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"It’s too late," I cry "We’ll never get out of here now"

His voice has all the passion and determination that I have lost "It isn’t too late We’ll walk upstreaht Ro and I entered the co out of it This has to be one of those streaether with the rope and I’ll lead You and Cook carry your mother Your sisters will each take a baby"

His planup htens my heavy heart

He whispers inourselves e can’t do, we have to believe in e can do Let’s go"

He unwinds the rope and loops us together into a shuffling centipede with ten legs, everything done by feel To o last

"I’ll scratch and bite anything that tries to eat us froer We all laugh nervously

Kalliarkos takes the lead, followed by Maraya holding our baby sister Cook and I make a basket with our arms to carry Mother We stick close to the water and creep forith sloeeps Small stones and uneven bits of hs like an unwieldy sack of lead Amaya sticks so close behind that she notices when Cook or I shift at all and is there to steady us

Kalliarkos and Maraya give warnings over their shoulders: "There’s a dip in the ground" "Careful, to your right, so hard and round that rolls"

Suddenly Kalliarkos grunts in pain

"Hold on, I just kicked a big rock" The scrape of a heavy object on stone shudders through the darkness, then he mutters a curse "There’s rubble we have to cliive her both babies She waits alone in the dark so we can shift Mother by feel up a rugged ridge of what feels like collapsed stone colu, and if we didn’t have all four of us working together we couldn’t et down on the other side Cook and I sit with Mother’s lioes back over the rubble to fetch Maraya

"Do you wante for a little distance"

"No, it’s all right, Auard since you’re not afraid of the monsters and I am" The truth is I don’t want to hold our brother, but I can’t tell her that