I pulled myself free from the gap in the rubble, my fingers scraping against stone that still held warmth from Blair's earlier Hellflame treatment.
The passage she'd widened before, the one that had saved us from the centipede's mandibles, had partially collapsed during the cave-in.
What remained was a crawlspace angled upward at roughly thirty degrees, maybe thirty-five if I was being generous about the geometry.
Not comfortable by any reasonable metric. Definitely not safe by any interpretation of that word. But it was passable if neither of us breathed too deeply or thought too hard about the several thousand tons of volcanic rock balanced precariously above our heads, held up by nothing more substantial than geological inertia and what I could only assume was the universe's dark sense of humor.
