"A lady-in-waiting?"

"Exactly."

A chilling image filled Anna's mind: herself crouched and whimpering, fear pouring like poison through her limbs, shutting down her brain as the cave closed in around her. Adrenaline spurted into her bloodstream, and she could feel the numbness in her fingertips and a tingling as of ice water drizzling on her scalp. To hide her thoughts she rubbed her face.

"Will you go?" Iverson asked.

Anna scrubbed the crawling sensation from her hair with her knuckles. "Just deciding what to wear."

Oscar looked at her shrewdly, the long, narrow eyes turning the color of bleached lichen. "Let me rephrase that: can you?"

"I don't know," Anna answered truthfully. "Can I?"

"Caving?"

"None."

"Climbing?"

"Some."

"Rapels sixty to a hundred fifty feet. Ascents ditto, naturally. Rope climbs with ascenders."

"I can do that."

"Crawl on your belly like a reptile?"

Jesus. "How much?"

Oscar laughed, a huffing noise concentrated in the back of his throat and his nostrils. "Not much where we're going. Lechuguilla is a big place. Huge. It's where the NPS stores Monument Valley during the off-season."

It was Anna's turn to laugh, but she didn't. "The crawls," she said. "How much is 'not much'?"

"Three or four good crawls."

"An oxymoron."

Iverson sat, letting her absorb the information. His heel rang its dull music from the side of the desk. Anna quashed an urge to grab his ankle, stop the pendulum. She tried to think of Frieda, alone and confused, hurt and afraid. She tried to think of friendship and honor and courage and duty. Cowardly thoughts of a way out pushed these higher musings aside: claims of a bad heart, a dying mother's call, or, if all else failed, "accidentally" shooting herself in the foot.