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Anyone or anything could be in here and she wouldn’t be able to see it or hear it—
    Get a grip, Ash, she told herself. She fumbled for her phone, and snapped it open.
    The glow of the screen was useless against the black ground – she had to crouch to see it, and even then it only illuminated the small circle in which she stood.
    She selected camera mode , and pushed the button.
    The flash lit up the cavern for a fragment of a second, like a mountainscape in a lightning storm. Ash regained her bearings – the jackhammer lay on its side at her two o’clock, the
pile of spare hard hats and headlamps were at her eleven thirty. She jogged through the darkness towards them. When she guessed she was about three metres away, she took another picture.
    The flash told her she’d underestimated; the pile of equipment was almost five metres away. She walked over and sorted through them until she found something that felt like a headlamp.
    She clicked the switch. The bulb worked. She tightened the straps around her head, tilted the lamp so the light fell upon the ground roughly five metres in front of her, and ran back towards the
jackhammer.
    She had a collapsible trowel in her pocket, but now that she’d seen the kind of equipment the miners were using, she thought she could do better. She didn’t know how to use the
jackhammer, but there was a pile of shovels, mattocks and other digging tools nearby. Ash selected a pickaxe, swivelled it in her hands, and then swung it into the ground between her feet.
    The rock crumbled easily – it was clearly a different substance from the stone the miners had been drilling through a few metres to Ash’s right. Which made sense, she realized, since
the box had only been buried here a couple hof years. Not enough time for the mud to solidify into tough stone.
    She swung again. The light jittered on the floor. She couldn’t hear the rocks shattering over the screaming of the alarm, but she could feel the impact through the padded grip of the
pickaxe.
    Six metres down, Benjamin had said. But that was when she was up in the entrance tunnel, which was at least four metres above the cave floor. She should only need to dig down two metres. But the
hole had to be fairly wide, or else there was a risk that she would completely miss the—
    Clack . Ash paused. That last strike had felt different. Either she’d hit a tougher kind of rock, or she’d found what she was looking for.
    She swept the broken stones aside with the blade of the pickaxe, and shone the headlamp into the hole she’d made.
    Wood. She’d struck something made of hard wood.
    She reached down and grabbed the box. It was scarcely bigger than an engagement-ring box, with dirty brass hinges and a scalloped handle. There was a scar on the top where the pickaxe had
scraped it.
    Reverently, she placed the box beside the hole. Lifted the lid.
    Urgh, she thought. Success. She could have taken the object out so she could rebury the box, but she didn’t want to touch it with her bare hands.
    Shuddering, she closed the box again. “I have the prize,” she told Benjamin. She tried to keep her voice from shaking. “Time to go.”
    Benjamin was talking, but Ash couldn’t make out what he was saying. Probably asking her out, yet again, knowing she’d refuse. That was his usual way of congratulating her.
    Ash started jogging back up towards the north tunnel. Now came the tough part: sneaking back out. The miners had all evacuated, so they would be watching from a distance as
she emerged from the tunnel. Even if she put her overalls back on and wiped the grime off her face, they’d be curious, wondering why she’d taken so much longer than they had.
She’d have to find a way to get past them without being spotted.
    Or a place to hide, she thought, while I wait for them to come back in and resume work. But who knows how long that’ll take? I have to be home by the time school finishes, or Dad will
freak.
    She kept moving.