I shove those thoughts out of my head. If large, hulking Hawk can do this—if dozens of other Taurians can do this—I can do it, too. I ignore the resentment that bubbles inside me. Magpie should be here. Hawk should be here. Someone should be at our side, guiding us. Instead, Hawk’s busy trying to save the guild from itself, and Magpie’s taking a nap. We’re on our own.

We’re silent as we creep along in the tunnel, until it opens up. Then, suddenly, it goes from a cramped passageway into a warren of side tunnels. There’s a discarded pickaxe off to one side and a broken rope, proof that others have been here in the past.

Kipp stops, and Lark swings the lantern around to the entrance of the other tunnels. Five—no, six—spread out like a fan before us. “Which way?” she asks, looking at me.

How am I supposed to know? “You’re the navigator.”

“Shit. Right.” She makes a face. “I don’t feel much like a navigator, gotta admit.” She gestures at the nearest tunnel. “That one, maybe?”

We head down it for a time, only for the tunnel to twist and turn and branch off repeatedly. Some of the branchings go for nothing more than a few feet, but some descend into the darkness for quite a ways.

Lark gets skittish as we pass yet another deep, branching tunnel. “I don’t know that we should go down.”

“You don’t have a good feeling about it?” Mereden asks.

“I don’t have a good feeling about any of this,” Lark confesses. “I don’t want to be the one who gets us lost.”

“You won’t,” I reassure her. “If we get lost, Hawk will come and find us anyhow. They sent us down with a retrieval beacon, and Hawk knows these tunnels better than anyone. He’s always down here.”

My belly flutters at the thought of my husband. Not for the first time, I wish he was here with us instead of Magpie. He wouldn’t have abandoned us to take a nap in the larger cave. He’d be right here with us, offering advice. I try to imagine what Hawk would say if he was with us. “Let’s just consider today a scouting expedition,” I tell them. “We’ll get a feel for things, explore a little, and then return to camp to rest and check in on Magpie. Once we’re comfortable, then we’ll start looking for something to bring back.”

“How will we know where to start digging?” Gwenna asks. “You’ve read a bunch of books about this place. What did they say?”

I’m starting to realize just how much information my books have left out. Because everyone in those books always seemed to automatically know where to dig and how deep. They’d just stick their pickaxes into a wall and magical artifacts would fall out. Looking around me, I know that’s not the case. One rocky wall looks the same as the next, and the farther we go in, the less of Old Prell there is. There are no broken bricks here, no bits of pottery or statues, and I’m reminded that Drop Thirteen is considered unlucky. Bare, even. “We’ll know when we see it.”

We continue exploring for the next while, just to try to get comfortable with the caves. I can’t help but notice that every time I look back, Gwenna, Lark, and Mereden are all clustered together, holding on to one another. I don’t blame them. I want to do the same, but only Kipp’s brave exploration keeps me from joining their huddle. Somehow when I’d pictured myself as a fearless excavator, it had been more glamorous—and more well lit—than this. I’d pictured artifacts just falling into my hands with a bare modicum of digging.

This? This is going to be a lot of work.

“Let’s try one more tunnel before we head back,” I suggest after a time, when we make it back to the fanned array of passages. “We can tell Magpie that we were looking for the best place to spend our efforts. Lark, pick us a tunnel.”

She points at one, and Kipp heads off in that direction. I follow after him, holding my shield up even though it feels as if it’s made of lead at this point. Maybe Lark and I should switch, I muse as we head into the dark tunnel. The ceiling is a little lower here, but nothing we haven’t seen before. I’d rather be navigator, I think, than carry around a heavy shield all day long—

Something brushes against my hair.

I look up, and Lark’s bobbing light illuminates a maze of spiderwebs on the ceiling. Long black legs move, and then my hair twitches again. I raise a hand to the top of my head—and encounter something that shouldn’t be there.

With a shriek, I fling the spider off my head and onto the floor of the cave. It’s the size of my hand, the legs long and disgusting and with hairs so thick even my bad eyes can make them out. Another spider drops onto my shoulder, and then Mereden gives a horrified squeal, knocking one from Lark’s cloak.

“Back!” I scream. “Back the way we came!”

We race from the tunnel, crying out in horror and shaking out our clothes. The lantern bobs, making me dizzy as the light wobbles back and forth. But then we’re back at the fan of tunnels, and I drop my shield, shaking out all of my clothing over and over again in disgust. Hawk did mention he hated spiders. I should have listened. I glance over to see if Kipp has followed, since the rope between us is taut. He emerges a few moments later, a long dark leg disappearing into his mouth.

Eww.

“I think that’s enough for me tonight,” Gwenna says, raking her fingers through her now-loose hair. She shudders. “Can we please just go back to Magpie and decide on our next steps?”

I’m totally fine with that. I nod, and Mereden is in agreement, too. Kipp shrugs, and then puts a rock in the center of the tunnel entrance, marking it. Good idea, though he might be marking it for snacks while the rest of us want to mark it as NO, NEVER AGAIN.

Picking up my shield, I gesture that Gwenna should lead the way now, since she’s at the front of the line, and we head back the way we came. We’re all a little quieter now that the truth of what the tunnels are like is setting in. My thoughts are swirling, comparing the reality of the tunnels with what I had imagined. I’m not disappointed, not precisely…but I can’t help wishing that Hawk was here. Something tells me he’d understand more than anyone else.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses because I really want to talk to him.

When the caverns open back up and we see the faint, distant light of Magpie’s encampment, I realize I’m exhausted. Some of the dampness of my clothing is sweat, as we’ve been hiking through tunnels all day long. Gwenna looks as tired as I am, and Lark and Mereden, too.

“How long do you think we’ve been gone?” Mereden asks. “How do we tell time down here?”

“Well, my stomach won’t stop growling,” Lark says, patting her gut. “And I normally don’t get hungry until well past dinnertime, so I’d say it’s late. I’m ready to eat some shitty rations and go to sleep and…”

She stops, silenced, and I peer around her.

The camp is a disaster. Our bags have been tossed about, our food supplies flung onto the ground. The extra canteens we left behind are sitting in puddles of their contents. Our bedding is gone or slashed to ribbons, our changes of clothing equally destroyed.

Magpie is sprawled, face down, amongst the mess.

“Auntie!” Lark cries, surging forward. Immediately we’re all knocked off our feet—Lark included—as she forgets we’re all still tied together. She crawls forward as we struggle to stand upright again. “Auntie Magpie! Is she dead?”

Gwenna helps Mereden to her feet just as a loud, garish snore echoes in the cavern. “She’s not dead,” Gwenna retorts. “She’s fucking drunk.”

Lark goes to her aunt’s side, flipping her onto her back and shaking her awake. The rest of us focus on untying the ropes, not saying anything.

“Auntie Magpie?” Lark says, tapping her cheek. “Wake up.”

Magpie comes awake with a snort, then rubs her eyes. She rolls out of her blankets, and the sound of empty bottles clank overloud in the cavern. I exchange a look with Gwenna.