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the flowers and leaves deep into her lungs and held them as long as possible.
    “Which cave first?” she asked.
    “Ping Yah,” he said. “It is older than Tham Lod, and perhaps has the most to see. It is in the same mountain range, and they are not terribly far apart, but it is harder to get to. Then Bor Krai or Pi Man, as I think I remember how to get there. We’ll have time for at least two. Maybe a third, as it is certain the lodge has canceled my bird-show group tonight. The tourists do not want to walk through all the mud.”
    “Pity,” Luartaro said. “That’s too bad about your birding group.” His tone was evidence he did not mean the sympathy.
    Annja had heard of Tham Lod Cave even before Luartaro had looked this area up on the internet. But Ping Yah and Bor Krai were new to her.
    Although a part of her was excited at the prospect of seeing something that an average tourist never would, she couldn’t shake her worries over the mysterious sensation that niggled at her brain.
    “What?” she whispered too softly for the men to hear. “What bothers me?”
    She’d been to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which one of her companions yesterday had mentioned. It had more than three hundred miles of tunnels, and she’d walked most of them during her many visits.
    Three years earlier in California she’d explored a series of caves created in ancient times by volcanoes and earthquakes. And of course she’d been through the Carlsbad Caverns, which was famous because one of its chambers was larger than a dozen football fields.
    In France, she’d climbed through the Lascaux Cave that featured paintings that dated back about seventeen thousand years.
    Older still, by as much as fifty thousand years some scientists estimated, were the fossils of bears and other creatures found in Poland’s Dragon’s Lair.
    On the island of Capri off Italy one summer, she’d journeyed through the Blue Grotto, a four-mile-long cave with breathtaking formations.
    Her favorite cave? She thought about it a moment as the Jeep jostled along the road, which was little more than a puddle-dotted path. Perhaps the one in the Austrian Alps, Eisriesenwelt in the Tennengebirge range, one of the world’s largest ice caves. Or maybe the Pierre Saint-Martin Cave that stretched from France to Spain, one of the deepest recorded.
    In Australia for a Chasing History’s Monsters special, she’d made a side trip to the Naracoorte Caves, but found them disappointing. The caves were largely a collection of big sinkholes.
    Her trip was salvaged when she went to the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand. That had been her favorite, she decided after a few more moments of contemplation, because of the worms.
    The same way Zakkarat had poled their group along the river on a bamboo raft in Tham Lod Cave, the New Zealand guide had taken her group in a flatboat into Waitomo.
    At various points in their half-hour excursion, the guide had doused the lights. A riot of shimmering stars had appeared overhead. Except they weren’t stars; they were glowworms. Annja had counted herself fortunate that day to have seen something so unique and glorious.
    She continued to run the names of caves through her head—ones she’d been to, ones she had no intention of visiting and ones she would like to see while she was still young. She couldn’t recall the name of the cave system in China that was perhaps the longest in the world. That was on her must-see list.
    The mental activity was a reasonable distraction to keep the chill away. She’d gotten goose bumps again the minute she’d sat in Zakkarat’s Jeep, and the sensation of ants crawling on her skin had worsened as they’d headed down the road.
    It wasn’t the rain and the cool breeze that came with it. The sensation was from something else. Maybe, she wondered, the ill feeling had nothing to do with the limestone caves or the spirits of the dead that had been interred in the teak coffins, but instead about their