“This tunnel isn’t getting any wider,” Sheiral said, when she and Jace had been traveling down it for quite some time. Her elbows kept banging the sides and her knees were scraped quite raw from the portions where she’d been unable to lift them.
“It’s not getting any narrower, either,” Jace pointed out. While the tunnel had continued to slope downwards, with frequent stretches that had a steep grade, it had remained mostly the same width. There had been one slightly wider spot where the limber youth had been just able to twist himself around to go forward, after having blocked up the entrance with some loose stones behind them.
“No,” Sheiral agreed. “We’re stuck in the same hole as we have been from the beginning.”
“It hasn’t forked yet, has it?” Jace asked.
“Not that I could tell,” Sheiral replied. “But in the dark…”
“It’s a small enough passage that you should be able to feel if you’re careful,” Jace said.
“I didn’t realize you were such an expert,” Sheiral said. “Why didn’t you go first?”
“That was your choice,” Jace said.
“If you had told me that made me responsible for searching out branching passageways, I might have chosen otherwise,” Sheiral said. “Or alternatively, I might have actually done so.”
“I thought it was obvious,” Jace said. “But assuming that there haven’t been any, that means we’re not lost… we can go back out the way we came at any time.”
“Wonderful news,” Sheiral said. “Let’s do that.”
“We can’t do it now,” Jace said. “They’re searching for us. If they’ve managed to track us, we’d be heading right back to them. If they haven’t, then the last thing we want to do is stick our heads out and give ourselves away.”
“So we’re stuck in here, like I said,” Sheiral said.
“We’re not stuck,” Jace said. “We can still keep going forward.”
“Getting yourself deeper into the hole you’re stuck in isn’t the same thing as getting unstuck,” Sheiral said.
“We aren’t stuck,” Jace said. “We could go out any time we wanted.”
“Well, I want to now,” Sheiral said, and she started to crawl backwards.
“We’ll get caught,” Jace said, pushing forwards against her.
“I’d rather be sold to the governor than die in a hole in the ground,” Sheiral said, straining backwards against him.
“For all you know, he’s just going to kill you,” Jace said, pushing back.
“He wouldn’t spend all that money just to kill me!” Sheiral said.
“No,” Jace said. He stopped pushing and instead braced himself, preparing to give Sheiral a hard shove forward to get her moving again. “He’d probably torture you first.”
He pushed hard, and Sheiral, caught by surprise, tumbled forward with Jace stumbling after her. Though neither one of them had been able to tell, there was a steep drop-off right in front of her and so the two of them went bouncing and sliding down into the darkness together.
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