"So we have to go in deeper, then," Kate said, turning around to give her a grin. "I'm cool with that." Maybe she shouldn't have been so prepared to go deeper into this world, maybe she should have been thinking about the people who'd be worried about her above ground, but she wasn't.

"Then let's do it," she said, heading for the door again, sweeping her flashlight over the floor. "There's nothing down here that we need to be worried about, right? No leftover monsters from weird experiments gone wrong?"