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  Belle and Zane followed and it took her about four steps into the huge cavern before she just stopped, unable to move.

  “Holy shit!” Zane said softly beside her.

  The cavern they had stepped into was so immense, she couldn’t even begin to get a sense of how big it was. The floor was flat and brown dirt, but the walls towered far over their heads and every inch seemed to be covered with glowing pink quartz crystals.

  Billions and billions of them of all sizes.

  “Any of the largest football stadiums in the country in 2020 could fit inside of here and not touch the sides or ceiling,” Duster said.

  Belle just couldn’t make her mind accept what she was seeing. It had a beauty to it that seemed to take all breath away.

  She let go of Zane’s hand and slowly turned around, trying to take it all in, but finding that impossible. The tiny door they had just come through seemed like nothing more than a dot on the massive wall of crystals that towered over her, arching upward to form the ceiling an impossible distance overhead.

  Across the vast space she could see the cavern was attached to another massive cavern and then beyond that more and more until the massive caverns vanished into a pinpoint in the distance as if she were looking into a mirror reflected in another mirror.

  She forced herself to take a deep breath and look down at the dirt floor and the footprints in the dirt to get her balance and bearing. Then she looked over to the right at a wooden table near one wall with a wooden box sitting on it and two wires lying on the ground.

  “Mind if I sit down for a moment?” Belle asked, not waiting for an answer as she lowered herself to the floor of the cavern. She needed to feel some strength from the solidness of the floor. The vastness of the cavern was going to take some time for her mind to even pretend to grasp.

  “Good idea,” Zane said, sitting beside her.

  Bonnie laughed. “Everyone sits down when they first see this place. Some, like you two, are just a little more dignified than others.”

  Belle was glad she was one of the dignified ones, but she had to admit, she didn’t feel dignified in the slightest. She felt tiny and small and very, very much in awe of one of the great sights in the universe.

  Stretching out in front of her and over her was the cavern where all energy and matter and time converged into a place of spectacular beauty and power.

  Dignified in the face of all that just wasn’t much of an option.

  PART FOUR

  Time Passes

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  July 11th, 1900

  Above Silver City, Idaho

  ZANE TOOK A deep breath and shouldered his backpack. Then he turned to make sure Belle was all right with her pack as well. She seemed to be fine.

  Then he turned to Duster and Bonnie. Duster had on thick gloves and had connected the two wires to a crystal on the wall, then connected one end to the wooden box on the table. He had not connected the other wire just yet.

  Over the last two hours, after first seeing the cavern, they had gone over the plan one more time while having a lunch in the modern kitchen area of the cavern.

  All four of them were going to go back ten years to 1890, all carrying a vast amount of supplies and water to be left in the cavern near the table. They wanted to do that even with the supplies in the supply cavern just feet away, just in case. They were trying to cover all bases as much as they could.

  Then Bonnie and Duster were going to stay in the packing area for one exact day, then Duster was to pull the wire from the machine.

  Zane and Belle were going to set out walking into the caverns, trying to get in as far as they could in that same time before Duster pulled the wire.

  In theory, pulling that wire would bring all four of them back to the wooden box in 1900.

  In theory.

  At one point in the planning process back in Boise, Zane had asked Duster, “You are afraid the time crystals won’t work to pull us back because of dimensional distortions in the caverns, aren’t you?”

  Both Duster and Bonnie had nodded.

  “So what do we do if that happens?” Zane had asked. “Where do we end up?”

  Duster had looked at Bonnie and both of them had shrugged. “We honestly don’t know. Our math can’t account for all the dimensional distortions inside the cavern.”

  “More than likely you’ll just stay in the same time you went back to, inside the same alternate timeline.”

  “In theory,” Duster said. “But if that happens, we really don’t know for sure.”

  “So why does the original table and device you have set up in the cavern work?” Belle had asked.

  “We believe because it is near an entrance to this world,” Bonnie had said.

  “Grounded,” Duster said.

  So now that they were about to head out into the caverns, Zane had made sure that he and Belle had enough to eat to last them months if needed in the packs they were carrying. And most of the weight they were both carrying was water.

  Also, all four of them had a bunch of extra supplies they were going to jump back with and then leave off to one side of the cavern. Duster and Zane had figured those extra supplies would be enough to almost get them to North Dakota if they came back and the mine tunnel entrance was gone for some reason.

  If something happened to them inside these caverns, there was a very good chance that the living forever thing wouldn’t apply. They had no safety net.

  Now granted, Zane hadn’t been used to living with that safety net of the immortality of time travel for very long. But he liked the idea and now thinking it might no longer apply in these caverns bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

  Zane, in all his caving, had never gone into a cave that he wasn’t sure would have an entrance after he got inside. He didn’t actually mind that much, but the institute and the future needed Belle and risking her life suddenly just seemed foolish.

  As they stood near the table, ready to go back the ten years in time, Zane turned to Duster and Bonnie, not letting himself look at Belle. “I’d like to change the plans some.”

  “A little late for that,” Duster said, frowning.

  “I want to try this alone first,” Zane said. “Belle is needed by the institute for her work. I’m just a caver.”

  “No!” Belle said.

  Zane had never heard such intensity in her voice before.

  He turned to Belle and started to say something, but she held up her hand. The fire in her eyes was something.

  “I understand what you are trying to do,” she said. “But I have left clear instructions on what I know about genetics and my research and Bonnie and others can move it forward just fine. Our chances for survival go up when we are together, and besides, I seem to remember reading something in one of your books about this very topic. Didn’t you say that a solo caver is a dead caver?”

  Zane laughed and Duster chuckled.

  “We stick with the plan,” Belle said.

  “Everyone get ready to touch the device on the count of three,” Duster said, hooking up the last wire and then removing his glove.

  Zane just looked at Belle and smiled. “You know I had to try.”

  “And I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t,” Belle said.

  Again Duster chuckled and said, “One…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  July 11th, 1890

  Deep Inside the Crystal Caverns

  SHE AND ZANE had been walking at a steady pace for three hours now, deeper into the crystal caverns. The pace was comfortable for both of them and they had used one energy bar snack an hour ago and drank just enough water to keep them going without worry.

  The temperature seemed to be a comfortable high sixties and the air was dry enough to help them stay cool but not sweat too much.

  The floor so far had been slightly downhill and completely flat.

  It had taken them almost twenty minutes to walk across the floor of the main cavern, through the ma
ssive arch between caverns that was higher than most bridges over rivers, and then into the second cavern.

  At the archway, they had stopped and built up a small pile of dirt in the form of an arrow pointing back at the distant table and the tiny figures of Bonnie and Duster in the distance.

  Now, after three hours, they were standing under yet another archway leading to another huge cavern. This had to be the tenth massive cavern at least that they had passed through. And not one inch of any wall that Belle had seen wasn’t covered by the glowing pink crystals.

  If the cavern hadn’t been tested numbers of times by Duster and others for radiation, she would have been worried about what they were absorbing.

  In the archway they stopped and Belle dug out the water they had been using while Zane pulled out a lighter and what looked like a stick. It didn’t flame, but put off a white smoke.

  Zane held the stick up and let the smoke rise in the air.

  Belle knew that he was looking for some sort of breeze. Both Bonnie and Duster had said they had never felt a breeze in the crystal cavern, but Zane had insisted there had to be one, otherwise the atmosphere in the places would soon stale out. Something had to be moving the air.

  The smoke moved in the direction they were headed gently and Zane nodded and snuffed out the stick.

  “That a good sign I assume?” Belle asked, handing him the water bottle.

  “A very good sign,” he said, smiling at her. “Since these caverns we have been in are basically a dead-end run, I didn’t expect much. But I’ve been feeling a little breeze, so that means we are getting close to the main run of caverns.”

  Belle nodded and put the bottle of water away in her pack after Zane took a small drink. In some of the planning sessions, after the caverns had been described to them, Zane had flat insisted that the cavern at the mine was the end cavern of a dead-end run.

  And if the caverns were going to go all the way to the Dakotas along the forty-second parallel, then that made sense as well.

  He and Zane made their little mound of dirt under the archway with the arrow pointing back in the direction they had come and moved on.

  Three more caverns later they hit the main line of caverns.

  And again, both of them had to sit down about four steps inside the big main cavern.

  The cavern of crystals around them could hold every cavern they had walked through already and still have room for more. She figured it was large enough to hold all of Manhattan Island.

  Easily.

  The massive caverns they had been inside since the mine had only been a tiny side path.

  And from where they were, just barely into this one cavern, she could see at least a hundred other side paths moving away like massive tunnels.

  Nothing in Belle’s imagination could have prepared her for this.

  Nothing.

  “Every decision, by every person in history,” Zane said softly, as if talking in a normal voice in this sort of scene would be wrong. “And this is only a small part of them.”

  All Belle could do was sit there in the dirt, her mouth open, just staring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  July 11th, 1890

  Deep Inside the Crystal Caverns

  ZANE KNEW HE had met his match as a caver.

  There was no sane way to move forward into the massive cave.

  None, even though the floor was flat and the going would be easy, they would die in here.

  It really was that simple.

  Some of the crystals on the walls and hanging from the ceilings were larger than skyscrapers and had thousands and thousands of smaller crystals hanging off of them.

  He took off his pack. “Dig us out something to eat if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Belle nodded and turned from the incredible sight and took off her pack as well.

  Zane needed to do some quick experiments to see if his hunch was right as to what was happening in front of them.

  He pulled out his smoke stick and lit it. Smoke went straight up without being bothered in the slightest by a breeze.

  “That what you expected?” Belle asked as he put the smoke stick away.

  “In a cavern this size,” he said, “that is the only thing that could happen. “Even a thousand openings wouldn’t move the air in here. A single opening would be like turning on a fan in the Bronx and expecting someone to feel it in Manhattan.”

  She nodded as he took out his compass. As expected, it flat didn’t work, so he tucked it away. His personal sense of direction, which had always been good even in the dark underground, told him the big cavern ran east to west.

  And in the distance on both ends of the big cavern were massive other caverns he could barely see.

  He then glanced at his watch. They had only been going now for just under five hours.

  She handed him a beef sandwich that they had made for this first meal before leaving the supply cavern.

  He took a bite and it tasted wonderful, the mustard just perfect on his. The taste helped calm him some, let his mind clear.

  Belle turned around and sat beside him on the dirt floor, eating and staring in silence at the sight in front of them.

  He tried to count the side entrances off the main chamber and lost track at around fifty. And those were the ones he could see. Some of them might stretch for a hundred miles before ending, some might only go one cavern deep.

  But all of them could have openings out into the real world.

  Or none of them might.

  “This can’t exist, can it?” Belle asked.

  “Not in any real world of earth’s crust that we know,” Zane said. “As Bonnie and Duster had figured, all this must exist in some sort of space outside of real space.”

  Belle shook her head.

  Zane just looked around. “This is all way beyond me, but I know for a fact no cavern like this one could exist in our planet’s crust, let alone all the other ones we can see from here. This flat isn’t a natural cavern in the slightest.”

  “So right now we are also existing outside of real time and real space?” Belle asked, glancing at Zane.

  At that moment his stomach snapped down into a panic mode. He stood quickly, helping the surprised Belle to her feet as well. She managed to hold onto her sandwich in the process.

  “We have to get back and get back fast,” he said, stuffing the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.

  “Why?” she said, as he helped her swing her pack back up on her shoulders.

  “Because of what you said,” Zane said, swinging his pack up onto his back. As soon as she was set, they headed back into the cavern they had come through. “We are existing outside of time and space here. Time does not exist in here.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said softly, clearly understanding what he was thinking as they hit a fast pace and started back uphill into the caverns.

  Zane just hoped beyond hope that they would find Bonnie and Duster just waiting for them, surprised at their quick return.

  But he had a sinking feeling that was not going to be the case.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Unknown Time

  Deep Inside the Crystal Caverns

  WHEN THEY REACHED the archway between two of the caverns, Belle looked hard for the pile of dirt and the arrow they had made just an hour before. She couldn’t see anything until Zane finally pointed at an area on the floor.

  A very, very slight pile of dirt was there, not more than a slight bump now in the dirt, and their footprints of their walk in were gone.

  “How long would it take for that to happen?” she asked as they went past.

  “I honestly have no idea,” Zane said. “These caverns might be resettling quickly or it might be a few thousand years of natural settlement.”

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Belle asked.

  Zane only nodded and kept walking.

  She stayed with Zane’s fast pace as they headed through the caverns, taking out bottles of water as they went and no
t even trying to conserve at the moment.

  Where it had taken them four hours to get to the main line of caverns, it only took them just over two and a half hours to get back to the starting cavern.

  But as they headed across the large space, Belle was not liking at all what she was seeing.

  Not at all.

  There were only mounds where the table had been and their extra supplies.

  Mounds covered in dust.

  And the big metal door was mostly gone.

  Zane took them straight to the table first. It had rotted away as had the wooden box, leaving only a pile of corroded and mostly destroyed pieces of equipment that had been the internal mechanism of the wooden box.

  Their supplies were still there, but nothing more than a pile of rotted material and metal and plastic covered in dust.

  Belle could feel the panic starting to climb up her throat and she took a deep breath and pushed it down.

  “Got any idea how long it would take this to happen in this protected environment?” Belle asked, amazed her voice was even working at all.

  “Thousands of years,” Zane said flatly.

  “We are so screwed,” Belle said.

  With that, Zane only nodded and turned to the door into the supply cavern.

  The big metal door was nothing more than pitted rust and Zane easily kicked it down, sending dust swirling into the air.

  They headed through the short tunnel and into the darkness of the supply cavern. No lights came up and both of them, using the light from the crystal cavern, dug out their flashlights and put on headlamps as well.

  The smell in the big cavern was of rot. A thick smell as if the place had been closed up far, far too long.

  Belle could tell that the condition of everything in here was as bad as the rotted table and supplies outside, if not worse. The supply tables were just piles of rubble, also covered in light dust.