“Here,” Charlie said, pointing. “It’s a current.”
“So, let’s follow,” Dave said, serious and awed.
Julia walked atop the tunnel’s steel girding that led to cool water. Girding was above, too—narrow steel beams like an animal cage. She grazed a top bar with her shoulder and it was ice cold.
Squish-splash. She went down for maybe five hundred feet. She could hear only the single-file splashing behind her, and the rushing of water. At last, the girding beams ended. Nothing was shored. All that was left was an unsupported tunnel of dirt and sand that weaved beneath Sterling Park. They shined their lights into the last section, where the water was higher and the tunnel much smaller. The current pulled them toward it.
If there was a cave-in here, nothing would save them.
She braced herself, holding to the last of the steel girding. Her thighs and toes were numb. Her heart pounded hard. She kept hoping her body would get tired, forced into calmness by exhaustion. For how long can a person stay so wired?
“This could cave in,” she said. “People should only keep going if they want to.” She looked back at them, let the light blind her, so they could see her face. So they could know that she forgave them whatever they’d said or done. They didn’t have to prove anything.
She forged ahead. They followed.
Deep water. The current dragged her and she ran-swam. So cold. Rushing sounds, and also a distant hum she couldn’t place—like the rhythmic shaking of trees in a heavy wind.
She felt the others splashing nearby. They arrived at a crevasse, through which all the water rushed. On a ledge, something reflected the flashlight. She picked up a depth gauge—that last, specially small diver must have left it. This must have been where the diver had stopped and given up. The crevasse was narrow and long and submerged under freezing water. Virgin territory, it was made for people with small hips and shoulders. People not yet fully grown. A part of the earth no human but Shelly had ever known.
The depth gauge read something impossible: 1,000 feet.
She’d read and heard that the deepest parts of the lowest Lloyd Aquifer went down 1,800 feet. Could Shelly be that far down? If the trained, professional adults hadn’t found her, how could they possibly do it?
Even as she reached her hands through the tight gap and held her breath, she understood that this was insane. Foolish and in some ways, selfish. But she couldn’t go back. She’d either surface with a body, or not at all.
She took the deepest of breaths, silently whispered the briefest of prayers （Please）。 Then underwater. Her arms went through first, catching purchase of soft rock. She tried to squeeze her head and shoulders through but had the angle wrong. She pulled back out. Breathed again. Submerged. Pushed through again. This time her head went first, tender and vulnerable to whatever waited on the other side.
Breath held, she wriggled. Everything felt tight, the surrounding walls of sand and tar and dirt unstable like they might crash down. Still holding her breath, still underwater, she pushed her shoulders. Easier. Then the rest. Small, child hips. She shimmied, bound tight as a worm, her shoulders doing the work. Sound took a long time to echo through water. She could feel life behind her—her friends. They felt so far away.
She burst through. Out! Her lungs still full of air, she went buoyant, carried by water to the top. She burst up, gasping into a wide-open space.
A current ferried her. She worked not to panic. Not to struggle and drown. Just to stay on her back, breathing, and let herself be carried, as surely Shelly must have been carried. She could see only with her hands and her breath, and the hairs on her arms.
The current brought her to an enclosed shallows where she was able to stand. The water rushed past her, knee deep. This was a kind of chamber. She could feel but not see the walls, the center where the water rushed and seemed to drain. There was a flapping; that tree sound in wind only much louder. The room oscillated, and in the dark, it was hard to tell what was happening.
One by one, the rest appeared. Phones recovered and wiped clean, they shined their lights, illuminating the enclosed crescent where everything above seemed to have dragged down. The shallow current rushed past the ledge and down, gathering depth as it pooled in the middle of the high-ceilinged room, a pile that moved. The water drained down.
She placed the rhythmic tree-shaking sound, at last. It was the sound from which the crescent had been bereft all summer. The sound that defined East Coast summer: cicadas. They’d swarmed down here, instead of above.
The movement, yes, the movement. This room was alive.