Something struck her in the abdomen, turning her head over heels, and a blast of water swept across her, filling her mouth and nose once more. Then, the flood passed and she was able to breathe again.
It took a moment for her to realize that she was hanging in mid-air, suspended by the rope attached to her climbing harness. The blow she had felt was the line snagging on something, going taut and dragging her to an abrupt stop as the water rushed away. Even though she was caught fast, unmoving, she could still feel the vortex whirling around her.
When the sensation finally passed, she found the rope and pulled herself upright. The flashlight revealed the smooth wet walls of a cylindrical shaft about twenty feet in diameter. She was off center, dangling about five feet away from the wall. Though she could not make out the bottom of the well, she could see a ledge ringing the shaft about twenty feet above. The ledge was not a solid piece of stone, but composed of individual blocks jammed together tightly. Her trailing safety line was caught between two of the blocks like a string of floss between two molars. The improbability of this apparent reprieve did not escape Jade’s notice, but she had more immediate concerns than wondering why fate had chosen to intercede on her behalf.
She stared at the rope for a few seconds, searching her memories of climbing lessons past for the best technique to make her way back up the rope. The nylon sheathed line was not thick enough to grip effectively. There were two perfectly good mechanical ascenders in her backpack, along with the rest of the climbing gear, but she had left the pack behind when she had gone into the water. She thought she might be able to use the carabiner on the front of her harness as a field-expedient ascender, but to do so would require unclipping the safety line, which would send her to the bottom in a hurry. The next best thing to a mechanical ascender was a Prusik, a friction hitch knot that could be fashioned out of a shoelace or a piece of paracord. When tied around a belay line and fashioned into handhold loops, a climber could slide the Prusik up a few inches at a time, and eventually regain her position after a fall. Jade stared at her boots, wondering how much effort it would take to remove the laces, and if there was a better option.
“Yo-yo,” she murmured, and that was what she felt like; a child’s yo-yo toy that had reached the end of the string and lost all its momentum.
Maybe she could rewind.
She reached up again, gripping the rope as hard as she could, and pulled. She managed to raise herself several inches, easing the tension on the rope a little, but knew that if she let go with either hand, she would immediately lose whatever progress she had made, unless she found a way to gather up the slack. When she was certain that she couldn’t lift herself any higher and felt her arms starting to burn with the exertion, she whipped her upper body around the rope, coiling up the slack around her waist.
Her grip failed and the rope went taut again, constricting her mid-section, but she had gained almost twelve vertical inches.
“Okay. Just need to do that nineteen more times.”
She reached up and pulled—
The rope slipped from between the stone blocks with a loud twang and then she was falling.
The first full second or two of the fall was weirdly distorted by the panic-induced rush of adrenaline that amped Jade’s brain into hyper-drive. A single thought ricocheted around her brain: how far to the bottom?
But after three seconds of falling—How far is that? How fast am I falling now? — the question of distance became less important than the question of what she would encounter when she reached the end of the vertical journey. If it was solid rock, then she would either die on impact or wish she had. But if it was water….
If it was water, deep enough and not too much further down, she might survive.
She brought her hands together in front of her lower torso, the flashlight still squeezed in her fist. She kept her legs straight, toes pointed down and feet pressed together tightly. The flashlight illumed the darkness around her, but she was moving faster than her brain could process, so she simply closed her eyes and—
The impact shuddered up her feet all the way to her hips, but the chilly water was considerably more forgiving than solid limestone would have been. She arrowed deep, so deep that the pressure against her inner ear became uncomfortably intense — one more painful sensation reminding her that she was still alive. Too late to make a difference, she threw her arms and legs wide to slow her descent and immediately started kicking furiously back toward the surface. The pressure in her head relented slowly, but the spasms in her chest intensified as the surface remained maddeningly out of reach.
She felt like she was clawing her way out of Hell.
When she finally broke the surface, she was too spent to do anything more than lie on her back, floating motionless, trying not to think about the pain crackling along her shin bones.
The break did not last long. Professor was still up there, probably thinking the worst. And if she didn’t find a way out of the pit, surviving the fall would mean a protracted death of hypothermia. She played the light in every direction, but saw only the same smooth walls she had seen from above. The rocks that had briefly snagged her rope were too distant to make out.
Damn.
But the walls of the shaft were too smooth, too perfectly round to be the work of nature. In some ways, the handiwork reminded her of ancient Roman structures, which despite the passage of thousands of years remained mostly intact. Some ancient craftsman had labored in the spot where she now trod water. Someone had carved out a cistern in the limestone to reclaim the water from the submerged chamber above, and that gave her hope. If the shaft had been cut for some purpose, then logically, there had to be a way to access it. If not above the water’s surface, then perhaps below.
While the idea of another free dive did not exactly thrill her, the possibility…no, the certainty that she would find a way out compelled her. She filled her lungs and then plunged beneath the surface, diving in a corkscrew pattern around the perimeter of the well, shining the flashlight beam on the walls looking for an intersecting tunnel.
There it was, a dark opening about six feet across.
What if it goes nowhere at all? What if it feeds into a maze of pipes and I can’t find my way back to the surface?
It was a choice between a slow death on the surface or a quick end from drowning. Neither fate was more appealing than the other, but not exploring the submerged passage was certain death.
She swam into the pipe, kicking and clawing her way forward. After more than half a minute of hard swimming, she spied the telltale flat shimmer of air above the water’s surface, and kicked urgently toward it.
She came up in a large pool, surrounded by a gymnasium-sized chamber with cylindrical pillars rising up from the water to support the high ceiling overhead. She dog-paddled for a few seconds, playing the light in every direction, until she spotted a flat stone walkway that rose just a few inches above the water. She paddled over and hauled herself up onto it.