. "I thought you were dead!"

"I thought you were dead!" He disengaged, carefully, and with a sigh. "But we're not out of this yet." He pointed into the darkness.

Lysa heard a detached defeat in his voice. Turning, she eyed a wall of stone.

Liam murmured. "That's the way out."