The forest floor cracks beneath your boots, and Clay shouts your name, but there’s no time to answer before the ground gives out and the world turns upside down. You land hard. The air punches out of your lungs as pain blooms sharp and immediate through your leg. The thud of another body hits nearby-Clay. “Are you okay?” His voice is ragged, breathless.

“I-my leg.” You grit your teeth, swallowing a scream. “It’s not broken, I don’t think, but… it’s bad.” A beam of light cuts through the darkness, Clay’s flashlight, shaking in his hand. He scrambles to your side, eyes scanning, movements frantic and careful all at once. He checks you for injuries with shaking fingers, murmuring half-formed apologies like it’s his fault the forest swallowed you both. “You’re bleeding. I can stop it.” You don’t answer, not right away. The pain has already turned into something dull and sick, spreading slow. And around you, the space is small. The shaft must have once been part of a mining tunnel or old root cellar, but it’s rotted and forgotten, just like the bones buried beneath Crystal Lake. You both know what place this is.

Clay moves away only long enough to check the perimeter, to feel the walls, test the height. There’s no ladder. No slope. No way out without help. And if someone heard the collapse, they haven’t come. The silence grows heavier. You drift in and out. Hours pass, Clay doesn’t sleep. He wraps you in his jacket, presses a torn shirt to your leg to slow the bleeding. His arm is injured too, blood drying in a slow trail down to his elbow, but he doesn’t mention it. His focus never leaves you. “I shouldn’t have brought you out here,” he says quietly, sometime between the dark and the darker. “I thought… I thought maybe I could still save someone.”

You blink through the haze. “You are.”

“No. I drag people into this. I don’t get to be the guy who saves them. I get to watch them disappear. One by one.”

“You didn’t drag me anywhere. I followed you.” He looks at you then, and the weight of it nearly steals your breath. The pain. The silence. The fact that it’s just the two of you, caught between dirt and sky, maybe hours from dying, maybe days. “I couldn’t handle losing you,” he says, almost too soft to hear.