Free The Wicked We Have Done by Sarah Harian Page A

steps forward and grips my shoulders. “Evalyn!”
    Face the music.
    “You’re going to watch me die if you don’t.”
    He takes my hand and pulls me around the desk and through the chamber. We race through the never-ending hall, into shadow.
    The cavern forks. The right path is almost tangible with darkness. Another click and the left is flooded with a crisp white beam. A spotlight, illuminating a sprawled figure on the ground.
    “This way!” Casey cries, yanking me to the right.
    Blonde hair matted with blood. Purple hemp bracelet on the left wrist, a bracelet that matches mine.
    “No, no, no,” I dig my heels into the ground, ripping my hand away from his. “I can’t. I have to stay here.”
    “Are you
fucking insane
?”
    I can’t run from her. Not from Meghan.
    I slow when I enter the halo of light. Her eyes are hollow, gaping wounds in both of her temples, one where the bullet entered and the other where it left. The puddle of blood beneath her is curdled with brain matter and yet she still breathes—rattled, wet gasps.
    “Evie.” Her trembling lips smile, and I break.
    “Jesus.” I place my hands on either side of her head, smearing her blood on my palms. I need to put her back together. My tears splash on her forehead, her cheeks, rolling as if they were her own. “I miss you so much.”
    Her eyelashes flutter like insect wings. I’m losing her.
    “Meghan, Meghan!”
    Rumbling billows behind me. Casey screams my name.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I know, baby.” Her skeletal fingers find my wrist.
    “I’m coming with you now. I’ll be there soon.” I choke on my sob and wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
    Casey grasps beneath my shoulders and hauls me to my feet. “The cavern is flooding!”
    The rumbling water crashes into the back of mine and Casey’s legs and rolls over Meghan, the ends of her blonde locks the last thing I see of her as they float atop the tide.
    I fight to see her one more time. Casey picks me up like a child and carries me to the dark tunnel, until another wave of arctic black knocks him forward and I fall into the water.
    The current, with a cryptic mind of its own, forces me one way and him the other.
    A third wave extinguishes the light. The fourth floods my last breath of air.
    ***
    “Holy shit,” someone says.
    I inhale, coughing, sputtering.
    Breathing.
    Breathing.
    “Evalyn? Evalyn!”
    It’s Casey.
    The world slides into focus. Valerie laughs.
    “Damn. Pound on her chest enough times and whaddaya know.”
    The sun shines bright behind the canopies above their heads. Grass tickles the back of my ears. And I’m alive.
    “What happened?” I roll to my side and spit leftover cave grit onto the grass.
    “I don’t know, you tell me. Thought it was strange that I had the urge to make camp next to a dark abyss in the middle of a fucking creek. It was intriguing, though. Good thing I did, because the two of you shot right out of it.”
    Casey breathes heavily next to me. Water still drips from his nose.
    I sit up even though Casey says I shouldn’t, and Valerie tromps around—her version of pacing, I guess—chewing on her thumbnail. Her eyes flit to the right, toward the noise of water, and I crane my neck to see the roaring current of the stream rushing down off the mountain. By our bank, the current is languid, spiraling into a midnight whirlpool.
    Funneling into a chasm.
    “That’s where you came from,” Valerie says. “Geysered straight up out of it, you and Casey. You were floating on your belly—thought you were a goner.”
    “Is this the outflow?”
    “Outflow?” she asks.
    “Of the lake.”
    “Don’t know about a lake. Been camped out here for the past two days.” She nods a bit upstream to an old shack several yards from the water, where rows of vegetables stem from the doorstep like crooked fingers.
    Food.
    Between us and the garden is a smoking fire pit and a nylon tent big enough to sleep several people snugly. The flap is unzipped, a