Chapter 83 - The Subterranean Current
The roar of the underground river was deafening, bouncing off the jagged walls of the limestone cavern. We were swept through the subterranean drainage system of the Engadin peaks, entirely at the mercy of the current. The water was scarcely above freezing, leaching the warmth from my muscles with every passing second.
"Claire!"
A beam of halogen light cut through the black mist ahead. Ethan was braced against a natural outcrop of rock, water churning around his waist. Leo and Maya were secured against his chest, both coughing up spray but screaming at the top of their lungs—a sound that, to my ears, was the sweetest music on earth. They were alive. They were breathing.
Ethan reached out with a collapsible carbon rescue pole. "Grab it!"
I lunged forward with my free hand, my fingers wrapping around the textured grip just as the current threatened to drag David and me down a secondary spillway. Ethan braced his boots into the slick rock and hauled us in with sheer, adrenaline-fueled power.
I scrambled onto the rocky shelf, pulling David’s limp frame out of the torrent. He was blue-lipped, shivering uncontrollably, his head rolling against the jagged granite. I collapsed beside him, coughing up mouthfuls of bitter, mineral-heavy water.
"Leo! Maya!" I dragged myself toward them on my knees.
"Mommy!" Maya sobbed, reaching out with cold, soaked hands. Leo threw his arms around my neck, trembling so violently his teeth clicked like dice in a cup.
"I've got you. I've got you both," I whispered fiercely, burying my face into their soaked hair. "You're safe. Daddy is here."
Ethan shone his tactical light down the length of the cavern. The water leveled out ahead, spilling toward an opening where pale, natural light cut through a veil of hanging icicles.
"The drainage tunnel feeds directly into the Roseg gorge," Ethan said, breathing hard as he unclipped the children and immediately draped them in thermal survival blankets from his waterproof pack. "The facility above is completely gone. Seismographs across Europe will record it as an anomalous tectonic shift. But we have less than an hour before the private search grid registers that the distress frequency never transmitted from the ruins."
"Then we move now," I said, stripping the wet outer layer from David and wrapping him in the emergency foil. "David can't survive in this cold much longer."
Ethan slung David over his broad shoulders in a fireman’s carry without another word. I took each of my children by the hand, their small fingers clasped tightly within mine, and we moved toward the pale light at the end of the cavern.
May you like
We emerged through a cleft in the towering granite wall into a blinding expanse of white. A savage alpine blizzard was howling across the gorge, obscuring the valley below. We were soaked, freezing, and hunted—but the prison was rubble behind us, and for the first time in six months, my family was together under the open sky.
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