"Over there," he said, indicating a darker slit in the floor. "You can hear the cave breathe."

Anna didn't tell him the last thing she needed was to hear the damn thing breathing.

In a tangle of beams from three headlamps, Holden disengaged from the rope. The entire descent had taken so little time, neither Anna nor Oscar had bothered to take off their packs.

"Onward and downward," Oscar said, and walking to an unpromising looking hole dug into the bottom of the shaft, picked up a nylon rope Anna'd not noticed before and wove it deftly through the metal ladder of his rack. "A nuisance drop-maybe ten feet. On-rope." And he was gone. "Off-rope" floated up seconds later.

The hole was hand-dug and dirt-walled. To Anna it looked as unstable as the caves the children used to dig in the sand pit behind the local airport in the neighborhood where she grew up; caves the airport operator was always dynamiting for fear some hapless little gene would get itself culled from the pool before its time.

Anna went second. The bottom of this drop was more rank and evil than the first. From a landing barely long enough to lay a coffin down, a ragged hole cut through to another chamber. Beyond this uninviting aperture, Anna could see a spill of light from Iverson's lamp. Then that was snuffed, and she felt terribly alone.

A blinding eye winked over the lip above. "You off-rope?" Holden asked.

"I guess." Anna couldn't move. A creeping numbness was flowing in from her fingertips. As it passed through her insides she felt her bowels loosen and bile rise in her throat. "I don't think I can do this," she said.

Holden landed beside her as lightly as a feather and flipped open the rack to free the rope. "Were you talking to me?"

"No." Anna didn't trust herself to elaborate.

Holden dropped to his knees and skittered out of sight through the crevice. "We having fun yet?" she heard him say.