“You guys ever heard about the case of the trapped child?”

  The clinking of the spike against the rock came to a stop, and the metallic echo kept dancing in the cave.

  Chris’s question had caught Kevin Anderson off guard, leaving him frozen on the ladder in front of the rock wall, chisel in one hand and hammer in the other.

  They had been there since morning, and no one had brought up the ‘trapped child’ until that moment. It would’ve been nice to wrap up the day that way, but now it was a little too late.

  “Uh-uh,” Haruki said, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, I think I heard something,” Eduardo said, though without much interest.

  Kevin held his breath, hot behind his face mask, and waited to hear what else they had to say. He needed to know how much his classmates actually knew about the case.

  A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek, behind his protective goggles, and another slid slowly under his arm. He endured the tickle just to stay still and keep his focus.

  Unfortunately, the sweat reached his eyelashes, and his eyes burned like hell. Cursing in silence, he rubbed them as best he could; not easy with dust-covered gloves and the goggles strapped on by his helmet.

  The positive attitude he’d managed to keep until now collapsed with that frustrated grunt—though really, Chris’s question and the sweat in his eyes had only brought out the real source of his frustration: time slipping away.

  Through the narrow cave opening about a hundred and fifty feet to his right, he could see sunlight fading outside, signaling the end of the workday. And still, in front of him, there was this huge, elongated hole he’d carved in the wall—empty, barren, with no signs of a find.

  He readjusted his plastic goggles and helmet, made sure the lamp mounted on the visor was pointing in the right direction, and went back to chipping away. The cling, cling echoed through the cave louder than before.

  Stevie Zar, who’d been lounging on the ground a few feet away for over ten minutes with a beer can in one hand, picked up a small rock with the other and tossed it at Kevin, hitting him square on the butt.

  “Come on, teacher’s pet,” he said, motioning for Kevin to sit next to him. “Why don’t you drop that and chill for a bit?”

  Haruki, the young woman snapping photos of mineral fragments arranged on a cloth on the floor, paused to chime in.

  “Kevin, you’ve been at it since we got here and haven’t found a thing. Nothing’s gonna change in the next half hour, y’know?”

  “Ha! Leave it to Haruki to come up with the uplifting words,” Stevie laughed, finishing the last of his beer.

  “I’m just trying to help,” the girl said with a shrug. “Kevin, I can give you one of my diamonds if that’s what you need for your report.”

  “Diamonds?” Eduardo repeated with a smirk. “Isn’t it a little pretentious to call a bunch of plain quartz ‘diamonds’? I mean, seriously?”

  Chris, meanwhile, enjoyed the banter as he picked up his tools from the ground. He shot a glance at Kevin, who still had his back to them.

  “Don’t listen to these clowns, Kevin,” he said. “You keep digging, man—maybe you’ll find another trapped child.”

  Kevin froze again, his hands tightening around the hammer and chisel like he was afraid they’d slip from all the sweat. Chris had brought it up again—but this time, he’d done it: he’d exposed him.

  Stevie finally caught on, and he, too, turned to look at his classmate, who still refused to turn around and face them.

  “Hey, Kevin…” He licked his lips, still tasting the beer. “Did you pick this goddamn canyon in the ass-end of nowhere just because of that dumb story?”

  Kevin stayed silent, feeling all their eyes on his back like ice on the nape of his neck.

  Chris clicked his tongue and chuckled to himself.

  “I think Kevin was picturing tomorrow’s headlines reading something like: ‘Kevin Anderson, second geology student to find the second trapped child in the Tropical Canyon of a Hundred Caves,’” he said.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Haruki shrugged. “What does it matter if we came here or to the northern woods? We had to pick a site for our fieldwork either way.”

  “So wait, that was for real?” Eduardo asked, pulling off his gloves. “I mean the trapped child thing. I thought that was just some campus myth or whatever.”

  “For real? Pfft, yeah, right…” Stevie scoffed.

  Chris held up his phone. “Well, my ‘source’ here just texted me about the whole thing. Says it really happened.”

  Curious, Haruki looked up from her phone camera. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Ninth-year students,” Eduardo explained, “supposedly found a child’s body while doing their fieldwork in one of these caves.”

  “Not the body—just the bones,” Chris corrected.

  “Yeah, whatever. Some people say it was a human sacrifice by a devil-worshipping cult, others say it was just a plain old murder,” Eduardo went on. “But everyone agrees the child’s ghost haunts that cave now. Y’know, like in those haunted-place horror movies. What a joke!”

  “Oh, of course! ‘A ghost took it’—that’ll be Kevin’s excuse when Professor Ramirez asks for his sample report,” Chris said, and everyone laughed.

  Everyone except Kevin, of course.

  Then they all began gathering their tools, getting ready to leave the place.

  “The trapped child is real. I’ve seen the evidence.” Kevin’s voice came out muffled behind his mask—his first words in a long while.

  “Oh yeah?” Stevie crushed his empty beer can and tossed it into the trash bag. “Well, even if it’s true, this place is called the Canyon of a Hundred Caves for a reason. There are three caves just on this rock alone—what makes you think you’re lucky enough to have picked the one…”

  “This is the cave,” Kevin said firmly, still facing the wall he was digging. “Cave 47-G, section 8. I interviewed the student who found him. It happened last year, right here. The full skeleton of a boy around five years old, wedged in this very crevice—here.” He tapped the crack with the chisel. “He’d been dead for decades. I’ve seen the photos! The bones of the right arm—here. The skull, stuck between these two rocks. And the legs, back here. It was like… the child had been trying to crawl through the walls when he died. Creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  A shadow fell over the group. For a moment, the only sound in the cave was Eduardo zipping up his backpack.

  “Well… I don’t know what to say,” Chris muttered, tucking away his phone. “My source didn’t go into that much detail, but… thanks, I guess?”

  Stevie shot Kevin a look. “Well, if you were hoping to take home another set of child bones, better luck next time, teacher’s pet. Don’t count on me coming back here,” he said, helping Haruki gather her things. “And now seriously, get moving. We have to be out of here in an hour if we want to make the airport. I’m not spending the night here.”

  “Good call. I could use a bit of civilization,” the girl agreed.

  “I brought you all here because I was interested in the story,” Kevin confessed. “But now I just wanna find something on my own, anything.”

  Stevie and the others ignored him. By now, the idea of leaving was more appealing than continuing the conversation.

  “Hey everyone, the generator’s down to yellow,” George announced, coming from outside. “We’re running out of power.”

  Hearing that was like the final bell announcing their retreat. Kevin turned on the ladder and saw that the lamps, connected to the outside generator, were already dimming.

  Seeing the power meter near the red meant the generator had maybe one or two hours of power left. Two hours was enough time to pack up the equipment, gather up the camp outside, take down the tent, load everything into the minivan, and hit the road. Two hours was enough for all that—but all that wasn’t enough for Kevin.

  He struck the inside of the hole again, but this time he focused on one specific spot. He wasn’t sure why, but something told him there was something there waiting for him. Maybe it was just his own stubbornness talking, but he kept chipping away until he heard a crack!—a sharp sound, like something breaking inside. Then the rocks gave way, revealing a small opening right at head height. He shoved his hammer inside and struck something that went cling, cling—a very different sound from the thunk, thunk he’d been hearing all morning. There it was!

  But, as if fate wanted to make things just a little harder, the light on his helmet flicked off. Of course—perfect timing for the battery to die.

  Kevin tossed the debris to the ground and noticed that along with the rocks, thin, pale fragments were falling too—like shards from a sheet of something. Had he cracked into a block of jade, maybe? He couldn’t quite tell.

  That thing making the almost-metallic sound was still in there.

  He dropped the hammer and chisel and reached into the hole. His hands touched something hard and… rectangular. The shape was far too geometric to be natural. If he hadn’t been wearing gloves, he might’ve had a better idea of…

  With a gentle tug, he managed to loosen whatever it was. It wasn’t another human fossil—he was sure of that—but he pulled it out carefully, very carefully; the last thing he wanted was to break it.

  What he’d found genuinely threw him off.

  It was a small square metal grate, just a bit larger than a hand—like the kind used for air vents.

  What the hell...?

  The grate was so clean he didn’t even need a brush to get the dirt off. In fact, it wasn’t just clean—it wasn’t rusted or damaged at all, except for a small dent on one edge, probably from the hammering.

  How had that ended up there? Could it have been left behind by students who’d visited the canyon before? Was it possible he’d just broken through into a neighboring cave? No way. He knew the map of that section too well, and there wasn’t supposed to be anything on that side of the cliff—not even a shallow cave.

  From the ground, he picked up one of those pale fragments that had fallen with the rocks. It wasn’t jade. It looked more like a chipped piece of acrylic pipe.

  And then he felt it—a cold current of air, flowing through the opening where he’d pulled out his strange find.

  Curious about what was on the other side, wondering if that draft really was coming from a—he actually smiled at how ridiculous it sounded—a ventilation duct, he leaned forward and peeked through the hole.

  He frowned.

  Impossible. On the other side of the opening… was a dark, starry sky.

  There was no way he could be seeing the night sky from here. They were in the heart of a cliff; behind that wall there should be nothing but rock, or at most an inner grotto that the cartographers hadn’t recorded. Besides, it was far too early for it to be night.

  No. Now that he looked more closely, it looked less like a starry night sky and more like… outer space?