Luckily, he didn’t fight me and followed without complaint. Almost as soon as we started running, more of the tunnel collapsed.
One after another the support structures fell, their remnants piling on top of one another until the tunnel was packed tight with rock dirt.
I kept running until the noise of the collapsed ceased, and only when the tunnel fell silent again, did I dare stop.
Ellis leaned against me, panting heavily from our sudden sprint.
“What… the hell?” He gasped for breath, just as much from fear as from exhaustion. “I thought you said it was safe.”
“It was,” I insisted, but Ellis wasn’t listening.
“Clearly it wasn’t. We never should have come down here.”
“It was safe,” I tried again, but Ellis was still too caught up in his terrified rant to hear me.
“Who even just goes down into a strange tunnel? Of course it was unstable. We only found it because it collapsed in the first place. We’re idiots for coming down here.”
“Ellis, listen to me.” I grabbed his shoulder and shook him until I knew I had his attention. “It was safe. I know construction andbuilding. I know the signs of an unsafe structure. It was safe. This tunnel shouldn’t have just collapsed like that.”
My mind returned to the slight popping sound I’d heard right before the collapse. That was not the sound of stone and wood breaking naturally.
“It shouldn’t have collapsed,” I repeated. “Not on its own.”
Ellis took one look back at the pile of rubble only a few feet away, then his gaze returned to me and in his eyes was a new understanding.
“You think… someone made it collapse?”
“I think you should stay very, very close to me.”
Letting him go, I reached under my jacket and pulled out a handgun from the holster clipped to my belt. With the gun in one hand and my flashlight in the other, I pointed both down the open end of the tunnel.
“You’re armed?” Ellis gasped out, while practically plastering himself to my back.
“I’m always armed.”
“Of course you are,” he sighed. “Why am I even surprised?”
My flashlight didn’t penetrate the darkness very far, and even with Ellis adding his own light into the mix, the open tunnel still stood before us like a solid black curtain.
I started moving down the tunnel, pushing forward into the black, but before I could take more than two steps, Ellis clung to me so tightly I was trapped in place.
“Shouldn’t we stay here?” he asked, speaking directly into my ear. “If we leave, Magnus and Trent won’t be able to find us.”
My gaze never left the open maw of the tunnel stretching before us, even as I answered him. “There’s dozens of yards of debris between us and them, now. It would take an entire excavation team for them to reach us. No. Our best bet is to keep going.”
“But—” he started to argue, but I cut him off.
“Listen. Whoever built these tunnels knew what they were doing. They would have built other exits just in case one was cut off. There must be another way out farther down the tunnel, so we need to keep going. Besides, I don’t want to wait around here for whoever sabotaged the tunnel to bring the rest of the structure down on our heads.”
Although I couldn’t see him, I could feel Ellis’s whole body shaking as he pressed himself against my back. I couldn’t let go of my gun or my flashlight to reach out to him, but with him so close, it was easy to simply turn my head a bit and press my lips to his cheek.
“Trust me?”
He swallowed hard enough that I could hear his throat moving. Then he stopped shaking and nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, I trust you.”
“All right. Then come on, stay close, and do exactly as I tell you.”