I.T.LUCAS

DON'T READ BEFORE FINISHING BOOK 112!

Chapter 1: Darien

Darien wasn't going to die a mile underground, in a flooded tunnel too narrow to turn around in, but knowing that didn't make the cold hurt any less.

The bottom of the world's deepest cave was underwater, and every record set in it for the past twenty years had gone to a diver. He intended to take the next one, and no one needed to know that he had an unfair advantage.

He was beneath the Caucasus Mountains, at the bottom of Krubera, the deepest cave ever explored. The dry passages had ended a while ago, and then the cave dipped below the water table and filled to the roof. The only way to go any deeper was to dive through the flooded passage, what cavers called a sump.

Following the line with two fingers, the nylon sliding through his grip as he moved, he kept his light aimed at the next arrow.

Beyond the beam, there was nothing to see.

The water was murky, thick with silt his fins stirred up no matter how carefully he moved, and he could see no farther than three feet in front of his mask. Every few yards, a small plastic arrow was clipped to the line, pointing back the way he had come.

The arrows were as important as the line, and both kept divers alive in places like this. If the light failed or the silt closed in, he could follow the line by touch, and the arrows would point him in the right direction.

The water was seven degrees Celsius, mid-forties in Fahrenheit. The drysuit did a good job of insulating his body, and his immortal physiology provided him with another layer of protection, but even though he could withstand cold or heat much better than humans, he still felt their effects.

The ache in his fingers had begun a minute into the dive and had become a burn by the tenth. This depth and temperature would have pushed the limits of the best human divers, but it would take much more to test Darien's limits.

His body had already begun to compensate, pushing warm blood into areas that should have gone numb.

The line ended at the tie-off he had made yesterday, a loop around a knob of rock at the lip of the underwater pit. Below him, the shaft dropped into brown darkness.

He unclipped the reel from his harness, fed out fresh line, and lowered himself along the wall, his tanks scraping the rock as the shaft narrowed.

He gave it sixty feet even though he could have easily doubled or even tripled it. The shaft kept descending, leading somewhere, and his body and the air mix in his tanks were both holding  fine. Every instinct urged him to see where it led, but he stopped, tied off the line, clipped an arrow to it, and turned around.

The caver who called himself Martyn Exley needed his numbers to stay within a human range, and on the surface of the lake, a teammate was timing him, so that didn't leave room for fudging.

That meant his decompression stops on the way back had to be held for the full time, even though his body could adjust much faster. Darien had to hang on the line in the damned cold at each stop and watch the seconds tick off on his wrist device.

When he surfaced in the low chamber at the bottom of the cave, the light from his helmet fell on Matevž, who was crouched at the edge of the lake with the stopwatch in one hand and a thermos in the other.

Luc stood behind him with his arms folded over his chest.

"Fifty-five minutes," Matevž said. "On the dot, like always."

Of course it was. Darien made sure of that.

He spat out the regulator and pulled off his mask. The air of the chamber was warmer than the water by a few degrees, which was not saying much. "I laid another sixty feet of line down the pit, and the shaft is still going."

Matevž reached over and turned the pressure gauge on Darien's left tank toward his headlamp, then the right one, and shook his head. "Sixty feet of new line, full decompression stops, and you come back with tanks this full. In that cold, I would have burned through half of that just by shivering."

"He's not shivering," Luc said, his French accent making it sound like an accusation. "Everyone comes out of that water shaking like dogs, and Martyn looks like he's ready for coffee."

Darien took the thermos from Matevž. "I'm certainly ready for coffee."

"It has to be the suit," Matevž murmured. "Heated undergarment, a battery pack somewhere we can't see."

"It's not the suit," Darien said.

"Then it's whatever you're breathing. Some specialty blend mixed just for you that the rest of us don't get."

Darien shrugged, let the corner of his mouth lift in a teasing smirk, and said nothing. Let them think that he was hiding some expensive piece of technology, and that was making him do things others couldn't.

He had never admitted or denied it, no matter how much they pressed, and he didn't allow them to touch his equipment so they would keep guessing.

"Rich men," Luc said, and unfolded his arms. "Come. Iker has made something to eat. Can't promise that it's edible, but it's something warm to put in your belly."

The deep camp lay well over a mile below the entrance, and about a hundred meters back up the passage from the underground lake. The chamber was just tall enough to stand in, but it still held their four tents, a stove, a phone box with a cable running all the way to the surface, and enough supplies to sustain five men who had been living on top of each other for three weeks.

Everything in the chamber, from the stove to the salt Iker was wasting, had come down on someone's back in a tackle sack, and everything that couldn't be eaten or burned, including what five men produced in three weeks, would go back up the same way.

"Iker says it needs more salt," Unai said in his heavily accented English. "We have four hundred grams of salt for the whole camp, and he has used half of it for his stew."

The brothers from Bilbao did most of the hauling and all of the cooking. They also sang and told stories, which, in a place with no reception, were almost as important as food.

"Salt is not a luxury," Iker said. "Salt is a standard."

As the arguing shifted to Basque, Darien sat on a rock and began stripping his gear.

Matevž sat beside him, his tattered notebook balanced on his thigh.

"Do you have siblings?" he asked.

Darien shot him a sidelong glance. "Half-brothers I'm not close to. Why?"

"Jure, my younger brother, wanted to be a diver."

He had mentioned it before, but Darien never paid attention to such things. The fewer personal details he knew about his teammates, the better. He couldn't form attachments, and not just because people died in these caves.

Darien said nothing.

"He's a great diver," Matevž continued. "He's been talking about joining me for years, but all of a sudden he switched to motorcycles and joined a club."

"And that's a problem because?"

"I don't know." Matevž rubbed the back of his neck. "It might be nothing. Some of those motorcycle clubs are harmless, but some aren't, and he won't tell me which kind he joined." He turned a page and started drawing neat columns without a ruler. "I told him I want him here with me."

Darien finished with his harness and set it aside.

"Your brother might be a good diver, but he no longer wants to do it and chose something else. He has the right to carve his own path."

Matevž looked up at him. "That's easy to say for someone who isn't close to his half-brothers. I love my little brother. I want what's best for him."

"There was one brother I was close to," Darien said. "I owe him a lot, but in the end he followed his heart, and I followed mine."

"Are you in touch with him?" Matevž asked.

Darien shook his head. "Lost touch a long time ago."

Matevž frowned. "You're still a kid. How long ago could that have been?"

"I'm thirty-two." The rehearsed lie rolled off Darien's tongue. "I just look good for my age." He rose and padded over to take a bowl of stew from Unai.

"What did he do for you?" Matevž followed him. "Your brother."

"He saved me from hell." Darien's tone made it clear he wouldn't answer any questions on the subject, and Matevž took the hint.

Darien sat with the bowl and thought of Kalugal, who had given him a new lease on life.

Thanks to Kalugal, he'd escaped the Brotherhood's island and his father's rule. During WW2, Kalugal's platoon of immortal warriors, loyal to him alone, had been stationed outside Hiroshima. When the city was bombed, they took the opportunity to fake their deaths and escape to America.

Most of the other warriors chose to stay with Kalugal, but Darien wanted to explore and didn't want to be found by his father, who wasn't easily fooled and no doubt suspected their supposed demise. The safest way to do that was to distance himself from Kalugal and the others.

It was much easier for one male to disappear than for a group.

He lost touch on purpose so he wouldn't be tempted to seek them out, but sometimes he regretted it, especially when he got lonely between identity shifts.

He didn't know where Kalugal lived now, under what name, or how many of the others were still with him.

"Do you want another bowl?" Unai asked when Darien's spoon scraped the bottom.

"Sure. If there is enough left."

"For you, always." Unai took the bowl from him, refilled it, and brought it back.

"Thank you." Darien smiled up at him.

"You're welcome."

Iker started humming a tune, and Unai picked it up, singing in his smooth tenor. Iker harmonized with him, and the chamber filled with the notes of a familiar tune and words in a language Darien had not bothered to learn.

"When you retire from this, you can do entertainment for a living," he said.

Both shrugged and kept singing.

He liked the men he worked with on this expedition, but after this he would never see them again. Darien had already made peace with it. He didn't get attached to people. He couldn't. He moved on.

He changed his appearance, growing a beard or shaving it, and altering his hair color and style. Mostly, that was enough. He had gone clean-shaven for most of a lifetime and had grown the short beard the month he became Martyn Exley, because a beard changed the shape of a face more than anything short of surgery.

He had been blond, brown, and once, for a decade, red. He had let his hair grow past his shoulders and cut it to the skin.

For his next shift, though, he would have to wear contact lenses. This identity had gotten media coverage, and people had commented on his eyes, a deep blue with violet undertones that was too memorable for someone who needed to fade into anonymity.

He hadn't gotten them from his father.

Navuh's eyes were nearly black, and they suited a ruthless male who ruled the Devout Order of Mortdh with an iron fist and kept his concubines so isolated that even the sons they bore him were not permitted to know their faces.

The eye color had to have come from his mother, and that was all he knew about her. He couldn't even picture her face. He'd been taken from the harem as a baby and given to a Dormant woman in the breeders' enclosure to raise, and she was the one he thought of when he thought of a mother. She had done the best she could for a boy who wasn't hers, but he doubted she'd ever loved him. He had been her charge, and Lord Navuh had expected her to do a good job raising one of his sons, so she had.

She was long gone by now, but Navuh's concubines were immortal, so his real mother could still be alive. Still trapped in a harem on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, one he could not even find on the map.

Chapter 2: Tamira

Darien's photograph was propped against a napkin dispenser on the table, where Tamira had left it the night before. Now she sat in front of it with her first morning coffee, just as she had since Kalugal had sent her the print.

Ruvon, the one who had brought it to her, had found the online edition of an expedition magazine, forwarded the article to her, and when she told him she didn't have a printer at home, he'd printed an enlarged version of the photo included in the magazine on large, glossy paper.

She hadn't understood half the things in the article, not because her English was lacking but because of the very specific jargon that people interested in deep cave exploration used.

The article wasn't what interested her, though. It was the picture of her adult son, whom she had last seen as an eighteen-month-old toddler. She had the photo Kalugal had used for Darien's passport all those years ago, but the face in the glossy, large photo looked very different from the one in the small, old, grainy one.

Darien, aka Martyn Exley, was smiling at the camera. He wore a black knit cap pulled low over his forehead and a black turtleneck. His beard was short and neat, and his eyes were a deep blue with violet undertones, just like hers.

The mouth wasn't hers, though, and neither was the set of his jaw. Those must have come from the servant who had fathered him, but she couldn't remember which one that had been. She had never kept the same lover for more than a few days, and she'd made a point of not getting to know them or remembering anything about them, not because she was a snob who considered humans inferior, but because human lives were too painfully short and she didn't want to get attached.

She should remember Darien's father, though, and she felt guilty for not even trying to find out which of her lovers he'd been.

He had given her the most precious gift, even if she got to enjoy it for only eighteen months.

Darien had been beautiful, with a head of soft dark curls she'd refused to cut, and even softer cheeks she had kissed a million times before she had been forced to hand him over.

It was for his own good, she had been told, so no one would know who he had been born to. He would grow up as Navuh's son, they'd told her, with all the privileges and dangers that came with that. But since he would be one of many, and Navuh made a point of not showing favoritism to any of his sons, no one would have an incentive to eliminate him, not his other so-called brothers nor some ambitious upstart.

The thing was, she wasn't sure it had been a lie. Navuh had a good reason to fear for his sons, whether by blood or by adoption. The first boy he'd ever adopted had been murdered by a jealous concubine who'd wanted the child in her belly to be considered Navuh's firstborn. Harem politics could easily turn deadly if not managed properly.

"You'll wear holes in it," Eluheed said from the stove.

She laughed. "Then I will ask Ruvon to print me a new one, larger this time, so I can hang it over the fireplace and stare at it all day."

He shook his head. "I'm sure the original is much better than the picture, and you are going to meet him soon."

"Not soon enough." She shifted her gaze back to that handsome, smiling face.

Eluheed brought the pan to the table, slid an omelet onto her plate, then sat down across from her with his own.

"Bon appétit," he said, cutting a piece, but before he could put it in his mouth, his phone pinged in his pocket with a new message.

He pulled out the device and read the text. "It's from Kalugal. He says he wants to talk about Darien and asks if we can meet him and Jacki at the cafe at eleven."

"Of course. Tell him we will be there. Does he have news?"

"His text didn't say." Eluheed sent the reply and put the phone back in his pocket.

An hour later, she and Eluheed arrived at the cafe, which was busy for a Sunday morning, when the kiosk was closed and only the vending machines provided coffee, sandwiches, and pastries.

It seemed half the village was there, enjoying the vending machine fare and the sunny day. She found Kalugal and Jacki sitting at a table near the hedge, with their little boy between them on a booster chair.

"Tamira. Eluheed." Kalugal rose to pull out a chair for her. "Can I get you something? Coffee? Pastry?"

"No, thank you." Tamira sat down. "We've just had breakfast."

"I'll get you coffee then." Kalugal headed toward the vending machines.

"I'm coming with you." Eluheed followed him.

Tamira turned to the little boy and smiled. "What do you have there?" she asked in that tone adults used with little kids.

"Toast." He offered her a piece of smooshed bread.

Jacki laughed. "Everything is toast. It's Darius's synonym for sandwich, bagel, and anything else that resembles bread."

"It kind of makes sense," Tamira said. "How old is he now?"

"Eighteen months," Jacki said.

The same age Darien was when he had been taken away. Darius had his father's dark hair and his mother's blue eyes, a clear, bright blue like a summer sky. Smart, old eyes for such a little boy, and he did not smile.

Darien had smiled at everyone, and his eyes had been much darker than this.

"He's beautiful," Tamira said.

"He looks like his father," Jacki said fondly. "He has nothing of me."

"He has your eyes."

Jacki shook her head. "Kalugal's eyes. Not mine."

Tamira thought Jacki was wrong, but she didn't say anything.

Kalugal and Eluheed returned with coffee and several pastries. As they sat down, Kalugal leaned back in his chair.

"I've done more research on Exley's expedition. We found a local contact who told us the Krubera team is in its final two weeks. The season is about to end, and they'll need to be off the mountain before the snow blocks the roads. The problem is that Martyn Exley is not going home right away. He has a ticket from Istanbul to New York a month later." He looked at Tamira. "It will be about six weeks before he gets back."

"Six weeks," Tamira repeated. "That's too long."

Kalugal nodded. "I know it's difficult to wait, but that's the sensible thing to do. Going to New York is easy. Going to Abkhazia is not."

"I know," she said quietly. "If you'd said he was coming out in two weeks and flying straight home, I would have waited. But six weeks is just too long now that he is almost within my grasp."

She put the photograph on the table between them, face up. "I don't know much about cave exploration, but from what I've read, it's dangerous. I am worried and anxious, and I just can't sit and wait in Los Angeles while he's out there. I want to see him come out."

Jacki reached across and touched her hand. "I feel you. I wouldn't have waited either." She turned to Kalugal and extended her hand. "You owe me five."

"I didn't bet against you. You said you'd bet me five dollars that Tamira would want to go right away, and I didn't bet she wouldn't, so I don't owe you anything."

Jacki pouted. "You never let me win."

"On the contrary, my love." He leaned over and kissed his wife's cheek. "I always let you win."

 The triumphant smile on Jacki's face suggested this was exactly the response she'd been waiting for, and Tamira wondered what Jacki would demand next.

Kalugal seemed to have realized the same thing and sighed before turning back to Tamira.

"I guess we are going."

"Who are we?" she asked.

"I'm going," Eluheed said, then looked at Kalugal. "I speak the language and know the country. I have a Russian passport, but I left it in my shop in Saint Petersburg, along with everything else I owned the day the Pakhan's men kidnapped me."

"All right," Kalugal said. "Here is the situation. Abkhazia is a breakaway republic. Georgia says it's theirs, and Russia says it isn't. The only way in is through Russia. The border is a river called the Psou, ten minutes from the Sochi airport, and from the border it's another hour down the coast to the town below the caves, and then a mountain road that takes half a day. Foreigners need a letter from the Abkhaz foreign ministry, which normally takes weeks, and a Russian visa that allows two entries, because you go out to Abkhazia and come back in to fly home. But that's just paperwork and money. Not a big deal. I can have it arranged."

"Do we go as tourists?" Tamira asked.

Kalugal smiled. "Journalists. A crew from a German magazine, doing a long piece on the deepest caves on Earth and the people who explore them. Photographer, writer, fixer, translator. It gets us where we want to be."

"You can use your Professor Gunter persona," Jacki said.

Kalugal shook his head. "Gunter is an archaeologist. I will need a different identity. I will get us all new German passports with fake new names."

"For me and Darius as well," she said. "We are going with you."

So that was what she had been angling for when she got Kalugal to say that he always let her win.

Kalugal turned to look at her, but given his amused expression, he knew that as well.

"Don't even try to dissuade me," Jacki said before he could speak. "Darius can travel now, and you promised to show me the world. Take some of the men for protection if you want. I'm sure they will fight for the privilege to go because they will want to see Darien, too." She grinned. "It will be a reunion."

Kalugal picked up the photograph and looked at it for a moment. "We're not even sure this is him, but that smile looks familiar."

"It's Darien," Tamira said. "I'm certain of that."

"You'd know better than I would." Kalugal put the picture down and let out a breath. "The funny thing is that Darien didn't want to stay with me because he thought Navuh would be looking for us. Mainly for me and for him because we are his sons. I can just imagine his surprise when he learns that Navuh is not his father and that he couldn't care less what happened to him."

Tamira leveled her gaze at him. "He also still thinks of you as his brother."

Kalugal nodded. "And I still think of him as a brother as well, even though we don't share blood. I took Darien under my wing and helped him escape."

"Did you know back then?" Eluheed asked. "I mean, about Navuh fathering only you and Lokan?"

"I didn't learn about the ruse until Carol infiltrated the harem and learned the truth from Areana. Darien has spent his whole life thinking he escaped his father, while he escaped a man who never gave him a second thought."

"I remember Carol in the harem," Tamira said. "She played her part so well that I never suspected a thing. Areana and Tula were the only ones who knew who she really was."

"Carol is very good and stupidly brave," Kalugal said. "I don't know anyone who could have pulled off the stunt she did, or would have. She did it for Lokan."

"Not just for Lokan," Jacki said. "Carol wanted to prove to everyone in the clan she was more than they gave her credit for."

"That's no less admirable than doing it for love." Kalugal took a sip of his coffee, then set the cup down.

"So how do we do this?" Eluheed asked. "When do we leave, and how long would it take us to get there?"

"Let's talk logistics," Kalugal said. "We can't fly the jet into Russia. We will fly to Istanbul on my plane, and from Istanbul we will take a commercial flight to Sochi. It's two hours over the Black Sea."

"What about the equipment?" Jacki asked. "Some things you can't take on a commercial flight, and you are usually not comfortable traveling without weapons."

"We'll arrange for what we need on the other side. I have people who have people, and Turner has connections everywhere. From Sochi, we'll take ground transport to the border, then the coastal road south into Abkhazia. The town below the plateau is called Gagra. From there, it's a dirt road up into the mountains in a four-wheel drive, a few hours if the weather holds, then on foot to the camps. The whole trip is two days if nothing goes wrong and four if something does." He turned to Jacki. "Are you sure you want to come and take Darius with us? You will have to stay behind in Gagra."

"I'm okay with that, provided they have a decent hotel there."

"I'll check." He turned back to Tamira and Eluheed. "We need at least three days for the paperwork, which means we'll reach that plateau about a week from now, while the Krubera team is still packing up."

"A week is much better than six," Tamira said.

Chapter 3: Lesya 

Lesya unclipped from the rope, called "Rope free" out of habit rather than need.

"There is no one behind you," Kirill said.

She turned her headlamp toward him. "I always say that so I don't forget."

Kirill, the team's rigger, chose every anchor and hung every rope they climbed on, and he'd come down a few minutes ahead of her to check the anchors before she trusted her weight to them. He was already settled on his pack against the far wall with his long legs stretched out and the spare rope coiled neatly beside him in figure-eights.

He shrugged. "I guess at your age, you're starting to worry about going senile."

She gave him the finger and turned to look at the shaft she had just descended. It climbed forty meters into darkness. Beside the rope, a thin, cold stream fell down the shaft like a waterfall, splashing into a pool at her feet. From there, the water flowed across the small chamber's floor through a channel no wider than half a meter, then vanished into a crack in the far wall.

The crack was the only way on.

It was barely wide enough for a body and twisted like a corkscrew. It descended sixteen hundred meters to the bottom of the world's second-deepest cave, a title that the club still disputed. The cave had been considered the deepest until the Krubera team re-measured theirs and reclaimed the title by a few meters.

Above her, beyond the top of the shaft and the camp, beyond the four hundred meters of squeezes and drops that formed the entrance series, lay the surface and the sky.

It was a full day's climb for someone fit.

The measuring station was a shelf of rock along the side wall, a meter above the stream and wide enough to kneel on. The two loggers, sealed steel tubes the size of flashlights, sat inside a length of pipe bolted to the stream bed. One measured the water's depth every ten minutes, the other measured air pressure, and a cable ran from them up to a reader on the ledge.

She knelt on the shelf and pointed her headlamp at the water.

For nine days it had made the same ripple over the same rock and the same sound going into the crack. Nothing had changed that she could see or hear. And yet the reader said the flow had crept up four percent since Tuesday, and the air pressure hadn't moved at all.

She wrote down the reading in her notebook, noted the time beside it, and underlined it.

"There's more water than there should be." She turned her head so the beam swept across Kirill.

He narrowed his eyes and raised a gloved hand to block the glare. At twenty-six, he was enthusiastic and, according to Gennady, the club's best rigger in a generation, a claim he readily shared with anyone willing to listen.

"Nobody topside has reported rain since we came down," she said. "So where is it coming from?"

"Snow," Kirill said. "It's October. The plateau gets snow, the sun comes out, the snow melts, and what's melted comes down as water. Simple explanation."

"The sun still hasn't come out. The last call said it had been cloudy since Sunday."

"Cloudy doesn't mean it didn't get warmer during the day, thawing the sleet and snow."

"That shouldn't have such an effect."

He shrugged. "Then what else could it be?"

"I don't know."

She checked the temperature reading against her thermometer. Four point three degrees. The water hadn't warmed, which argued against surface melt. She wrote that down too.

Something nagged at her.

The water seemed restless.

That was the word her mind kept throwing at her, and she kept dodging it because restless wasn't a term a trained geologist used to describe a stream in a limestone cave six hundred meters underground.

Still, she had no better word for the gut feeling that was making her uneasy.

Her father had always told her to trust her gut. Not that listening to his own had saved him. Perhaps he hadn't listened that one time, and once was all it had taken.

"You should let me do the loggers next time," Kirill said. "I'm faster on the rope, and I can read a display. You could stay in camp, be warm, drink Gennady's terrible tea."

"You round the numbers, Kirill."

"I do not."

"You rounded the pitch length on the survey sheet. Twelve point four became twelve and a half."

He grinned, not at all repentant. "It's a rope, Lesya. Half a meter one way or the other doesn't matter."

"Perhaps not to a rope. It matters to a flood."

His grin faded, and he glanced down at the water and then away from it. Everyone in the club knew about the flood of two thousand eighteen. Half of them had been on this plateau when it happened. Gennady had been in the camp below when the phone rang with a thirty-minute warning, and he had climbed for eleven hours with the water rushing up behind him, and he still told the story on the last night of every expedition, when the vodka came out.

Everyone in the club also knew about her father.

Nobody told that story. At least not when she was around.

"Done," she said, and clipped the notebook into the pocket of her oversuit. "Let's go up. I'm freezing."

"Now you're freezing."

"You could have gone up."

"And leave you alone on a ledge? Gennady would rig me to the wall by my ankles."

She stood, and the cold that had lodged in her knees shifted into her hips as she straightened. The ledge was a shelf of dark limestone, about two meters wide, slick where the spray reached it, dry at the back where the loggers were bolted, and it ended in a lip that dropped straight into the stream.

The only way back to camp was the rope, forty meters straight up.

Kirill went first because he was faster. He clipped two metal clamps onto the rope, one at his chest and one in his hand. The clamps slid up the rope but locked when pulled down, so he could stand in a foot loop, slide the clamps higher, and stand again, inching upward in a rhythm that hardly looked like climbing. When he called down that he was clear, Lesya followed him.

It took her twelve minutes, a good time for her and a slow one for Kirill.

By the time she reached the top, her arms burned, and her hands had gone past cold and into a dull, distant ache. From the top of the shaft, the way to camp was short but not easy. First came a slope of loose, broken rock, like climbing a pile of rubble on a building site, where every other stone shifted under her boots. Then the passage shrank to a tunnel so low she had to drop to her hands and knees and crawl, the roof scraping against her helmet if she raised her head, the walls close enough to brush both shoulders. It lasted twenty meters and felt like a hundred. Then the walls fell away, the roof lifted out of reach of her light, and she was standing at the edge of a chamber as big as a church.

The camp sat on a wide shelf of dry rock along one wall, three tents glowing faintly from the lamps inside. Below the shelf, the stream that fed her station ran across the chamber floor, a shallow, clear brook here, good for washing dishes, before it slipped over the edge at the far end and dropped the forty meters to her ledge. The stove was hissing, promising warmth and something to eat.

"She's back," Kirill announced. "The water is going down, and it's four degrees, like it always is."

"Four point three," Lesya said.

"Four point three," Kirill agreed. "Lesya is very upset about the point three."

"Leave her alone." Vera looked up from the stove, where she was stirring something in the big pot.

She was a sturdy woman with a pleasant, weathered face, and at forty-five, she was on the older side. Vera was a microbiologist who had come down for the shrimp in the sump pools and had ended up cooking for everyone because nobody else could or would. "Come and eat, Lesya. Kirill, go help Gennady with the phone."

"I'll help him," Lesya said. "Stay and eat, Kirill."

"Thank you." He blew her a kiss. "I'm starving."

"You are always starving."

The phone sat in its waterproof box beside Gennady's tent. It was an old-fashioned wired handset, its cable tacked to the walls as it ran pitch after pitch up the passage, all the way to the surface, which was a full day's climb under ideal conditions.

Gennady was crouched beside the box with the handset pressed to one ear and his hand over the other, as if the cave were noisy.

It wasn't.

The quiet was one of the things Lesya loved about it.

The stream murmured, the stove hissed, and beyond that the silence went on so far that her ears sometimes played tricks on her, making up sounds to fill it.

"Please repeat," Gennady said into the handset. "Two days? Two? Good. Good. And the snow? Gone by noon. Yes. Yes, I know what it means, Sasha. I'm not a rookie." He waved Lesya away. "Go eat. I don't need help."

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes, yes. Go."

She went back to Vera and took the bowl she handed her. It was pasta with something red in it that had been dehydrated in Moscow and reconstituted in a cave. She sat on a foam pad with her back against the rock and cradled the bowl between her gloved hands, letting the warmth seep through.

"How's the water?" Vera asked in Ukrainian.

"Up a little," she answered, in the same language. "I don't know why."

"You'll figure it out. You always do."

"Not always."

Vera looked at her a moment longer than the exchange called for, then turned back to the pot.

Gennady hung up and came over, rubbing his knees. He was close to retirement, but Lesya suspected he would keep working as long as he was allowed to, or as long as his body could endure it.

He'd run the club's expeditions for twenty years, and he'd been her father's friend for thirty. He still called her Lesya Anatolyevna in front of the others, and she had never decided whether he did it out of respect for her father or out of a need to remind everyone whose daughter she was.

"Front is still two days out," he said. "Sasha says the sleet this morning was gone by noon. Cloud, wind, nothing serious. We go up in three days. End of season."

"Three days," Kirill said, and made a face. "I wanted one more push on the lower series."

"You wanted to go down and touch the sump so you can tell girls in Moscow you touched it, but it's not going to happen. Not this time. Three days, and we spend two of them hauling gear, and nobody goes below camp." He cast Lesya a stern look. "I'm talking to you, dochka."

"I need one more descent to the station."

"You were just there."

"I need to swap the loggers. The winter set. They record all season and run until we come back in July. If I don't put them in, we've got nothing. The whole point of this trip was to get the winter data." She held his gaze. "One descent. Down, swap, up. Two hours."

"It will take you at least three," Kirill said. "You're slow on the rope."

"Two and a half."

Gennady scratched his beard and looked at the phone, then at the stream, then at her. She knew what he was going to say before he said it.

In the end, he always said yes to her.

He'd said yes when she asked to join the club at nineteen, to take the deep camps at twenty-three, and to run the hydrology program at twenty-eight, despite objections from men with twice her experience. He said yes because of his friendship with her father, and each time, she felt the debt grow heavier while the credit grew thinner.

"Tomorrow," he said. "First thing. Kirill goes with you. And if the phone rings while you're down there, you drop whatever you're holding and climb back."

"I will."

"Swear it."

"If the phone rings, I promise I will climb immediately."

"I'm holding you to it, Lesya Anatolyevna." He said it loudly, so everyone would hear. "I mean it."

"I know you do."

As she dug into the pasta, Gennady lowered himself onto the pad beside her with a grunt. "Sasha had news from across the plateau. The Poles in Sarma are packing up. And the Americans in Krubera pushed their sump another twenty meters. Exley is diving it himself."

The sump was the reason Krubera had a bottom at all. Somewhere below two thousand meters the cave dipped under the water table, the passage filled to the roof, and the only way to go further was to swim through it in the dark with tanks on your back and a line in your hand. It was the most dangerous thing a caver could do, and the rich American was doing it personally.

It wasn't only Americans on that team. It was an international group, with a Frenchman and two Spaniards and a Slovene diver, or so the gossip went, but the money was American and so was the man who ran it, and on the plateau that was all that counted.

"Of course he is," Gennady said. "Buys the deepest cave in the world for a season, then goes down and drowns in it. That's how you get in the record books. Either you find the bottom, or you become part of it."

"You've never met him," Vera said. "Why are you shitting on him?"

"I don't need to meet him. I've met his kind. Rich boys with expensive rope who think money can buy them anything." He waved a hand toward the phone. "Twenty years the Ukrainians spent in that cave. Twenty years on tinned fish and stubbornness, and they found the bottom of the world. Now a man with deep pockets wants his name on it."

Lesya had heard about Exley, but she'd never seen him. She had a vague picture in her mind, assembled from Gennady's contempt and Kirill's envy, of someone with very white, perfect teeth, which was how everyone told Americans apart from everyone else. They had the best orthodontists, and it wasn't limited to the very rich either. It seemed like everyone there got treated to perfect teeth.

After she finished her pasta and washed the bowl in the brook, she went to her tent.

Her father's notebook was under the foam pad beneath her sleeping bag, and she took it out and opened it. She could read it by the light of her headlamp, but that was not why she had pulled it out. She just liked to hold it and feel a connection to the father whose footsteps she'd followed.

It was a field book like hers, even the same brand and the same waterproof paper, but his handwriting was less legible than hers. The last pages were readings, columns of them, water level and time and temperature, from a station in a cave in the Caucasus that she had never visited.

The model he'd been using to predict the flood pulse was written on the page before the readings: a neat block of equations. It was a good model, and she used a version of it herself.

It said that a pulse from surface rain would take nine hours to reach his station.

It had taken four.

His team had gone up. He'd stayed to catch the readings because scientists didn't climb five hundred meters down to leave before the data was collected.

They'd found him nine days later.

She had been sixteen at the time. Everyone at the funeral had said it was bad luck, and she had gone home and read his notebook and understood that it was not bad luck. It was an incomplete model, and she had realized that she was going to spend her life completing it.

She hadn't done it yet.

Unbidden, her mother's words from the last call before the trip came to her. Not what she had said about the weather, or about her husband's shoulder, or about the price of things in Kyiv now. It was her plea for Lesya to come home.

"Home where, Mama?" she'd asked.

Her mother hadn't had an answer to that, and then they had both said goodbye.

Lesya closed the notebook, put it back under the pad, turned off her headlamp, and lay in the dark, listening to the cave.

She woke up sometime later. Six hundred meters down there was no day, and sleep came and went as it pleased. She lay still with her eyes open and wondered what had woken her. The tent was dark. The camp was silent. Kirill was snoring, two tents over. The stove was off. The phone had not rung.

The stream murmured below.

She listened to it.

It was the same low, continuous sound that had put her to sleep every night since they'd made camp.

There was nothing in it.

There was no reason for her to be lying in the dark with her heart beating faster than it should, straining to hear a difference that wasn't there.

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Some Fates Can’t Be Changed

A prophecy still missing its final piece, a mystical flower holding an ancient key, and a princess who seeks knowledge but finds destiny.

Driven by a legend of a rare flower with unmatched pharmacological properties, Princess Idrilia pays a terrible cost for her obsession and vows never to risk another life for it. But some quests are impossible to abandon, and the secrets of the Silver Princess go far beyond what legend ever hinted at.

Bonds of love and duty are tested by distance and crown politics, and fate rarely unfolds the way prophecy predicts.

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