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“What’s wrong?” she asked

“I thought I heard so” He stood and listened for another few breaths, then shrugged heavily He turned and continued down the tunnel

After another ten steps, the path plunged over an ice cliff

Connor reached the edge first, bending over to shine his helht down He suddenly stiffened and dropped to his knees

Aht The pit ended about fifteen feet down The splash of red on the ice was a raw slash One boot lay in thehelmet, the lamp smashed

Connor turned to her “Lacy’s”

There was no sign of a body, but the bloody track led off to the side Out of their line of vision

“I have to go down there,” Connor insisted “There ht be another way out that we can’t see If Lacy tried to drag herself…”

Amanda stared at the aged the coil of poly-line to the floor “I’o down and look”

Connor looked like he was going to leap down there himself But he only nodded

Ath of rope to the bottom Connor braced his apart, cra into the walls He passed a loop of poly-line around his back, under his ar it

“You ready?” she asked

“I won’t drop a little slip of a girl like you,” he groused “Just find Lacy”

Arabbed the rope, and began to rappel down into the ice pit She lowered herself, hand over hand, spiked feet against the wall She quickly reached the bottom

“Off rope!” she called up as her toes hit the floor

The line jiggled as the large e He still wore the loop of poly-line around his chest He stared anxiously down at her and lare of his hel

Rather than adnorance, she siht

As she swung her light, her nose curled The smell was rank It seemed to hover at the bottom of the pit like bad air in a cavern, heavy, thick, suffocating She sed hard One su to Stanford, she had worked in the kennel of an aniht her back: blood, feces, and urine It was a smell that she had come to equate with fear

She followed the blood trail with her flashlight It led past the cliff to an opening in the ice wall It was a horizontal slot, even with the floor, siround sewers It was no higher than her knee, but alth of her body

A big sewer drain

She crossed toward it and called out, “Lacy!”

Deaf, she glanced up to Connor to see if he registered any response He still knelt up at the cliff’s edge, but he was staring back down the tunnel rather than into the pit

Her toe hit soaze back down It was Lacy’s boot It spun froht It hit the wall and stopped Froht shone down into the boot

It wasn’t eht bone, splintered at the end, stuck out of the boot

She screamed But no noise ca She scra like ice skates

She craned up to the cliff’s edge

No one was there

“Connor!”