Page 70 of Spelunking Through Hell

And then the pain somehow, mysteriously, impossibly, got even bigger and even brighter, burning through the entire universe, and I wasn’t praying anymore. I wasn’t wanting anything anymore, except for the pain to stop. Nothing else would make things okay. Only the pain stopping would fix anything.

I didn’t know whether my eyes were open or closed; everything was blackness either way, so profoundly dark that the possibility of light seemed like a lie. There was a vast shattering sound, like someone had struck a mirror the size of a ballroom wall with a hammer, and like any broken mirror, it rained down around us in slicing shards, and I was ripped open, laid bare before the uncaring universe. The pain got even bigger, now searing and crushing at the same time, and then, mercifully, it stopped, and so did I.

And then, against all reason and logic and reasonable, logical outcomes of the situation, I woke up, and if that’s surprising to you, imagine how it felt tome. I mean, at first, it felt like falling down a rabbit hole through comforting numbness, dropping like my namesake into the unending dark that lay at the center of all things. I fell, and the pain fell away, so far behind me that it couldn’t possibly catch me again.

Only then the fall began to slow, and I began to remember that I had a body, or my body began to remember that it had a me. It began with a low, numbing ache that spread through all my limbs in near synchronicity, which I realized after a moment was the blood beginning to circulate again. Apparently, at some point, it had stopped, which was probably why the hurting had gone away. Human people need blood circulation to be alive, and for a little while there, I might not have been.

That was fun. Well, no, that was absolutely horrifying, and I didn’t like it one little bit, but dead people don’t get to have opinions about things unless they come back as ghosts, and now that I knew where Thomas was, I didn’t need to start a haunting. It would still be good to know for sure whether he got out, whether he’d been able to yank enough pneuma off of me to use me like the grenade I was, but not good enough to justify coming back and hanging out the way Mary and Rose had done. If I was finished, let me be finished. Let me rest.

It had been a long, long time since I’d had anything resembling a proper nap.

But the ache continued to spread through my body, until it reached my chest and became a splintering pain that seemed to ebb and flow with my breath, which was how I realized I was breathing. And if I was breathing, I wasn’t dead, and that was a little bit annoying, since I had just come to terms with the idea that I was finally done. I decided that annoyance was a good enough reason to wake up, and so I did.

Opening my eyes, I found myself looking at Sally from a much closer distance than I would have expected. Her face was right up in mine, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears, hair tangled as she took a deep breath and leaned in toward me.

The pain in my chest suddenly made a lot of sense. She’d been giving me CPR. But I was awake now, and I didn’t want anyone giving me CPR, especially not someone who’d been pretty unpleasant to me during our brief acquaintance.

“...wait,” I said, or tried to, anyway. It came out as more of a croak.

Sally heard me anyway. She stopped, staring down at me.

“Are you alive?” she demanded.

I took a deep breath again—or tried to. It seemed like nothing I wanted to accomplish was really working out for me. My chest refused to fully expand.

My struggle must have shown in my face. Sally grimaced. “Sorry,” she said. “This was my first time doing CPR on a person, and not atraining manikin. I think I may have broken a few ribs. It was an accident.”

I glared at her and didn’t bother trying to sit up. Broken ribs suck, and since mine had already been cracked before she started with the compressions, at least one of them felt like it had given way. Normally, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that particular scenario. But if what Thomas had been saying before was accurate, my luck, which was always unpredictable, had been temporarily stripped away when he removed the pneuma. Sitting up felt like it would be taking things a step too far, at least right now, and so I stayed where I was.

It would have been polite to thank her, but that would have taken too much air. At least I could breathe normally. At least I wasn’t falling anymore.

At least we had gotten out of there.

“Alice, thank God,” said Thomas, suddenly appearing next to Sally. That makes it sound like he teleported or something, when really, he had just been outside my currently limited frame of vision. “You’re awake. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry...”

“S’okay.” He looked like hell, as filthy as Sally, with more streaks in the dirt on his face, some from tears and some from frustrated wiping at the same while they were falling, resulting in a muddy palimpsest of a trauma I had managed to sleep—or maybe die—through. How did they get sodirty? Dimensional crossing wasn’t a form of mud wrestling. My lips were dry. I licked them, swallowed, and said, “Knew what I was doing.”

“Well,Ididn’t, and we are never, ever doing that again.”

I snorted. “No,” I agreed. Then: “Happened?”

Thomas took my hand and a deep breath, in that order. “We made it,” he said.

I closed my eyes, relaxing as much as I could through the pain in my chest and the ache in my limbs. We made it out of that damned killing jar. We were going to make it home from wherever we were now. Everything else was extraneous.

“You can sleep if you have to, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t if you don’t have to,” said Thomas, squeezing my hand. “Please.”

“She’s exhausted,” said Sally.

“She’salive. I thought I’d killed her.”

“Phoebe said—”

I opened my eyes again. My vision was a little clearer this time, and I could see a cloth ceiling stretched above us, a blue so pale that I’d initially taken it for the sky. We were in a tent. Given the shade ofblue, we were in anIthacantent, meaning Helen and Phoebe had managed to find us.

“I know what Phoebe said,” snapped Thomas. “And she was right, but dammit, we need to stay with Alice now.” He looked back at me. “Darling, when I was looking at your tattoos, I saw several that were associated with healing. Do you know what they do?”

I considered whether I felt well enough to nod, and finally forced myself to do so.

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