“Got it!” she shouts, and Caleb hears something above turn with a grating sound that releases a cascade of dust. Coughing, Caleb lets Phoebe down and drops to his knees, just as the stone slab shakes and slides sideways into a thick groove in the stone wall.
Phoebe quickly pulls out two flashlights from her backpack and hands the bigger one to Caleb. “Ready, big brother?”
Caleb glances back, expecting a horde of spear-wielding Mayans to burst from the thicket at any moment, but the trees sway and the cicadas sing and the sun glares with blind ferocity that all but pushes him inside the sheltering darkness after Phoebe.
They descend a straight, narrow staircase, stepping carefully around rubble where the jungle has found its way inside. Vines and roots hug the walls and smother the ceiling. Further down, the steps seem to grow steeper, and Caleb and Phoebe take their time with their footing, shining their lights ahead and, occasionally, back.
“Thinking about Dad?”
Caleb looks up, surprised. She rarely mentions Dad, and barely even remembers him. He was shot down when she was only three, but Phoebe has been watching Caleb intently over the past couple years, sympathetic to the internal conflict her older brother has been struggling with. He continues following, then pulls ahead, shining his light into the gloom, adding his brilliance to Phoebe’s steady beam. “Let me lead.”
“I think I’ve seen him too.” Phoebe touches his shoulder.
He pauses. The cool air is musty, a little rank, full of dust, and the walls are cracked where brown vines protrude. The back of Caleb’s neck breaks out in a cold sweat. He turns, shines the light on her face.
“When?”
She chews on her lower lip and it reminds him of how, as a baby with two new teeth, she used to nibble on a piece of cheese. “Sometimes I feel, I don’t know, dizzy, and I sit and the world kind of disappears and then I see this bright white room, and this Middle Eastern man walks in, carrying something shiny and I scream…”
Phoebe’s eyes glaze over.
“… and the walls change color. And suddenly I’m in a desert, and there’s a man in a rusty cage and a dirty dish filled with little white worms and there are scorpions and then…”
Caleb’s mouth is dry as sand. He tries to reach for her but can’t move. “What then?”
She shrugs, blinks. “I don’t know. Sometimes it all just vanishes and I’m back in the present. Other times I look up and I see the sun, except on top of it there’s this bird’s head and a beak and tiny brown eyes looking down at me.”
Caleb’s fingers go to his mouth. “The eagle and the sun! The same thing I’ve seen, that I’ve drawn! And Dad… tortured in that place.” He wants to run screaming to anyone who will listen — to the police, to the American embassy, to anyone but his mother, who won’t hear of it. But then he tells himself to relax. Maybe Phoebe has just been influenced by his vivid descriptions, and subconsciously she has begun experiencing the same things.
She squints. “I don’t get this vision often, and it’s not very strong. Mom says it’s nothing. You’ll outgrow it, too, she says, eventually.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.” Phoebe gives him a nudge back down the stairs. “And Mom says someday you’ll learn to separate the… the objective dreams from the others.”
Caleb scowls. “You even sound like Mom.”
She shrugs. “You’re my big brother, and even though you’re a real nerd sometimes, I still like you.” She stares at her shoes. “I don’t want you to hate me, too.”
“I don’t hate Mom.”
“Yes you do.”
“I hate that she won’t believe me. She won’t look for Dad. He’s been calling for our help all this time and we’re ignoring him, hoping he’ll just die.”
“He might be dead,” Phoebe whispers as they start descending again. Too eager, she squeezes past him, determined to go first. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe it’s like Mom says, and you’re just picking up on stuff from the past.”
“Maybe, but—”
Something shifts, a barely perceptible sound, but in this hollow passageway it echoes in Caleb’s ears like a thunderclap. He shines his light down to Phoebe’s foot and illuminates the step sinking beneath her weight.
Another spring.
She freezes, turns back with a look of surprise, a look that begs her big brother to say everything is all right, that it’s just a weak step. “Caleb?”
He reaches for her—
— just as she drops into the darkness, the entire stairwell suddenly falling away, and everything beyond Caleb’s step just vanishes, sucked into the distant floor, somewhere in all that darkness. But he catches her, barely. Just her wrist. Her scream pierces his ears and lets loose a hailstorm of dust and rocks from the walls and the high, tapering ceiling.
“Don’t let go!” she shrieks.
“Got you, I’ve got you.” He sets down the light, which promptly rolls and spills off the step, turning end over end, then clanking and winking out below as the darkness claims it. Only Phoebe’s light remains, spinning wildly in her free hand.
“Drop the light, Phoebe, and grab my arm with both hands!” He has a hold on the upper stair with his left hand while clinging to Phoebe with his right.
“Wait. Just hold on. I think…” She steadies her light, aims it down, where it highlights something that glints like the sun about twenty feet away. The beam, full of captured dust, plays slowly over the chamber below, tracing objects that flash back at them. Heaps of golden ingots, statues, jade and ruby necklaces; monkey gods with sapphire eyes holding plates heaped with golden cups and chains, coins and spheres; and in the center, a gold-inscribed crypt. And there… a mosaic face, pierced nose and ears, and slanted eyes leering up at them, mocking their predicament.
“Phoebe!”
She looks back, eyes glazed, as her hand slips.
“Drop the flashlight! Come on Phoebe, come on! Reach for me. We’ll get the others and come back.”
She drops the light, and the seconds drag out until the flashlight smashes on the hard rock floor below. “We found it,” she whispers and lifts her hand, reaching for Caleb. He feels her palm, sweaty from holding the flashlight, slipping along his skin. Her other hand, the fingers sliding down and then through his—
“NO!”
— then his empty hand, fingers open, snatching at nothing but swirling dust. The darkness swallows her up, greedily enveloping everything, it seems, but her fiercely shining blue eyes and the words screaming from the depths.
“Big brother!”
Caleb clenches his eyes…
… and opened them, to see his etchings of the pyramid, the door, the stairs, and page after page, roughly torn from the pad and scattered across the cot and the floor of the recompression chamber. And the last one, still on his pad: a hand reaching out to him from the darkness beyond a broken stairwell. Caleb tore it out, crumpled it into a ball and brought it to his mouth, chewing into the edge to stop from screaming.