Page 7

One hour and a hundred false alarms later, Ella's legs had moved beyond pain into some new territory of agony. Her lungs ached from the cold night air, and her mind kept circling back to that pristine Mustang on the level below. Something about the whole setup felt wrong – like a stage dressed for a play where the actor had missed his cue.

The quarry toyed with them, offering hope in every shadow only to snatch it away. An old jacket turned out to be a tangle of vines. A flash of pale skin became sun-bleached plastic. The lack of cell service meant that calling in reinforcements would require a trip back to the mainland, and Ella would only do that if she couldn’t find Marcus with her own two eyeballs.

‘Tell me again why we didn't wait until morning?’ Luca asked.

‘Because Marcus didn't.’ Ella swept her flashlight across another rock face. ‘And I want to know why.’

The truth was more complicated. Something about this case had hooked her - that familiar tension between curiosity and dread that preceded every major breakthrough in her career. The human mind was a maze of dark corners and false bottoms; Ella had spent her life learning to navigate those shadows. And right now, every instinct told her they were close to getting answers.

The top level of the quarry was different from the others. No equipment lay abandoned here, no signs of human activity beyond the basic cuts into the rock. Just raw stone beneath a sky that had completely clouded over.

‘One more level.’ Ella aimed her flashlight beam at the ramp ahead. It wound up like a serpent's spine, steeper than the others. ‘Then we'll go.’

‘You said that two levels ago.’

‘Yeah, well, I lied.’ She started climbing. ‘Coming?’

Luca muttered something that might have been anatomically impossible, but his footsteps crunched behind her. The burns on her legs screamed with each step, but Ella pushed through. Pain was just weakness leaving the body, or so Ripley used to tell her.

The top level was different. Instead of the broad terraces below, this was more like a shelf carved into the quarry face. Barely ten feet wide in places, with a sheer drop on one side and solid rock on the other. Their lights revealed ancient drill marks in the stone, like some giant creature had tried to claw its way out of the earth.

‘Watch your step,’ Luca said. ‘Long way down.’

‘Thanks for that.’ Ella kept close to the wall, trying not to think about the empty air to her right. ‘See anything interesting?’

‘Besides certain death? No.’

Their lights played across the quarry face. The limestone here was different - more fractured, shot through with veins of darker stone that caught the light like frozen lightning. Ella found herself studying the patterns despite her exhaustion. She could see why Marcus might have been drawn to this spot.

Luca shouted, ‘Ell, look at this.’

Ella joined him at a section of wall that bulged outward like a tumor. The rock here was a chaos of different types, all mashed together, although Ella couldn't identify them by name. All she knew was that, at least by visual inspection, none of them had any business being in a limestone quarry.

‘That's not natural,’ she said.

‘No kidding. Check this out.’

The beam revealed markings carved into the rock face. Not the usual graffiti – no crude initials or declarations of teenage love. These were precise, geometrical shapes. Triangles nested within circles. Spirals that disappeared into nowhere. And something else, something that made Ella's skin crawl – symbols she'd never seen before, but which her mind insisted on reading as words. Like letters from an alphabet she'd seen in dreams.

‘Are those… carvings?’

‘Looks like it. Geological survey marks?’

Ella traced one of the symbols with her finger, and something electric shot through her nervous system. Her stomach clenched like she'd swallowed ice water – that instinctive reaction to wrong that had kept humans alive since they first huddled in caves.

These weren't survey marks. They reminded her of something, but the connection danced just out of reach.

The hair on her neck stood up. She'd seen enough scenes to know when something felt off, and this whole setup was triggering every alarm in her head.

She and Luca ran their flashlights across the carvings, then their combined beams revealed what the darkness had been hiding .

A hole in the quarry floor.

Perfectly circular, about three feet across.

It hadn't been blasted or eroded. The edges were too clean. Like something had simply decided to exist where solid rock should be.

‘That's new,’ Luca said.

Ella approached the hole carefully, testing each step. The rock around it looked sturdy enough, but something about the perfect geometry of it worried her. They positioned themselves on opposite sides with lights aimed down into the darkness. The beam disappeared into nothing. The hole was deeper than their lights could reach.

‘I don't like this,’ Luca said.

‘Neither do I.’ Ella reached into her pocket and pulled out a quarter. ‘Want to see how deep it goes?’

She dropped the coin before Luca could answer. One second passed. Two. Three. Four.

The impact echoed up from the depths.

‘Jesus, that’s a big drop,’ Luca said.

Ella adjusted her light and tried to pierce the darkness below. For a moment, there was nothing but shadow. Then something caught the beam – a flash of pale skin, a tangle of darker shapes that might have been clothing.

‘Hawkins,’ she breathed. ‘Tell me that's not what I think it is.’

She didn't answer. Couldn't. Because the light had revealed more details now, and her brain was cataloging them with ruthless efficiency.

A hand, fingers twisted into claws. The sleeve of what had once been an expensive jacket, now torn and stained dark.

And beneath that, glimpses of something that had stopped being Marcus Thornton about three days ago.