Velvet crawled out of the crevice. Coco peered inside. She took off her sunglasses.

“Sure is dark down there, isn’t it?” She hoped no one heard the trembling in her voice. The others pretended they didn’t. She put her glasses on Velvet. “Hold on to these for me. Don’t scratch them.”

Coco scraped, pushed, and pulled her way through the tiny opening, sucking in her stomach and holding her breath. She slid down a steep slope, sending rocks and pebbles falling with her, and dropped down, much farther than she had expected. She looked up at the sliver of light about ten feet above her head. There was no getting back up there.

“The only way out is through,” she said. Her voice echoed eerily around her.

The light disappeared briefly, and a second later Coco caught her bag. She immediately felt better.

“You all right?” Fox sent.

Coco’s hands shook as she fumbled with her Scroll. She’d had a phobia for dark and enclosed spaces ever since she was young. She and her brothers had been playing hide-and-seek, and Coco had hidden in a small cabinet under the sink. After she had waited a long time for one of them to find her, she tried to crawl out to see what had happened to Mate and Toma —but the door wouldn’t budge. It had gotten stuck, and they didn’t hear her calls for help or the pounding of her bare feet against the door as she tried to get it open. Her father eventually found her after she had begun banging on the pipes under the sink and the sound traveled down to his workshop. Later, she found out her younger brother, Mate, had looked for her in that cabinet, but he’d given up when he couldn’t open it and assumed she had run off in the middle of the game.

Coco’s Scroll lit up. “Weak signal,” the screen read. She turned on the flashlight function and light flooded the cavern. Now it wasn’t quite so dark, but the space was only a few feet across. She couldn’t tell how far along it went. It was cool and wet down there, and dust drifted down from the ceiling with the occasional pebble dropping and clattering against stone.

“Over here!” the man’s voice called. The echo bounced around her and magnified, making it difficult to pinpoint the source.

“That was a one-way trip,” Coco sent, allowing Fox to broadcast her words to Velvet and Yatsuhashi. “I’ll have to find the survivors and another exit.”

“We’ll look from outside, and make a new opening if we have to,” Fox sent.

- RWBY: After the Fall, Chapter 11