Page 12 of Girl, Unseen

‘No.’

‘Well then.’ Ella fished her keyring out of her pocket and found the flat piece of metal she kept for such situations. She jimmied it in the gap between the rear and the trunk door. A second of wiggling later and the thing sprung open.

‘The lockmaster strikes again.’

Ella pocketed her keys. 'These things might look great, but they're not exactly secure.'

‘Like many women I’ve been with. What’ve we got?’

The trunk lights revealed what looked like standard geology gear – hammer, chisels, sample bags. All arranged with the same precision she'd seen in Marcus's office.

‘He came prepared.’ Luca picked up a hammer. ‘But for what?’

'And why hasn't he left?' Marcus's car had been here for at least three days. No food or water in sight. No camping gear. Just tools.

Something cold settled in Ella's stomach. The thrill of discovery curdled into dread as she realized what they weren't finding. No signs of violence. No struggle. Just a perfectly maintained car with a perfectly organized trunk, sitting in a perfectly horrible place to disappear.

‘We need to search this whole quarry.’ Ella shut the trunk. ‘Every level, every corner. Marcus – or what’s left of him – is still here somewhere.’

CHAPTER SIX

One hour and a hundred false alarms later, Ella's legs had moved beyond pain into some new territory of agony. Her lungs ached from the cold night air, and her mind kept circling back to that pristine Mustang on the level below.Something about the whole setup felt wrong – like a stage dressed for a play where the actor had missed his cue.

The quarry toyed with them, offering hope in every shadow only to snatch it away. An old jacket turned out to be a tangle of vines. A flash of pale skin became sun-bleached plastic. The lack of cell service meant that calling in reinforcements would require a trip back to the mainland, and Ella would only do that if she couldn’t find Marcus with her own two eyeballs.

‘Tell me again why we didn't wait until morning?’ Luca asked.

‘Because Marcus didn't.’ Ella swept her flashlight across another rock face. ‘And I want to know why.’

The truth was more complicated. Something about this case had hooked her - that familiar tension between curiosity and dread that preceded every major breakthrough in her career. The human mind was a maze of dark corners and false bottoms; Ella had spent her life learning to navigate those shadows. And right now, every instinct told her they were close to getting answers.

The top level of the quarry was different from the others. No equipment lay abandoned here, no signs of human activity beyond the basic cuts into the rock. Just raw stone beneath a sky that had completely clouded over.

‘One more level.’ Ella aimed her flashlight beam at the ramp ahead. It wound up like a serpent's spine, steeper than the others. ‘Then we'll go.’

‘You said that two levels ago.’

‘Yeah, well, I lied.’ She started climbing. ‘Coming?’

Luca muttered something that might have been anatomically impossible, but his footsteps crunched behind her. The burns on her legs screamed with each step, but Ella pushed through. Pain was just weakness leaving the body, or so Ripley used to tell her.

The top level was different. Instead of the broad terraces below, this was more like a shelf carved into the quarry face. Barely ten feet wide inplaces, with a sheer drop on one side and solid rock on the other. Their lights revealed ancient drill marks in the stone, like some giant creature had tried to claw its way out of the earth.

‘Watch your step,’ Luca said. ‘Long way down.’

‘Thanks for that.’ Ella kept close to the wall, trying not to think about the empty air to her right. ‘See anything interesting?’

‘Besides certain death? No.’

Their lights played across the quarry face. The limestone here was different - more fractured, shot through with veins of darker stone that caught the light like frozen lightning. Ella found herself studying the patterns despite her exhaustion. She could see why Marcus might have been drawn to this spot.

Luca shouted, ‘Ell, look at this.’

Ella joined him at a section of wall that bulged outward like a tumor. The rock here was a chaos of different types, all mashed together, although Ella couldn't identify them by name. All she knew was that, at least by visual inspection, none of them had any business being in a limestone quarry.

‘That's not natural,’ she said.

‘No kidding. Check this out.’

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