The Abandoned Quarry Had One Rule: Never Answer What You See in the Stone.

The gate at the end of the access road has been rusted shut in the open position for as long as any of us have been coming out here, which means it isn't really a gate anymore, just two pieces of chain-link leaning against each other like they're tired. We dropped our bikes in the weeds beside it and walked the rest of the way in, gravel crunching under our shoes, because none of us wanted to risk a flat this far from town.

Oscar was already talking about who could climb down the fastest, which was Oscar's way of talking himself into something before he'd actually decided to do it. Leroy told him to shut up. Christina didn't say anything.

Morrow Quarry is a big rectangular hole cut into the limestone on the east edge of the county, maybe forty feet down to the floor, with walls straight enough that you'd think somebody used a level on them. Nobody's worked it in decades. The floor is cracked pale stone with weeds coming up thin and stubborn through the seams, and if you catch it on the right afternoon, with the sun low enough and the sky clear enough, the flat sections start doing something they shouldn't.

You look down and instead of seeing rock you see sky that isn't the sky above you, or a room, or once — I saw this myself, two summers back — a hallway with a door at the end of it that never opened no matter how long you watched.

Everybody who grows up around here knows the Quarry Cox before they know what a mortgage is. Something lives under the floor. It doesn't want to be looked at, but it wants to be answered, and the rule that comes with the story is the only rule that matters: you look, you never call back.

You don't shout down at a face. You don't wave at whatever's watching you from under the stone. You for sure don't talk to it.

We spread out across the floor the way we always did, each of us drifting toward our own patch of quarry like we were checking mail. I glanced at the south wall out of habit, the way you glance at a stove to make sure it's off. There's a passage cut into the rock there, framed by two stone uprights and a lintel across the top, and it looks less like something a quarry crew blasted through and more like a doorway somebody built on purpose, a long time before anybody thought to open a quarry around it.

The space between the uprights was solid rock, same as it had been every other time I'd looked at it. Nobody goes in. Nobody's ever needed telling twice.

Oscar had found himself a good flat stretch near the middle of the floor, down on one knee, head tipped, holding himself like he'd spotted something and didn't want to spook it. I called his name from maybe thirty feet off and he didn't answer, which wasn't like him — Oscar always answered, even if it was just to say something dumb back.

I started walking over. Christina had drifted toward the east wall and Leroy was crouched by a puddle that had collected in one of the low spots, poking at it with a stick like there was something to find in three inches of rainwater. Neither of them was paying attention to Oscar yet.

The stone in front of him had a face in it. I could see it from ten feet away, indistinct, tilted up like it was looking through water at him, the way the light was falling across that section of floor just then. It wasn't anybody's face I recognized. It didn't need to be.

I was still ten feet away when Oscar cupped both hands around his mouth like he was calling across a football field and shouted some stupid taunt down at it, trying to sound like he wasn't scared. The sound of it rolled off the quarry walls and came back at us twice, three times, thinner each time.

By the time the echo died out, Oscar was gone.

I got to the spot where Oscar had been in maybe four seconds flat, and there was nothing there. No mark on the stone. No crack, no seam, nothing that said a person had ever knelt down on that patch of limestone and put his face two feet from it. Just flat gray rock with a little water film sitting on it from the last rain, same as every other flat gray patch of rock on that floor.

"Oscar."

I said it like a question this time, which was stupid, because a question needs someone able to answer it.

Christina was already moving toward me from the east wall, not running, but not walking normal either. Leroy had dropped his stick in the puddle and was just standing there with his mouth open like he was working up to say something and couldn't find it.

Nobody spoke for a while. It wasn't a long while. It felt long.

"He was right there," Leroy said finally, which didn't help anybody, but I understood the impulse.

I wanted to say something just as useless.

I looked at the south wall next, because something made me turn that way before I even thought about it. The two stone uprights stood the same as always, the ones every kid who rode down that gravel road got told the one rule about — you don't go in. Except the space between them, solid rock the last time any of us looked, was open.

A doorway with nothing behind it but a drop of black going down at an angle I couldn't see the bottom of.

I walked over. Christina and Leroy didn't try to stop me, and they didn't follow either, not yet. I stood at the mouth of it and looked down into that dark for what felt like a long time and was probably ten seconds, and the air coming up out of it was cold, colder than it should have been for late September.

Then I turned around and walked back to the bikes.

I didn't call anybody's parents. I thought about it for a second, then let it go. I didn't ride into Lebanon and tell some deputy that my friend got swallowed by a hole in the quarry floor that hadn't existed an hour before. I already knew how that would go, and how much good it would do Oscar.

I got on my bike and rode toward Whitestown, and Christina and Leroy rode behind me without asking where we were going, which told me they already understood we weren't finished for the day.

Leroy lives on the east side, a low brick house with a trampoline in the side yard that's been missing half its springs since summer. He was in the garage when we rolled up, doing something to his bike chain that didn't need doing. I told him. Straight through, the way it happened — Oscar crouched down, Oscar shouting something dumb at the floor, Oscar gone before the echo finished bouncing off the walls, and the south passage standing open where it hadn't been an hour before.

He listened to the whole thing without saying a word.

"You remember the thing with your bike," I said.

"Freshman lot, last spring."

He knew exactly what I meant.

"I remember," he said.

"I'm calling it in."

He stood there a second with the chain still in his hand, oil on his fingers, and I watched him not want to say yes.

"I don't want to go down there," he said.

Then he set the chain down and wiped his hands on his jeans. "I'll get the harness."

He had it all from a summer his older brother spent climbing down in Brown County — a decent harness, sixty feet of rope coiled tight in a stuff sack, and a flashlight heavier than it needed to be that threw a beam you could see across a football field. He didn't say anything else while he loaded it into his backpack.

I think if he'd started talking he might have talked himself out of the garage.

Christina's house was closer to town, and I told her on her front step, no easing into it. Oscar was gone into the south passage. I was going in after him. I needed somebody who wasn't going to fall apart on me halfway down.

She looked at me for a second with that flat, steady look she has, the one that doesn't tell you anything about what she's thinking.

"Do you have a plan?"

"No."

She went inside and came back out thirty seconds later with her jacket on.

The three of us rode back to the quarry with the sun getting low and orange behind us. Curtis Vega was already there when we came through the gate, sitting up on the quarry wall, not looking anywhere near the south passage. He's sixteen. His cousin Danny went into that same passage six years ago on a dare nobody remembers the details of anymore, and Danny never came back out, and Curtis has kept showing up at that quarry ever since.

He didn't ask what happened.

"I'm not going down," he said.

"I'll stand watch at the mouth. I'll haul on the rope if you signal me. Three short tugs."

He held his hand out for the rope's end like that settled it, and I gave it to him, because it did.

We rigged Leroy's harness onto me right there at the passage mouth, and Curtis tied the other end off around one of the stone uprights, testing the knot twice with his whole weight before he let go of it. The passage was still open. The dark inside it hadn't gotten any less absolute in the half hour we'd been gone — if anything it looked deeper.

I checked the knot myself after Curtis was done, and I checked the flashlight, thumbing it on and off once to make sure the beam still held.

Then I stepped into the passage mouth and started down, the rope paying out above me, Curtis's silhouette shrinking at the top, the cold air rising from below.

The first twelve feet were nothing special. Chisel marks in the walls, straight lines cut by somebody's hand a hundred years back. Cold air came up past me the whole way, and I could feel the rope paying out above, a little slack and then a little tension, Curtis's hand somewhere up there keeping it honest.

I looked up once and saw his shape cut against the gray evening sky, small and steady, and that was enough to keep me moving.

Then the rope went slack.

Not the good kind of slack, not the kind where you've found the floor and the rope's just catching up to you. It went slack the way a fishing line goes slack when something's cut it clean through — all the weight gone at once, nothing pulling back. I stopped where I was, boots braced against smooth stone, and looked up.

No opening. No gray sky, no rectangle of evening light, no Curtis. Just ceiling — flat, unbroken, close enough that I could've reached up and touched it if I'd wanted to, which I didn't. It looked like it had always been there.

I called up anyway. Curtis's name, twice, my voice going up into that stone and not coming back down with anything.

Nothing.

I stood there in the dark with the flashlight beam shaking a little against the ceiling, and I told myself I was going to count to ten before I did anything else, and I didn't get past three before Christina came through.

She didn't fall. She stepped through the stone like it was an open doorway, one foot and then the other, and landed next to me on the passage floor like she'd meant to do exactly that. She looked up at the ceiling where she'd just come from. It was solid. She didn't say anything about it.

Her mouth went tight, and then she looked at me instead, waiting.

Leroy came through a second later, both hands locked around the harness straps even though there was nothing left above him to hold onto. He was breathing through his teeth in short little pulls, like he was trying to ration the air.

"Rope's still on me," he said.

He held up the end of it. It was clipped into his harness same as it had been at the top, except now it went up about a foot and disappeared straight into the stone overhead — no seam, no give, like it had been poured that way.

I put my hand flat against the ceiling anyway. Cold. Solid. No line where an opening might have been, no dust, nothing.

"Curtis!"

Leroy tried it himself, louder than I had, and the stone ate that too.

Nobody said anything for a second. Christina looked past me down the passage, the direction we hadn't come from, and I understood before she said it that we weren't going to stand here and wait for the ceiling to change its mind.

The flashlight still worked, at least. I checked that first, thumb on the switch, the beam steady and yellow-white against the walls. Down the passage the chisel marks were gone. The stone had gone smooth somewhere between here and there, almost polished, and thin veins of quartz ran through it in threads that caught the light and threw it back pale and cold.

"That wasn't there a second ago," Leroy said, meaning the smoothness, meaning all of it, and nobody corrected him because he wasn't wrong.

There was only the one way to go. Up was gone. I started down, and they came with me, and none of us said anything else about the ceiling. The passage narrowed as it dropped, just enough that our shoulders started brushing stone on both sides, and the quartz threads got brighter, throwing little blue-white flickers across the walls whenever the flashlight passed over them.

The cold got worse instead of better, like we'd walked into a freezer instead of out of one.

Christina walked close behind me, quiet, watching the walls. Leroy kept a hand on the rope even though it wasn't attached to anything anymore, just trailing behind him from his harness.

The passage opened ahead of us into a long gallery, and I stepped through first, the flashlight sweeping the walls — and stopped.

The wall was full.

Not shelves, not cases — the stone itself, both sides of the gallery, packed edge to edge with things that had no business being inside rock. A sneaker, laces still tied, sunk in to the sole. A plastic hair clip, the kind with a little butterfly on it. A spiral notebook, red cover, curling slightly at the corner like it had been closed in a hurry.

A pair of glasses with thin wire frames, one arm folded, the other straight out like whoever wore them had just set them down.

Each one had a ring around it. Lighter stone, smooth-edged, like somebody had traced a careful circle before pressing the object through. Framed.

And beside each ring, scratched into the rock in thin shallow letters, was a name.

I walked the wall with the flashlight because I couldn't not. Some of the names meant nothing. Some of them did. A first name and a last initial I'd heard before, years back — the way my mom went quiet once at the kitchen table when somebody on the radio said Danny Vega's name, and my dad reached over and turned it off before the story finished.

Christina wasn't reading. She was watching the passage ahead of us, and behind us, and the ceiling, all at once, like she'd assigned herself all three jobs.

Leroy was reading. I could hear him not liking it.

The beam swept another few feet along the wall, and I stopped it there — my hand had already stopped moving.

Oscar F.

The date beside it was today's.

The keychain sat in its little ring of pale stone at eye level — brass rectangle, cartoon dog stamped into it, the edge worn smooth on one corner. Oscar had rubbed his thumb over it a thousand times without ever noticing he was doing it. He'd had it since second grade. I knew that keychain the way I knew my own house key.

I put my hand flat against the stone around it.

It was warm. Not hot — warm, the way a seat feels right after somebody's gotten up from it.

He wasn't here yet. The entry existed. The label was scratched, the ring was cut, the keychain was already in — but the warmth meant something was still happening.

There was still time. I didn't know how much. I didn't say that part out loud either.

I pulled my hand back and didn't tell them.

Christina glanced at me — half a second, checking whether I'd found something — and I kept my face flat and kept moving, faster now, and she didn't ask. Leroy didn't ask. They just came with me, boots on smooth stone, breathing louder than either of them probably wanted to.

Curtis's voice came down through all of it, distorted and thinned out, barely his voice at all.

Rocks, he said, or something close to it. Coming from nowhere. Piling at the mouth. Burning through my lighter.

Then nothing. Just the gallery, and the names, and our own feet.

Near the far end, where the smooth wall gave way to a narrow side passage cut into the dark, something was pressed flat against the stone. At first I thought it was a shadow thrown wrong by the flashlight, a trick of the quartz veins pulsing under the beam. But it had shape. Thin, wide, stretched against the rock like a coat someone had hung there and left, and it had no face I could put a word to, but it was facing us.

The boy you are looking for is beyond sorting, it said. Its voice didn't come from a mouth. It came from the wall itself, low and dry, like stone settling. Leave before you are processed.

Leroy made a sound and didn't move.

"What was he wearing?"

I said.

It took a second before it answered, and that second told me everything.

A green jacket, it said.

"He's got a gray one."

I didn't slow down. I didn't let the words sit.

"You're guessing. You haven't seen him at all. You want us to quit on a story you made up."

It flattened further into the stone, like it was trying to become part of the wall instead of a thing standing in front of it, and it didn't say anything else.

We went past it, through the low arch at the end of the gallery, and the passage opened up into a chamber, round and close, with a long stone table set at the middle of it.

Something small and wide was bent over the table, working with its back to us, fingers too long for its hands moving fast over something I couldn't see yet. When it tilted its head just enough to catch the light, its eyes were entirely, milkily white.

It didn't look up.

The thing at the table didn't look up when we came in, and that scared me worse than if it had.

Its fingers moved over the clay tray in short, sure motions, pressing, scratching, pressing again, and I could see the tray now, the row of small things sunk into it at different depths, and I could see the watch. Cheap digital, cracked rubber band, the crystal already gone under the clay past halfway. I knew that watch.

I'd seen it on Oscar's wrist that morning at his locker, seen it a thousand mornings before that.

Christina didn't say anything. She just went.

She came in low and fast and pinned the thing's arm against the table edge with her forearm, both hands braced on top, her whole weight coming down through her shoulder. The tool skittered a few inches and stopped. Leroy planted himself in front of the other way out like he'd been told to hold a door, feet apart, arms out a little from his sides.

"Talk," Christina said.

Flat. Not loud.

The thing turned its head toward her, slow, and its eyes were just white all the way through, no place to look that meant anything.

"The set must be complete," it said, and the words came out grinding, stone dragged over stone, short pieces of sound instead of a voice.

"The Cox does not take a person until every item is placed. The watch is the last item for this one. When it is pressed in fully, he is gone and does not come back. The watch is halfway down."

"How long," I said.

It didn't answer that. It didn't answer anything that wasn't already inside whatever it was built to say, and I understood, standing there, that asking it a real question was like asking a door hinge to reconsider.

Then it twisted, and Christina's grip wasn't enough, and it came free with a jerk that took her arm with it for a second before it tore loose. Three lines opened up along the inside of her forearm, thin and even, like something had raked a fork across it, and she made a sound but didn't drop her arm, didn't grab it, just held it out a little from her body while the thing skittered off the table and into a crack in the far wall that couldn't have been wider than my shoulder.

It went in like water going down a drain.

And then the sound started. Not a voice. A grinding, ratcheting noise, evenly spaced, on and on, and it wasn't coming from the crack anymore, it was coming from everywhere, from the walls themselves, like the stone was passing the sound along on purpose.

I went for the tray.

I got both hands around the watch and pulled, and it didn't move. Not stuck-move. Not clay-move. It held like it was bolted through the floor into the foundation of the building, dead weight, no give anywhere in it, and I pulled until my hands slipped and I nearly went down onto the table.

"Craig."

Christina's voice, tight.

I left it. I had to leave it, and leaving it felt like letting go of Oscar's wrist itself.

Leroy had already crossed to Christina and taken her arm gently by the wrist, turning it toward the light.

"It's not deep," he said, fast, like he needed to say it out loud to believe it.

"It's not deep, look, three lines, that's all, you're fine—"

"I know."

She pulled her sleeve down over it herself, businesslike, and that was the end of the conversation about it.

We ran.

The passage past the chamber narrowed fast, low enough in places that Leroy had to duck his head, and the quartz threading through the walls had started to do something it hadn't done before — a slow pulse, dim blue-white, off and then on, off and then on, like a chest rising. I tried not to watch it too closely.

It had a rhythm that wanted you to fall into step with it.

Leroy stopped so hard he nearly knocked into me from behind, and when I turned he already had his back against the wall, both hands out in front of him, fingers spread, staring at them.

"I looked," he said.

"I looked at my hands while we were running. My left knuckle — I think it's already in. I think it's sunk into the rock behind me. I think this is how it starts, I've been leaning on it—"

"Give me your hand."

"Craig, I felt it—"

"Give it to me."

He put it out and I got the flashlight under it and turned it so the beam hit it full, knuckles, skin, nothing, cold to the touch and nothing else, no seam, no give, no gray creeping up from underneath.

"You're fine," I said.

"Your hand is fine. Look at it."

He looked at it. He kept looking at it a second longer than he needed to, like he didn't trust his own eyes yet, and then he breathed out through his teeth and nodded, and it wasn't steady, but it was something.

The passage forked into three right where we stood, and from the left one came the sound we'd been chasing since the chamber, grinding, even, patient, like something turning over deep in a machine that never stopped. And from the right, low, almost too quiet to be sure of, came my name. Just that. Said once, quiet, uncertain if anyone was close enough to hear.

Oscar's voice.

Leroy had the rope coil off the harness before I'd finished turning my head toward it.

"That's him," he said, and he didn't wait for either of us to agree, he was already moving into the right-hand passage, rope over one shoulder, flashlight up.

Christina looked at me once. I didn't have to say anything back to her.

We took the left passage, toward the grinding, the quartz pulsing blue-white along the walls on either side of us, and behind us, somewhere back in the stone, Jude's alarm kept going, steady, unhurried, following us down.

The passage opened without warning, the walls falling away on either side of us. The cavern that swallowed the light from our flashlight was bigger than any room had a right to be down here, bigger than the whole quarry floor above us laid flat and stretched thin. The quartz didn't need our flashlight. It ran through the stone in veins thick as my wrist, and it lit the space in a low blue-white that made everything look like it was underwater.

The floor was rings. Rings of things. Shoes and notebooks and eyeglasses and photographs, sunk halfway into the rock in circles that widened out from the center like something had dropped a stone into still water and the water had frozen mid-ripple.

At the center of the rings was a shelf, raised a few feet off the floor, and Oscar was standing on it.

He was upright. Still. His eyes were open and they weren't looking at anything, not at us, not at the cavern, not at the thing beside him. His right wrist was already gone into the stone to the forearm, the rock closed around it smooth and unbothered, like it had always been that way.

The thing beside him was low and broad and put together wrong, joints where joints shouldn't be, the whole shape of it like something that had been pressed flat once and folded back up crooked. Its skin was the same gray as the quarry wall above, the same grain and grit. It had one flat palm against Oscar's other wrist, pressing, slow and even, the way you'd flatten dough.

It stopped when we came in. Its head — if that's what it was — turned toward us, unhurried, and the quartz light dimmed like someone had turned a dial. The air went sharp and metal in my mouth.

I didn't let myself think about it. I just started talking.

"You can't finish him."

My voice came out louder than I meant it to, bouncing wrong off the rings of stone.

"The watch isn't sorted. It's still in the tray, half down. The set's not complete."

The thing didn't answer. It never was going to answer. But its head tilted, just slightly, the way you'd tilt your head at something you hadn't expected to hear, and it held there.

"Without the full set it doesn't hold."

I kept my eyes on it, kept my voice from breaking rhythm, because I understood without anybody telling me that stopping was the same as losing.

"If you take him without every piece he's ever going to come loose. It'll ruin the whole thing. It'll spread — it'll get into the ones next to him, the whole row, everything you've already finished."

I had no idea if any of that was true. I was making it up as fast as I could say it, stacking one sentence on the next so there was never a gap for it to think in, and it seemed to be working, because it wasn't moving toward Oscar's other wrist. It was watching me.

Just me.

Christina had already started moving. I felt her go past my shoulder without turning my head to check, working her way along the outer ring, stepping between a sneaker and a hair clip and a spiral notebook with a red cover, quiet, steady, like she had all the time we didn't have.

"You've got hundreds of these," I said, and my voice was starting to shake at the edges and I let it, because shaking was better than silence.

"You've got years of these. You ruin one, you ruin the wall. Every name on it. Every one you already closed."

The thing held. It didn't move. Christina reached the base of the shelf.

I kept going, same words turned a different way, over and over, watching its head, watching for the moment it decided I was lying, because the second it decided that was the second it turned back to Oscar.

Christina got her fingers under the edge where his wrist went into the rock, where it hadn't sealed all the way, and I saw her shoulders set and I saw her start to pull, and the stone gave the way old clay gives, slow, reluctant, fighting her the whole way.

I ran out of words right when she needed the room to finish it. I felt the sentence die in my throat and I let it die, because I understood, in that one silent second, that I had nothing left to say that would buy her three more.

The thing's head turned toward Oscar's wrist.

The stone let go with a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle, wet and sudden. Oscar gasped like he'd been underwater the whole time and just now broke the surface, and his knees went and he started to fall.

The cavern answered him. A sound built up out of the floor itself, low at first and then climbing, not a scream, nothing that came out of a throat — more like a slab of rock cracking clean through somewhere far off and the crack running toward us. Dust sifted down out of the dark above.

The quartz flared bright enough to hurt and then dropped almost to nothing, and in that half-second of near-dark I grabbed Oscar under the arms and hauled him up off his knees.

Christina took his other side. Neither of us said anything. We just ran.

We hit the junction chamber going full speed, the three passages splitting off ahead of us out of the dark. Leroy was already there, chest heaving, flashlight shaking a little in his hand, and when he saw Oscar between us he didn't ask a single question. He just turned and ran with us.

Leroy kept talking as we ran, words coming out in pieces between breaths.

"I heard him — I heard him say your name, clear as anything, went down the right crack — followed it maybe thirty feet and it was the same, it just kept — it was bouncing off something back by the sorting room, same sound over and over, it wasn't him, it was never him—"

Nobody answered. There wasn't anything to say to that. He saw Oscar hanging between me and Christina, feet mostly working, eyes open and looking at nothing, and he didn't ask a single question about it. He just got in front and started running the way we'd come.

The gallery took us in a rush of dark stone and I kept my eyes on the back of Leroy's jacket. I knew what was on either side of us without looking at it. I could feel the wall of it going by, all those shelves of shoes and glasses and spiral notebooks, all those scratched names, and I did not turn my head once.

I did not look for the ring of lighter stone with a boy's name and today's date next to it. I already knew where it was.

The arch at the far end came up faster than I expected, and Jude was standing in it.

It hadn't run far. It was pressed flat against the wall right beside the stone uprights, that flat tool still in its long fingers, milky eyes turned toward us without blinking. It didn't say anything. It didn't need to. It was just standing where the only way out was.

Christina didn't slow down. She pulled her jacket off in one motion, still moving, and threw it over Jude's head like she was throwing a blanket over a lamp, and Leroy hit it with his shoulder half a step later, going through the arch like Jude was a door that hadn't opened all the way.

I heard something clatter off the stone behind us — the tool, maybe — and then we were through, all of us, into the shaft.

The rope was hanging down out of a ceiling that had no business having a rope hanging out of it, sealed rock same as before, and the rope was already moving. Curtis was pulling from the top, fast, way faster than any three-tug signal, like he wasn't waiting on anybody to tell him it was time.

"Go," I said to Christina, and she went, hands on the rope, feet finding the wall, gone up into the dark almost before I finished the word.

Oscar didn't move on his own. I had to put the rope in his hands and close his fingers around it myself, and even then he just stood there holding it like he didn't know what a rope was for.

"Climb," I told him.

"Oscar. Climb."

He climbed. Slow, mechanical, like his hands remembered how to do it even though the rest of him hadn't come back yet. I watched him go up into the ceiling and vanish through stone that should have stopped him cold, and then it was Leroy's turn and Leroy went without a word, no announcement, no complaint, just gone.

Then it was me.

I got my hands on the rope and my feet found the wall and I pushed off, and the second my feet left the passage floor the ceiling above me closed. Not slow. Not a grinding shut like a door. One motion, clean, like a fist closing around nothing, and if I had waited even a half a second longer standing there I don't think I'd have gone through it at all.

My right hand slid against the passage wall on the way up, bracing, taking weight it shouldn't have had to take, and the stone under my palm felt cold.

Then I was through, and there was sky.

I came up through the passage mouth already rolling and hit the quarry floor hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and I lay there for a second just breathing gravel dust before I got my knees under me.

Curtis was standing above the passage with the rope still gripped in both hands, coiled loose around his boots, and at his feet was a pile of stones that hadn't been there when we went down — fist-sized, some of them bigger, scattered like someone had been dropping them out of the dark for the better part of an hour.

"They kept coming up," he said.

"Out of nowhere. I don't know where from."

He looked at the pile like it might start moving again. Then he looked at me.

"You're all out?"

"We're all out."

The passage mouth behind me was closed. Sealed. The two stone uprights stood exactly where they'd stood before, same shape, same angle, but the space between them was just rock now, solid and flat, like nothing had ever been open there at all.

Oscar was sitting a few feet off, knees pulled up, looking at the quarry wall like he was trying to remember something just out of reach. Christina crouched next to him. Leroy was on his back in the gravel, breathing like he'd run a mile, which he basically had.

"You okay?"

Christina asked him.

Oscar looked at her, and then at me, and then around at the quarry like he was only now noticing it was evening.

"What happened?" he said.

"I don't — I shouted at something. That's the last thing. I shouted at it and then I was just here."

Nobody answered that. He didn't ask about his watch. He didn't reach for his wrist. There was a thin ring around it, lighter than the rest of his skin, clean at the edges like it had been drawn on with a compass, and he never once looked down at it.

I got up and started toward the bikes, and it was on that walk, in the last of the daylight, that I opened my right hand and looked at the palm.

There was a patch of skin about the size of a quarter, right in the center, smooth. No lines running through it. No whorls, nothing a fingerprint would leave behind on glass. Just smooth skin, pale, like it belonged to someone else's hand and had been set into mine.

It didn't hurt.

Craig closes his hand, picks up his bike, and walks it out through the rusted gate with the others, the quarry floor behind them sealed and silent.

By November, the quarry had stopped being news and become just another fact of the town, something nobody thought twice about. The Boone County Highway Department sent a crew out the second week of October, and by the middle of the month there was a chain-link fence running the whole length of the south wall, eight feet high, with a gate and a padlock and a laminated sign zip-tied to the mesh that said the face had been surveyed and found unstable.

Nobody who'd grown up around that quarry believed a word of it. Limestone doesn't get less stable in a week. But the county put a fence around it anyway.

Curtis checks the padlock every morning before school. I've seen him do it. He rides out there in the dark, before the bus even runs, gets off his bike, puts his hand on the lock, and stands there a second like he's listening to something the rest of us can't hear. Then he gets back on his bike and rides to school like nothing happened.

Nobody asks him why. He wouldn't tell us if we did.

Oscar's fine. That's the word everyone uses, teachers, his mom, the kids at school who heard some version of the story that doesn't line up with what actually happened. Fine. He's back in class, he laughs at the same jokes, he still eats lunch at our table. He doesn't go near the quarry anymore, not even the access road, and he never once asked about his watch.

I waited for him to bring it up — the cracked rubber band, the little digital face he used to check obsessively during tests — and he never has. It's like it slid out of his memory the same way it slid into that clay tray. The keychain's the same. Second grade, that brass dog, gone from his backpack and gone from his mouth, like it was never a thing he owned.

There's a ring around his right wrist, pale against the rest of his skin, clean at the edges, and he's never once looked down at it in front of me.

Christina healed up in about two weeks. The scratches faded to nothing you'd notice unless you knew to look. We don't talk about what happened down there. It's not that we're avoiding it — we sit next to each other in two classes, we still walk the same way home some days. It's just that neither of us has ever been the one to say it first, so it stays unsaid.

I think about the keychain sometimes. Still warm, when I put my hand near the stone. Oscar's, sunk halfway, waiting for the rest of him to catch up to it. It wasn't on the wall anymore by the time we ran back through that gallery — I know because I looked, once, without meaning to, and the space where his name had been scratched into the rock was just rock again, smooth, no ring of lighter stone, no letters.

Maybe the cavern took it down with everything else when the whole place started coming apart. Maybe it kept it. I don't have a way to find out, and I've stopped trying to find one.

This morning I woke up before my alarm, the way I do most days now. I lay there a minute, listening to the furnace click on downstairs, then got up and went to the bathroom and ran the water hot until the mirror fogged at the edges. I held my right hand out under the light over the sink and opened it.

It's still there. Quarter-sized, dead center of my palm, smooth the way a stone gets smooth after a river's had a few hundred years with it. No lines running through it, none of the little creases that fold up when you make a fist, no whorls, nothing a fingerprint scanner would ever pick up if I put my hand on one.

It doesn't hurt. It's never hurt, not once, not that first night and not any morning since. It doesn't grow. It doesn't shrink. It's exactly the size it was when I noticed it on the walk back to the bikes, and it is exactly that size every single morning, like it got fixed there and forgot how to do anything else.

I used to check it expecting it to be gone. I don't do that anymore. I check it now the way you check the weather, or whether the mail came — a fact of the morning, not a hope.

I dried my hands on the towel, feeling the wet come off every part of my palm except that one patch, which never seems to hold water the way the rest of my skin does. Then I got dressed, went downstairs, and ate breakfast standing at the counter because I was running late.

Outside, the air had that thin gray cold that means winter's close but not here yet. My bike was where I left it, dew beaded on the seat. I wiped it off with my sleeve and swung my leg over, and before I pushed off I looked down at my right hand one more time, wrapped around the grip, the smooth patch pressing flat and quiet against the rubber.

I closed my hand. It felt like it always feels — like nothing at all. Then I rode to school.