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his choosing. Whenever he stopped, he thumbed through photos on his phone to
remind him of the world above.
    ‘They’ve found you,’ he whispered, stopping at a picture of his father. ‘You’re at the hospital, waiting for me. That’s why I have to get out too.’
    When the stream vanished suddenly beneath the stone floor, Daniel tried not to panic and kept following its musical sounds, stopping whenever the echoes looping round him
threatened to become too confusing. Worried about losing his way, he picked up a stone and scratched a chalky number 1 on the rock. And a few minutes after that he scratched the number 2.
    Soon he was into the hundreds, striking out numbers whenever he found a dead end that forced him to retrace his steps.
    When the stream eventually bubbled up again through the floor, he whispered
thank you
and knelt and drank, the pure cold making him gasp.
    After a few hours, the short breaks started becoming longer. He was colder. More tired. He sat in the dirt, his chin bumping him awake each time he dozed off, the fragments of
his dreams skittering back into the cracks and crevices of his brain, giving him just glimpses at first.
    . . . His father smiling . . .
    . . . His mother holding out her hands and calling to him.
    But, as the cold drilled into him and he rested more and more, those dreams of his crept out as rich dark stories.
    . . . His father cursing Daniel for leaving him behind in the car, saying it was all Daniel’s fault the sinkhole had opened because he’d said that he hated him . . .
    . . . His mother not being gone at all but living secretly with another family, telling him she had never wanted him and that was why she had left the day he had been born . . .
    And so real did each dream seem, with their bright colours and clear sounds, that Daniel shouted himself awake from each one into the dark.
    Once, he was so scared and cold and confused after waking, he held up the phone to his ear, thinking it was ringing, his face lit ghoulishly by the screen’s glow.
    ‘Mary?’ But the only noise was the stream. ‘You promised,’ he whispered when he realized he had dreamt the ringtone.
    On one occasion he stopped when he thought he heard voices and wondered if there might be people looking for him and he shouted out again and again.
    But no one answered him back.
    The only noise Daniel heard was the stream.
    When he found a thermal spring in a chamber, bubbling up into a small pool through the rock floor, he undressed and crept into its warmth and floated in the dark.
    He swallowed as much warm water as he could before going on his way, telling the phone they could not stay.
    Daniel knew he had spent over ten hours following the stream, according to the phone, its torchlight casting an eerie moon glow around him.
    He kept whispering to his phone, promising he would find a way out. But, as more time passed, he heard his voice beginning to falter. He spoke less and less for fear of promising something that
might not happen, that it might not believe him any more. He said nothing when it prompted him with a message that told him its battery had only twenty per cent remaining.
    When he took a dump, squatting like an animal, he was careful not to dirty the damp shorts pooled round his ankles. Afterwards, he hovered close above it, feeling the warmth on
his bare skin, until the rancid mess turned cold.
    Ten per cent.
    Daniel cursed out loud that he should never have left that first chamber and followed the stream. That he should have stayed and waited to be found.
    He stopped when he realized he had lost his trainers from around his neck and panicked. But he soon gave up on ever seeing them again.
    Five per cent.
    He croaked orders at the stream to show him the way out, casting the phone’s light around him. But there was no magic door in the stone, only the damp walls shining golden.
    One per cent.
    Daniel pleaded with the phone not to give up. He stumbled on, bumping off the rocks,