"Goddamn, but I'm tired," Anna said too loudly, blowing away the morbid fantasy.

A minute shift occurred in Holden's dull stare. He was looking at Anna, his light on her face.

"Oscar," he said in a reasonable facsimile of his old voice, "we've got to teach Anna the fine art of cowboy cursing."

"Dad blast it," Oscar said, and Anna heard the relief behind the words. He'd sensed Holden's return as well.

"Gol dang it," Holden said. "The power is in the diphthongs."

Remembering her last great blasphemy before all hell broke loose, she gave it a try. "Shucks," she said tentatively.

Everyone laughed. Brent's laugh was shrill, an alarming whinny. There was an edge of desperation to it. Still, it was good.

"Darn tootin'," Holden approved.

"We're going to have to rig a litter for you." McCarty jerked them abruptly back from the oasis of forgetfulness they'd forged.

The only litter they had was in the bottom of the rift, housing the remains of Frieda Dierkz. A clutch of icy fingers tweaked Anna's insides, and she waited for Holden's retreat back into the quietude of victimhood.

"My ankle's not broken," Holden declared. Wordlessly, Anna cheered his obstinacy. "Fix me up so I can get by."

Anna and Oscar understood perfectly. McCarty was nudged aside. The two of them ransacked packs and first aid kits and built Holden a walking cast that kept his knee and ankle rigid. With duct tape and three of the lightweight, ladderlike aluminum rappelling devices they tied his foot and lower leg into a brace he could put his weight on. Dealing with the pain and awkwardness was up to him.

"Everybody okay?" It was Zeddie Dillard coming crablike over breakdown from the direction of the goat track. Hailing her as Lazarus woman, they all but fell on her neck and wept. At least that was how Anna interpreted the calls of: "Where have you been?" Brent. "Now there's a good-looking woman." Oscar. And, "Is Curt with you?" Holden.

Of the six of them, she appeared to have weathered the incident the best. She'd suffered no physical injury. She'd not seen the litter fall, Frieda dead. Unlike Oscar, Holden, and Peter, she carried no burdens of responsibility for a crushing past or an unpromising future. Added to these was the blessing of youth and its attendant sense of immortality. Anna doubted it had occurred to this strong, determined young woman that something as paltry as the elemental forces of nature could snuff out her life.

Zeddie had tested the phone line, she told them. It was dead, probably sheared during the avalanche. Curt was unhurt, she reported. After the fall, she had seen Brent attending to Holden, and she and Schatz had passed the lines where Peter and Oscar descended to the Stokes. Since matters were being handled on the fall end, they had gone back to the beginning of the Pigtail to check on the others. Curt stayed back with four of the rescuers from outside who had been trapped.

"I thought it best we not all come thundering up here till we knew how things stood." That said, Zeddie waited expectantly.

Truth was, nobody knew how things stood. Holden rose to the occasion, drawing the invisible albatross of leadership back around his neck. "You did just right," he assured her.

"Did anybody…" Zeddie's question petered out as she nodded at the pile of earth beneath and behind them.

That they squatted on the burial ground of the perhaps undead had not occurred to Anna, and she shivered uncontrollably. To have her one hundred fifteen pounds instrumental in the death of another of her fellows was insupportable.

"No," Holden said firmly. "The others made it to the Distributor Cap before this happened. If anybody went up there after that, they had to sneak by. Everybody was out."

Anna released breath she'd not known she was holding and laughed-a rush of air without sound-at the image that had held her in thrall; grasping hands thrust through the soil from a movie. Probably Stephen King.

"Frieda?" Zeddie said.

"Didn't make it."

Anna watched the woman's face as the simple words sank in and thought she saw genuine sadness through the grime. In a spill of light, she caught sight of Roxbury at the same instant. He had already heard the news, yet sorrow and something else-a gestalt of expressions suggesting a painful and very personal loss-crumpled his face a second time.

"What happened?" Zeddie asked, and Anna drew breath to confess.

"She was killed in the fall." Holden forestalled her. "After the anchor gave way and brought down the mountain there was nothing anyone could do. Anna was lucky not to be killed too."

The statement was more than an exoneration of Anna. It was an acceptance of the blame. He'd chosen the anchor that had carried Frieda and Anna to the bottom of the rift.

"I'm betting the anchor held, that the slide started above the boulder and knocked it loose," Oscar said in an attempt to ease his friend. "The anchor was sound. Rocks from above must have dislodged it. There couldn't have been any way to foresee that."

Brent Roxbury interrupted with a strangled noise.

"If you're having a heart attack, I'm not up for CPR," Anna said unsympathetically.

For a second he searched for words or breath, then he said, "Listen." They froze in a sudden tableau, expecting a reprise of the horrible grinding. Instead came a musical cadence of taps, clear and sharp and obviously man-made.

Again Brent whinnied.

More taps.

Anna laughed, and Oscar with her. They were saved.

"Well," Holden said, a ghost of the twinkle flickering through. "Somebody answer the doggone door."

Zeddie was the quickest to respond. She scuttled up the newly fallen scree to where the taps emanated from. In her haste she started another rock slide, a tiny one this time, but enough to remind them how inherently unstable the slope was. Deep in timeless and un-weathered earth, jagged corners unsoftened by the influence of wind or water, breakdown was cemented in place with a dry mortar of silt that had filtered down fine as dust over the centuries. Without external forces to act upon it, this bedding went untested through soundless, lightless years. Once the delicate fabric was disturbed, it flowed like sand through an hourglass, trickling from beneath, shifting rocks that had been held unmoving for eons.

Having undipped a carabiner from a belt loop on her trousers, Zeddie rapped it smartly against a stone. No reply.

"I think it's too light," she said, meaning the aluminum alloy of the 'biner.

McCarty dug a hammer from his pack, possibly the kind used to tap on patients' knees. "Try this," he said, and tossed it. Fortunately Zed-die's hand was sure even in the faint and shifting light, and she caught it. This deep within the earth nothing could afford to be casual. Greater threats than Hodags were ready to make mischief at every turn. Shadows waiting to swallow tools, holes to snap bones, passages like mazes to capture lost souls.

Hostile work environment, Anna thought, and no one to sue.

Using the hammer, Zeddie banged three times in quick succession. Three raps came back and the cavers sent up a ragged cheer that ended as spontaneously as it had begun.

"Does anybody know Morse code?" Oscar asked hopefully.

"SOS," Zeddie offered. They all knew SOS.

"I think that's been established," Iverson said dryly.

Another flurry of taps were exchanged for the reassurance of both parties. Nothing of moment could be transmitted, but the message that they were not alone, not forgotten, that help was on the way was enough.

"How long do you think it will take them to get through?" Brent said, and Anna was grateful he'd saved her from being the first to ask.

Holden and Oscar looked at each other in mute conference. Holden shrugged. "I'd only be guessing," Oscar said.