The dust of Zion tastes like memory. For years, Elias Thorne had felt it coating his tongue—a fine grit of sandstone and sorrow. Every August, on the anniversary of his sister’s disappearance, he returned to the small house in Springdale, the house where her hiking boots still sat by the door, confident she’d be back to fill them. The official story was a clean, tragic narrative, polished smooth by time and repetition. Lara Thorne, 24, and her boyfriend, Liam Hemlock, 26, had set off on August 14th to explore the Subway, a semi-technical slot canyon carved by the left fork of North Creek. They were experienced, but Zion is indifferent to experience. A freak summer monsoon, a flash flood, a rockfall. They were reported missing two days later. For four years, they were ghosts, their faces smiling from faded posters tacked to community boards between ads for river guides and crystal shops.
Then, last autumn, a pair of canyoners venturing off the permitted route had found them. The report from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office was brief and clinical. Skeletal remains huddled together behind a significant rockfall in a narrow section of the canyon. The cause of death was listed as exposure and dehydration. A slow, grim fading in the dark. The case was closed. The ghosts were given graves. For most, it was a sad final chapter. For Elias, it was a wound that refused to scar over. Closure was a fiction sold to the grieving. The truth was a jagged hole, and knowing how they died only changed its shape, not its depth.
He sat in a room that was a shrine, a place he and his parents had lacked the strength to dismantle. Her photography books were still stacked on the nightstand. A prism hung in the window, casting lazy, silent rainbows on the wall. The air was thick with her absence, a pressure against his eardrums. He was here to finally do what his parents couldn’t: to pack her life into boxes, to concede to the past tense. His phone buzzed on the dusty desk. A text from Marcus. Thinking of you today, man. And them. Let me know if you need anything. Anything at all. Elias stared at the message. Marcus Vance. He had been their triangle’s third point, Liam’s best friend since childhood and the one who, by a twist of fate, had been sick with the flu that weekend. He was the one who raised the alarm, the one who found their Jeep abandoned at the trailhead. In the chaotic aftermath, Marcus had been Elias’s rock, a fellow mourner who understood the specific contours of the loss. He had been a constant, steady presence for four years. Elias typed back a simple “Thanks, Marcus. I’m okay.” He wasn’t, but it was the expected response.
He turned to the desk, pulling open the top drawer. It was filled with small things: ticket stubs, polished stones, a dried desert wildflower, and her digital camera. He’d looked through the photos on the memory card a hundred times in the first year, searching her captured moments for a clue, a premonition, anything. He found only joy. Sundrenched smiles, vast landscapes. The two of them, so alive it felt like a physical blow. He picked it up, its plastic body cool in his palm. The battery was long dead. He found the charger in a tangled mess of cables and plugged it in. While it charged, he sifted through a box of prints, the last roll of film she’d developed. The images were from the week before the trip. Mostly landscapes, the abstract patterns of slick rock and juniper. Then the last few shots: one of Liam laughing, silhouetted against a sunset; one of her own boots caked in red mud; and the last one, a blurry accidental shot of a diner tabletop—a half-eaten plate of pancakes, a coffee mug, a salt shaker, an empty frame. Elias tossed it back in the box, labeling it “meaningless.”
He went back to the camera, which now showed a sliver of power. He turned it on and began to click through the digital files again. A familiar, painful ritual. The photos were the same. Arms outstretched on Angel’s Landing. Liam pretending to be swallowed by the mouth of a small cave. The two of them kissing, the sun flaring behind their heads. He kept clicking, past the photos from the days before the hike, into older folders: a trip to Moab, a weekend in Bryce Canyon. He stopped on a photo of a campfire, the flames painting their faces in flickering orange. Lara, Liam, and Marcus, all of them smiling. A pang of something cold and sharp went through him. The way things were. He returned to the most recent photos, the ones from August of that year. He zoomed in on their faces, tracing the lines of their smiles, torturing himself. He looked at the details in the background, the gear laid out on the living room floor before the hike. Ropes, harnesses, helmets—everything was in order. He had been over this with the search and rescue team a dozen times.
He was about to turn it off when his thumb slipped, navigating to the camera’s menu. He saw the “File Info” option. He’d never looked at that before. Out of a sense of methodical, pointless thoroughness, he selected it. The screen displayed the metadata for the photo of Liam kissing: Date: August 13th. Time: 7:42 p.m. Location data was disabled. Nothing. He scrolled to the next photo. It was the last one on the card, taken the morning they left. It was a selfie of Lara in the passenger seat of the Jeep. She wasn’t smiling. Her eyes looked tired, her mouth a flat line. He’d always interpreted it as simple fatigue before a long day. Now he wasn’t so sure. He checked the file info: Date: August 14th. Time: 5:17 a.m. He scrolled back one photo to the kissing picture from the night before, then forward again to the grim selfie. He did it again. Back. Forward. Love. And then something else. It was nothing. It was grief playing tricks on him. He put the camera down. The house was too quiet. The rainbows on the wall felt like a mockery.
He decided to go for a drive to get out of this suffocating space. He drove toward the park entrance, the colossal red and white walls of the Temples of the Virgin rising before him. He passed the diner where Lara and Liam had eaten their last meal, the Zion Pioneer Lodge. On a whim, he pulled into the gravel parking lot. He didn’t know why he was there. He just sat in his car, staring at the rustic wooden facade. He thought of the blurry film photograph, the pancakes. He picked up his phone and called his mother.
“Mom,” he said, his voice strained. “A quick, weird question. Do you remember what Lara’s favorite breakfast was?”
“Oh, honey, that’s an odd thing to ask right now.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Just humor me.”
There was a pause. “Pancakes,” she said, her voice soft with the memory. “Always pancakes, drowned in syrup. Your father used to call her the Pancake Monster.”
“Right,” Elias said, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. “Thanks, Mom.”
He hung up and stared at the diner. They ate here. He got out of his car and went inside. The air smelled of bacon and coffee. A woman with a kind, wrinkled face and a name tag that read “Brenda” greeted him.
“Just one?”
“Actually, I just have a question,” Elias said, pulling the blurry photo from his wallet. He’d put it there this morning, not knowing why. “This is a long shot, but do you recognize this? This was taken here, I think, four years ago.”
Brenda squinted at the photo. “Lord, honey, four years is a lifetime in this town. Tables change, plates change.” She studied it a moment longer. “Wait a minute. The syrup bottle, that old beehive design. We got new ones about three years back. So yeah, this could be from then. What’s this about?”
“My sister and her boyfriend,” Elias said, his voice quiet. “They ate here the morning they went missing. Lara and Liam.”
Brenda’s face softened in recognition. Everyone knew the story. “Oh, that sweet girl. I remember them. They used to come in all the time. So full of life, those two.” She looked at the photo again. “A plate of pancakes. That was her, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Elias said. “The police report said they ate here around 6:00 in the morning on the 14th. Does that sound right?”
Brenda frowned, tapping a finger on the counter. “The 14th. That was a Saturday. Let me think. The morning crew would have been me and Sue in the kitchen. Yeah, I remember them coming in. It was early, still dark out. But something’s not right about that.”
“What do you mean?” Elias asked, his heart starting to beat a little faster.
“There were three of them,” Brenda said. “Not two.”
The air in the diner seemed to thin. Three? “Yes. Your sister, her young man, and another fellow, a quieter one. Sat right over there in booth 4.” She pointed with her chin. “I remember because the boy, Liam, he was being loud, boisterous, joking around, but the girl and the other fellow… they were quiet. Looked like they hadn’t slept. The girl looked real upset about something.”
A third person. The police report mentioned no third person. The story, the clean, tragic narrative, had always been about two. “Do you remember what this third person looked like?” Elias asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“Dark hair, lean. Didn’t say much,” Brenda said, shrugging. “I’m sorry, honey. It was four years ago. The only other thing I remember is they were arguing a little in whispers. Sounded serious. Then the third fellow, the quiet one, he got up and paid the bill while the other two were still bickering. Paid in cash and left a big tip. I only remember that because it’s rare.”
Elias felt a wave of dizziness. An argument. A third man. This wasn’t in the report. This wasn’t in the story. This was a crack in the foundation of his grief. “Thank you,” he managed to say, his throat tight. “Thank you, Brenda.” He walked out of the diner and into the blistering Utah sun, but he felt cold to his bones. He got in his car and drove, not back to the house, but toward the park, toward the canyon that had swallowed his sister. The clean narrative was a lie. And if that was a lie, what else was?
He thought of the text from Marcus. Thinking of you today, man, and them. The word echoed in his head. Them. Who was “them”? Lara and Liam? Or Lara, Liam, and a ghost? A third man who was there at the last breakfast and then vanished from the story completely. A quiet man with dark hair. A man like Marcus. No, couldn’t be. Marcus was in Salt Lake City with the flu. He had told them all. He had sounded genuinely sick on the phone when Lara had called him the night before to wish him well. Elias had been there when she made the call. But Brenda’s words hung in the air: The girl looked real upset about something. Elias pulled over at a scenic viewpoint, the Virgin River a brown ribbon far below. He took out the camera again. He scrolled back to the grim selfie of Lara in the Jeep at 5:17 a.m. He zoomed in on her face. It wasn’t fatigue. He saw it now, clear as the canyon walls in front of him. It was fear. The anomaly wasn’t in a photo. It was in the story itself. And Elias Thorne, the archivist, the brother, the man who had lived in a stasis of sorrow, felt a new, terrifying purpose coalesce within him. He was no longer just mourning. He was investigating.
The following days bled into one another. A smear of sun-baked rock and digital screens. Elias told his parents he needed more time to sort through things, a lie that tasted like ash. He turned her room into an incident room. He pinned the blurry diner photo to the wall. Beside it, he printed the grim selfie. He bought a large map of Zion National Park and spread it across her bed, the creases like fault lines. His first move was to test the foundation of Marcus’s alibi. It felt like a betrayal, a sickness in his gut. This was Marcus, who had helped carry Liam’s casket, whose arm had been a steadying presence on his shoulder. But Brenda’s words—”There were three of them”—had become a corrosive acid, eating away at the trust that had bound them.
He started with a phone call to a mutual friend, Chloe, who had been part of their circle back then. He kept his tone casual, a man reminiscing. “Hey, Chloe, I was just thinking about that awful week. Do you remember Marcus being super sick with the flu?”
“Oh, God, yeah,” Chloe said immediately. “He was supposed to come to my barbecue that Saturday, the 14th. He called that morning and canceled. Sounded like death. Said he’d been throwing up all night. I felt so bad for him.”
Elias’s hope for a simple contradiction died. Chloe’s memory aligned perfectly with Marcus’s story: sick in Salt Lake City, a two-hour drive north. It was plausible. Too plausible. “Right,” Elias lied, “just trying to piece that whole weekend together in my head again. It’s all a blur.”
“Don’t do that to yourself, Eli,” she said, her voice full of genuine concern. “It’s over. Let them rest.”
Let them rest. The words echoed what everyone had been telling him for four years. But rest felt impossible now. He hung up and stared at the map. If Marcus was there, he was a ghost.
He turned his attention back to the official report, which he’d obtained a copy of years ago. He read it again, this time with the eyes of a skeptic. “Vehicle, a gray Jeep Wrangler belonging to Liam Hemlock, located by friend Marcus Vance at approximately 1900 hours on Sunday, August 15th. Mr. Vance stated he became concerned after being unable to reach either party by phone all day Saturday and Sunday. He drove down from Salt Lake City on Sunday afternoon to check on them.” A full day and a half before he got worried? For a man who claimed to be Liam’s best friend, it seemed like a long time. But then, they were often out of cell range in the park. It was explainable. Everything was maddeningly explainable.
He needed something concrete. He went back to Lara’s camera, sifting through her digital life, looking for the detail he’d missed. He opened her old laptop, a ghost in the machine. He accessed her email account, for which he had the password. He searched for Marcus’s name. He found dozens of emails—friendly banter, plans for trips, links to articles. Then he narrowed the search to the month of the disappearance. He found an email chain from early August. Subject: “Subway Trip.”
Liam: Final confirmation for the 14th. Gear check Friday night. Marcus, you bringing your new rope?
Marcus: Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Rope is packed and ready. Can’t wait. I’ll make my famous trail mix, the kind with way too much chocolate.
Then an email from Marcus on Friday, August 13th, the day before the hike. Timestamp: 9:12 a.m.
Marcus: Guys, the absolute worst news. I’ve come down with something nasty. Woke up feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. There’s no way I can make the hike. I’m out. You two have an amazing time for me. Be safe.
Liam’s reply was brief: No, that sucks, man. Heal up. We’ll do a rain check.
Lara’s was the last in the chain: Oh no, Marcus. So sorry to hear that. Rest up. We’ll miss you.
It was all there. A perfect, documented alibi. Elias felt a wave of shame. He was chasing shadows, desecrating the memory of his friend out of paranoia.
He was about to close the laptop when he saw something. An email in her drafts folder, never sent. It was addressed to Chloe. The date stamp was August 13th, late afternoon, the day Marcus canceled. The subject line was empty. The body of the email contained a single, unfinished sentence: I don’t know what to do. Liam is being impossible, but it’s Marcus. I’m actually worr… The sentence just stopped. The cursor blinked at the end of the fragmented word. Worr… worried? Worrisome? Elias read it again and again. This Marcus. I’m actually worried about. Why? Why was she worried about Marcus, the sick friend in another city? The story was that she and Liam were the ones in trouble, fighting. Brenda at the diner had confirmed the bickering. But Lara’s last private thought wasn’t about her boyfriend. It was about Marcus. The shame evaporated, replaced by ice.
He needed to break the alibi. The phone call to Chloe, the emails—they could all be lies. The only way to prove Marcus wasn’t in Salt Lake City was to prove he was somewhere else. But how? After four years, his eyes fell on the diner photo again. He got up and paid the bill. Paid in cash. Cash leaves no trail. It was a dead end. Or was it? Elias’s mind raced. If Marcus had planned to be there, if he had lied about being sick, he would have had to prepare. The Subway isn’t a casual stroll. It requires gear. Marcus had told Liam he had his new rope packed. Where did he buy it? It was a wild, desperate leap. He started searching online for sporting goods and outdoor supply stores in and around the Zion area, as well as on the route from Salt Lake City. He made a list. It was long.
He started calling them one by one. A needle-in-a-haystack search that felt insane even as he did it. “Hi, I’m trying to track down a receipt for a friend for a warranty claim. It’s from four years ago. I know this is a crazy request…” He was met with polite refusals, automated systems, and sympathetic but unhelpful clerks. Store after store, he hit a wall. Their records didn’t go back that far. They couldn’t search by name. He was about to give up when he called a small, family-owned shop in Hurricane, a town about 30 minutes from Springdale. The man who answered sounded old and gruff. Elias gave his spiel. “Four years ago?” the man grumbled. “Son, I can barely remember what I sold yesterday.”
“His name was Marcus Vance,” Elias pressed, expecting nothing. “He might have bought a climbing rope. Maybe some other gear.”
“Vance,” the man said slowly. “That name sounds familiar.” Elias held his breath. “Hang on.” There was a clatter, the sound of him putting the phone down. Elias could hear the faint clicking of a keyboard in the background. The silence stretched for an eternity. “Well, I’ll be.” The old man’s voice came back on the line. “Got a transaction here. August 14th. Four years ago. Name on the credit card is Marcus Vance.”
The floor dropped out from under Elias. A credit card. Not cash. A verifiable timestamp. August 14th. “What time?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“Let’s see… 7 in the morning.” Less than two hours after Lara and Liam had been at the diner. On the day he was supposedly sick in bed in Salt Lake City, Marcus was here, near Zion, buying something.
“Sir,” Elias said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Can you please, please tell me what he bought?”
There was more clicking. “One 50-foot static rope, one compact shovel, one pair of work gloves, and one heavy-duty canvas tarp, 9-by-12-foot.”
A rope, a shovel, a tarp. The words landed like body blows. This wasn’t hiking gear. This was a burial kit. The first crack in the story had just become a chasm. The official narrative, the accident, the tragic rockfall, wasn’t just a lie. It was a cover-up. A carefully constructed scene designed to hide something infinitely more sinister. The first major, undeniable reveal of foul play, and it landed squarely at his feet. The melancholic grief that had defined Elias’s life for four years began to curdle, twisting into a new and terrifying shape: horror. His friend hadn’t just lied. He had come prepared to dig a grave.
The hardware store receipt changed the very air Elias breathed. It was no longer thin with grief. It was thick with menace. Every shadow in Lara’s room seemed to deepen. The smiling photo of Marcus on her wall felt like a leering threat. The question was no longer if something terrible had happened, but how deep the deception went. A shovel and a tarp. The rockfall. The official story had been a natural event, a tragic act of God. But with this new knowledge, it felt engineered. Did Marcus cause it? Did he follow them into the canyon and, under the cover of a storm, trigger a slide? It was monstrous to contemplate, but the items on that receipt screamed premeditation.
Paranoia, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness. He started locking the door to Lara’s room. When his phone rang, he would flinch, his heart seizing in his chest. He felt watched even in the silent, empty house. The inevitable call from Marcus came two days later. “Eli, just checking in. You’ve been radio silent. Everything all right?” Marcus’s voice was the same as always: calm, concerned, familiar. But now Elias heard a discordant note beneath it, a chilling dissonance. Every word felt calculated.
“I’m fine,” Elias said, his own voice sounding alien and brittle to his ears. “Just going through a lot of old stuff. It’s harder than I thought.”
“I get it. Hey, I was thinking of driving down this weekend. Maybe we could grab a beer. Get your mind off things. For old times’ sake.”
The offer was a splash of ice water. He wanted to come here, to this house, to this room. Was he suspicious? Did he sense the ground shifting beneath his carefully constructed lie? “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Elias said, more forcefully than he intended. “I’m not really up for company.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. For the first time, Elias detected a flicker of something other than friendly concern in the silence. It sounded like appraisal. “Man, no worries. Just know I’m here for you,” Marcus said, his tone smoothing back over into its usual warmth. “Call me if you change your mind.”
He hung up. Elias’s hand was shaking so badly he dropped the phone on the bed. He had to get out. He grabbed the park map and his car keys and fled the house. He drove back into Zion, needing to see the landscape, not as a backdrop for his sorrow, but as a crime scene. He spread the map across the hood of his car at a turnout overlooking the winding road. The official report said the bodies were found in Section 7 of The Subway, a notoriously narrow and technical part of the route known as “The Bowling Alley.” The rockfall there was massive, attributed to the flash flood that had torn through the canyon that day. He traced the route with his finger. It all made sense on paper: a storm, a flood, unstable rock, a perfect tragic accident. But Marcus had bought a shovel. People don’t use a shovel to start a rockfall. They use a shovel to move earth, to dig, to bury. His mind snagged on a detail from the retired park ranger he’d spoken to years ago. The ranger had mentioned how lucky it was they were found at all, that the shifting rock and debris from subsequent floods could have easily buried them forever. The discovery had been a fluke. A fluke? Or was the location itself a lie?
He folded the map and drove to the home of the retired ranger, a man named Dave Holloway. Holloway lived in a small cabin in Rockville, his porch filled with wind chimes that made no sound in the still, hot air. He was old, with skin like tanned leather and eyes that had seen too much of the park’s casual cruelty. “Thorne,” he said, recognizing Elias immediately. “Didn’t expect to see you again. I heard they finally brought your sister home.”
“They did,” Elias said. “I had some questions about the recovery, about the location.”
Holloway sighed, motioning him to a wicker chair. “It was a bad spot. Nasty rockfall. The crew that found them were damn lucky to have even seen the remains, tucked way back in a crevice behind a mountain of scree.”
“Did it look natural?” Elias asked.
Holloway gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean, natural? Of course it was natural. We had a historic flash flood that day. Washed out half the canyon. That rockfall was a hundred tons of sandstone. Not something a man does.”
Elias knew he was right. A shovel and a tarp couldn’t create a rock slide of that magnitude. He felt his theory crumbling. What was the shovel for? “Did you know my sister and Liam well?” Elias asked, changing tack.
“Saw them around. They were good kids. Knew the park. Liam was a bit of a geology nut. I remember that. Always tapping on rocks, talking about strata and sediment.”
Geology nut. The phrase snagged in Elias’s brain. Liam knew rocks. He knew unstable formations. Would he have chosen to shelter in a place prone to rockfalls? It seemed like the last place an amateur geologist would hide from a storm. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Holloway,” Elias said, standing to leave. His head was spinning. The shovel, the tarp, it didn’t fit with the massive natural rock slide.
Back in her room, he stared at her belongings, desperate for another clue. His eyes landed on her journals. He’d read them before, but in his grief, the words had been a blur of emotion. Now he read them for data. He flipped through the last volume, the pages filled with her graceful, looping script. It was mostly observations about photography, sketches of rock formations, feelings about her art, and feelings about Liam. Their relationship had been passionate but volatile. There were entries detailing arguments, frustrations: Liam’s fire is what I love, but sometimes I feel like I’m going to get burned. It supported the story of them fighting at the diner.
He was about to put the journal down when a page from a few weeks before the trip caught his eye. Showed Liam the Echo Chamber today. He was blown away. He said it was the most geologically stable formation he’d ever seen off-trail. A perfect little pocket carved out of the oldest Navajo sandstone. I love that we have a secret place. Our place. He says it’s our fortress. Safe from anything the canyon could throw at us.
The Echo Chamber. A secret spot. A fortress. Geologically stable. Elias’s blood ran cold. He tore through the rest of the journal, his hands trembling. He found one more mention just two days before they left. Feeling anxious about the hike. Liam is on edge again. I almost wish we could just skip the Subway and spend the day in the Echo Chamber. Just us. It wasn’t on any map. It was their secret. A place Liam, the geology nut, had deemed perfectly safe—the opposite of the place where they were found. A horrifying new theory began to form, piece by agonizing piece. The rockfall where they were found? What if it was a decoy, a scene? The shovel and the tarp weren’t for causing the slide. They were for something else. Something after. What if they never sheltered there at all? What if they went to the one place they knew was safe? Their fortress, the Echo Chamber. And what if Marcus knew about it? He scoured the journal for any mention of Marcus in relation to their secret spot. He found nothing. But Marcus was Liam’s best friend. Best friends share secrets.
The dawning horror was no longer a suspicion. It was a certainty, a monstrous shape taking form in the dark. The official story was a fabrication. The rockfall was a red herring. And the shovel… the shovel wasn’t for burying them. Elias looked at the map, then back at the journal entry. Lara had included a small, rough sketch: a distinctive bend in the river, a stand of three juniper trees, and a marking for a fissure in the rock wall, nearly invisible. He knew what he had to do. He couldn’t go to the police with this. A dead girl’s diary and a hardware store receipt from four years ago? They would think he was a grieving brother driven mad by sorrow. He had to go himself. He had to find the Echo Chamber.
He packed a small bag: water, a headlamp, the journal. Before he left, he sat at the desk and wrote a short, simple note. He addressed it to Dave Holloway, the retired ranger. He wrote down everything he had discovered: the third person at the diner, the hardware store receipt, the journal entry about the Echo Chamber, his suspicion of Marcus. He sealed it in an envelope and wrote on the front: Mr. Holloway, if I’m not back in 24 hours, please give this to the sheriff. And please, check on Marcus Vance. He left the note on his pillow. A final, desperate contingency. Then he walked out of the house and drove toward the canyon, the setting sun painting the towering cliffs in shades of blood and fire. He was walking into the heart of his sister’s murder, and he knew with chilling certainty that he might not be walking out.
The hike was a descent into a different world. Elias parked at the designated trailhead and set off, not along the permitted route, but on a parallel path along the canyon rim, following the crude map from Lara’s journal. The air grew cool as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the canyon filled with purple shadows. The silence was absolute, broken only by the crunch of his boots on the gravel and the frantic thumping of his own heart. He found the stand of three juniper trees, their gnarled branches like arthritic fingers pointing toward the cliff face. He scanned the wall of rock, a sheer, monolithic surface. It looked impenetrable. He almost turned back, thinking he’d made a terrible mistake. Then his headlamp caught it. A vertical crack no wider than his shoulders, masked by overgrown desert brush. It was exactly as sketched. He pushed through the scrub, his heart hammering against his ribs, and slipped into the fissure. The passage was narrow and dark, the rock cool against his skin. It opened up after about 20 feet into a small, circular cavern. A perfect dome. The Echo Chamber. It smelled of dust and ancient stone. He swept his headlamp beam across the floor. There was a scattering of weathered gear, a rusted canteen, and a small, faded orange bag he recognized as Liam’s. And then, in the center of the chamber, his headlamp fell on the most horrifying sight of all. It was a shallow, freshly dug hole. The soil was loose, darker than the surrounding rock. It was exactly the size of a grave. Elias froze, a scream caught in his throat.
The shovel. He had assumed it was for them. For Lara and Liam. But what if it wasn’t? He took a tentative step toward the hole. His sister’s journal. A secret fortress. A place of safety. What if Lara and Liam had never made it to the Echo Chamber? What if they had been intercepted on the trail? What if the rockfall site was the decoy, and the real crime scene was meant to be here, in their secret sanctuary? He heard a sound behind him, a small scrape of a boot on rock, and he spun around, his headlamp beam cutting a frantic swath through the dark.
A figure stood silhouetted in the narrow fissure behind him. A man with dark hair. “I knew you couldn’t leave it alone, Elias,” Marcus said, his voice calm, chillingly so, in the perfect stillness of the chamber. Elias’s mind raced. He was here. He was always here. The emails, the phone calls, the concern, all of it a lie. Marcus took a step forward, his shadow swallowing the light from the entrance. The gleam of something metallic caught the light—a knife. “I’m sorry, man,” Marcus said, his voice devoid of any real emotion. “I really am. But you were getting too close. We can’t have you digging up old graves.”
We. The word hit Elias with the force of a physical blow. “We?”
Marcus stepped fully into the beam of light, and Elias saw the chilling, cold truth in his eyes. A truth that had been hiding in plain sight for four years. Marcus hadn’t acted alone. And the shovel… the shovel wasn’t for digging a grave. It was for something else entirely. Marcus was here to ensure Elias’s silence, to complete a job that had been left unfinished. The Echo Chamber, a fortress of love and safety, was about to become a tomb. Elias backed away from the freshly dug grave, his hand reaching for the rock wall behind him, desperate for any escape from the man who had pretended to mourn with him for four long, terrifying years. The lie of Zion wasn’t a tragic accident. It was a betrayal. And Elias, the grieving brother, was standing in the very heart of it.
