Deep Betrayal

quick—a fraction of a second—there was no room for error. “How do you get in?” I asked.
    “I need to make a beeline for the gap. If I hit it at the right moment, I should get sucked in behind the falls.”
    “And if you don’t hit it?”
    “Seriously, Lily, you should go.”
    “I’m not going to leave you.”
    “You think it’s by that boulder?” He didn’t look convinced. “I’ll have to be quick.”
    “Positive,” I said.
    His breath came out slowly against the back of my neck. “Good girl.” He took off his watch and handed it to me. “Takethis and go back to shore. Give me an hour. If I’m not back by then, well …”
    I strapped on the watch and Calder left me, diving down deep. I watched for some sign of him—a splash, a flash of arm, but I heard the gasp of air and never saw him again.
    Panicked, I counted in my head and timed my dive, swimming as fast as I could for the boulder, praying I could hit the spot right as my internal timer hit the twelve-second mark.
    It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet deep here—nothing compared to the depths we’d dived to before—but the velocity of the falls churned the lake into a watery nightmare. It pounded at my temples and bellowed in my ears. The currents pulled me toward the boulder’s center, tossing and pinning me down.
    The force of the falls pressed me to the rocky lake bottom. My fingertips met the boulder. Twelve , I thought. I waited for that infinitesimal vacuum of sound and air. When I heard the gasp, the falls parted and sucked me through.

31
LAIR AND LIAR
    I was inside the cave behind the falls. I whispered Calder’s name, but only the walls whispered back. Dank and rough, as if carved by a giant pickax, the rock walls seeped to the point of dripping in the small puddles around my feet. The aroma of rotted fish coated my mouth and a coppery tang settled behind my teeth. Pinprick beams of light crisscrossed through the cavern where moles had burrowed through the surrounding ground, finding weak spots in the rock. Their toothpick bones crunched under my bare feet.
    I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, butthere was nothing to see. Whispering Calder’s name again, I felt him reach for my hand and pull me to his side. He shook his head in apparent exasperation, but he didn’t scold me. He couldn’t have believed I would let him go in alone.
    Neither of us dared to speak too loudly or too much. This was hallowed ground. Had any human being come so far before? As far as I could tell, there were no large bones on the floor.
    “We should have brought her an offering,” whispered Calder. “How stupid can I get? I guess I never really thought …”
    “Wait, I have this,” I said, digging in my pocket. “It’s not much, but it is tobacco.” I handed him the pack of cigarettes I’d found on the hillside, and he sniffed at it before slipping the four remaining cigarettes into his hand. He tore off the filters and peeled the wet paper.
    “Follow me,” he said, and we crept deeper into the cave, my hands on his back. He stopped, reacting to something I couldn’t see. He ground the wet tobacco between his palms and sifted it in a line across the stone floor.
    “What do we do now?” I asked.
    “We wait.”
    “How long?”
    “Not long. If she’s here, she already knows we’ve come.”
    We slid down the wall to wait. Calder rolled the dagger’s handle around in his hands. The only sounds were the constant dripping and the muted roar of the falls above us, like traffic on a distant highway.
    Calder grabbed my wrist and took back his watch. He hita button and illuminated our faces. “Forgot this had a light,” he said. “Sorry, that would have been helpful before.”
    Only then did I see the worry on his face. I almost wished he’d turn off the light. Calder bent his head and whispered something in an unfamiliar language, repeatedly. Although I couldn’t understand him, I was certain he was practicing for the confrontation.
    After what felt like a very short time, he stopped whispering and checked his watch. “It’s already been an hour,” he said. He held his wrist up and aimed the light around the cavern. The carpet of bones reflected back the light. Below them were thousands of small, green-patinaed discs. Calder reached forward and raked his hand through some of them. He crawled away, scattering the bones as he moved.
    “What are you doing?”
    “There’s nothing here,” he