WITH THE LIGHTS OUT

CHAPTER 1

June

Mexico is boiling. Sat on the old, dusty bus with its barely working air conditioning June can see the compressed air motes and heat distortion outside her window. The dirt track the vehicle bumps along seems to ripple.

June shifts in her seat uncomfortably as the bus driver turns up the cheerful, tinny music on the radio. Her shirt is sweaty and the backs of her thighs are stuck to the tattered leather seat.

They are half way between Oaxaca and Acapulco on the coast, though there is no hint of a sea breeze. Most of the people on the bus with her are poor villagers. A man opposite her sits with a hen on his lap, which clucks sleepily every now and then. Though the villagers have another four hours of travelling before they reach the nearest city, June has instructed the driver to drop her in the next twenty miles, just on the outskirts of the jungle. They have not seen any signs of civilization in a while, but June doesn't let the wilderness bother her. She is well prepared.

She goes through her belongings in her bag one more time. Camping equipment. Enough water to last for a week. A harness, carabiners and climbing ropes. Food. The pack is bigger than she is; she'd barely squished it through the door getting onto the bus.

Slung round her neck is an expensive, state-of-the-art camera. She raises it experimentally and snaps a picture of a spider monkey swinging in among the trees that fringe the road. Sunlight filters down blindingly white. When she checks the digital screen, the image comes out plain as day.

The bus pulls to a halt with an abrupt jolt and the driver looks over his shoulder at her expectantly. He jerks his head to the door.

June gets up and clumsily manoeuvres herself down the aisle and off the bus. Nobody looks up or shows a flicker of interest in her departure. They're probably too hot to care.

She coughs as the bus immediately moves off again with a burst of putrid petrol fumes. It leaves a thick cloud of dust in its wake, and she quickly checks her map. She'll have to walk twenty miles by nightfall to stay on schedule, and she knows that's not going to be easy in a jungle like this one. The thick foliage can easily obscure any view of the sun and the undergrowth on the ground would often be equally as dense.

June stares up at the immense wall of jungle in front of her for a moment – is it just her or is it too quiet, as if the forest itself is holding its breath? Deciding not to think about it too much, she hitches her bag straps further up her shoulders, and plunges in. Everything is a bright, jewel green and the air is hotter than an oven. Mosquitos and other small bugs hover low to the ground and June quickly finds herself covered in tiny midge bites – red welts all over her exposed forearms. She ties a knotted handkerchief round her neck to protect her exposed throat. The sun is spun out – bright and clear – overhead.

On the first night she makes her camp in a small clearing, exhausted but pleased. She's trekked the twenty miles she intended and uses her satellite phone to radio in to a friend tracking her progress in Mexico City. She can only use the radio sparingly, to save the battery. Still, it's comforting to hear another human voice. The air is so close here it feels like someone is listening to her. Waiting. She'd be lying if she says the jungle is not unnerving; that the hairs on her arms don't prickle with the buzzing silence.

It's a stupid feeling, but June still tries to make as much noise as possible as she makes her dinner. She crawls into her tent before night fully falls, arranging her mosquito net around herself. It's too hot to even bother with a blanket so she curls up on top of her sleeping mat in her underwear and fishes round in her sack for an object covered in a rich, thick cloth. She unravels the material carefully, using a torch to illuminate a small idol made of clay. Features have been painted onto the doll-like pottery, and red eyes like pin pricks stare up at her. They'd speculated when June's team had excavated the funeral chamber of the temple she was heading for that they might find the incinerated remains of several pre-Aztec leaders. So far they had found nothing, but June was sure this proved that there was something they had missed. This idol represented someone important – someone who had been worshipped. And that someone was human, judging by the tiny breasts that had been etched on. A women.

The next two days the ground in the jungle steadily rises, and June finds it more and more difficult to make progress. The air is more humid than ever and she has to be careful to ration her water supply. She talks to herself every now and then, just to hear her own voice and tracks her progress using the map and satellite phone. She reminds herself that she's done this kind of thing many times before. She's strong.

On the fifth night, unexpectedly, it rains. She has spent the evening in her tent trying to remove a stubborn tick from her leg with a pair of tweezers when she hears it.

The first drop of rain on the tent roof. Then a second. Third, and fourth. And then the deluge comes. She sleeps fitfully, and then wakes around midnight to find her tent leaking and her campsite a swamp. For the first time, panic begins to crawl up June's throat. The rain is so heavy she's spitting it when she crawls hastily out of the tent in the pitch blackness, using the torch on her helmet to pack everything up. She's already ankle deep in rain water and mud, and she trudges through the sludge, looking for higher ground to make her camp. She's exhausted, trying to step from rock to rock in an effort to keep her boots clean, but she soon slips and falls in the mud, the weight of her pack almost crushing her.

Get up. She tells herself, feeling her spirits sink – her breath escaping her in tiny gasps. The rain is so heavy it's almost a monsoon. It is so dark.

June groans and with a monumental effort pushes herself to her feet. The front of her body is covered in mud and her ankle feels twisted from falling. She squints as water pours down her face and into her eyes, trying to figure out where to go. She'd taken her contact lenses out before falling asleep and the landscape looks an indistinct blur. It feels as if she's gone blind.

The roar of the rain is so loud it sounds like thunder. She has that prickly feeling again, and barely slows to pick out a clear path as she stumbles on again through the forest. There's a feeling of almost latent panic that June struggles to push down. She forces herself to focus – she needs to get to higher ground. Get herself to some kind of shelter.

She can't stop.

The next day it continues to rain. Gone are the bright, vivid colours of the jungle and replacing it is a dull bleakness. When June looks up at the sky, all she can see is dark thunderclouds. The foliage at the jungle floor has turned into a swampy mush.

She continues to trek north, her feet snagging on roots and slipping in mud. She finally begins to use her knife to cut down the worst of the foliage in her path. When she radios her friend in New Mexico, they suggest she turns back. Try again another time.

But June isn't one for giving up. She's had worse – much worse – than this rain.

On the final morning, about fifteen miles out from her destination, the sun rises and the sky is clear. The humidity returns, turning June's damp hair to a frizz, but she couldn't care less. She spends the morning hanging her wet clothes from the boughs of trees to dry, barely restraining a grin. Is it her imagination or is the jungle less dense here? Is there more room to breathe? For the first time since the rain started, she allows herself to relax.

Until now, she has scarcely allowed herself to imagine her goal. Perhaps she's superstitious, but she feels as if to visualise it would somehow make it less real. She needs to see it with her own eyes: the pre-Aztec temple base chamber the American Archaeological Institute had discovered whilst on a dig here. A ruin older than old, with a pit of darkness inside they hadn't had the equipment to scale. The blackness had spun out below her, mesmerising, as she'd worked.

And then she'd found the figurine. The voo-doo doll thing that everyone had laughed at and agreed was weird and creepy. The figurine that had markings on that wasn't hieroglyphs. Wasn't the language of the Aztecs – Nahuatl. Something different. Something old.

June spends the rest of the morning going through her pack, trying to salvage what she can. Most of her important things had been protected in waterproof bags. The climbing ropes and her food are still fine. The camera is undamaged. Her book is a soggy mush. The only thing that concerns her is the rope itself. It's a fifty meter rope – good and sturdy. Now she's not so sure it'll be long enough. She imagines that hole - how far down she'd have to go until she reaches the bottom.

She eats lunch and stores everything back in her bag, moving on once more. She ties her greasy hair back with a handkerchief, but the strip of fabric is drenched with sweat after a mile and her contact lenses soon start to sting.

She should be excited. As she nears the top of the gradual incline she's been following for the past six days – the temple lying just beyond the ridge – June knows she should feel…elated. But instead she continues to feel vaguely unsettled. She finds herself checking over her shoulder, even when there's nothing behind her; jumping at the sound of chattering monkeys in the trees. The humidity never relented from the moment she stepped into the jungle, making the very trees feel as if they are pressing in around her. It will be a relief to get to open, clear ground.

She reaches the brow of the hill and her heart constricts. The temple lies in front of her – a ruin eaten up by moss and trees and partly dug up out of the earth. Thousands and thousands of years old. Their technology hadn't been able to precisely date any of the artefacts they'd excavated but this place was older than even the Aztecs. It was a miracle parts of the temple remained at all.

Technically – technically –she should not have returned here, alone. She had been part of the team to excavate it, but authorisation for site access lay with the Mexican government and her boss at the American Archaeological Institute. She'd received clearance from the government, but not from the AAI. They'd told her that there was no need to go down there – that it would be too expensive to excavate, that they were focusing on the sacrificial chamber in the upper levels. Why would she want to go into a black pit when a wealth of findings lay above ground?

June ducked brusquely under the yellow tape that marked out the area perimeter. It felt good to stride across the parched, yellowing grass instead of having to pick her way through plants almost as tall as her. She relished in the feeling of her legs stretching.

The pit itself was behind a collapsed wall at the end of the sacrificial hall; a continuation of a tunnel unearthed in 2013. Inside, her footsteps are swallowed in the heat, like a blanket thrown over to muffle any sound. She slings her bag off her shoulder with a dull thud. This part of the hall is bathed dark with shadow – she has to use her torch on her helmet to hammer the pegs firmly into the ground – the dark mouth of the hole gaping in front of her. It occurs to June not for the first time that rappelling an unknown distance with no help probably isn't the smartest thing to do. She's a good climber, but even the best can get into difficulty when not prepared.

She brusquely tucks the figurine of the idol into her jacket and then wastes no time in shrugging into her harness, pulling on the rope to test that it's firmly attached to its anchor. Satisfied, she attaches the rappel device to her belay loop which hangs round her waist and, gripping the rope firmly in her clammy hands, leans back over the hole.

"Marco?" she asks, taking out the satellite radio and speaking into it.

There's only static on the other side, but she hadn't expected him to pick up. They're scheduled check-in was seven in the evening. Still, the crackle of the broken link is slightly unnerving. It echoes through the hall and down the pit too loudly. It makes the silence ring. "...I'm at the temple," June reports, bracing her weight on the rope. "I'm about to go down." She hesitates. Down to where? To find what, exactly? "...I'll be in touch later with my findings. Over."

She drops the radio on the ground by her bag and then, planting her feet firmly against the ledge, descends step by step into the darkness.

She tries to calculate with each step how much of the rope she has used so far. Twenty meters? Twenty five? The mouth of the pit is an opening of light above her, gradually being swallowed up by feet of earthen, rocky walls. She realises with a start half way down that there are human skulls in among the stone and dirt, cracked and brown with age. Part of the foundations, or deliberately placed there, she wonders? Though she's relatively small and nimble, it's a long descent and her arms soon hurt from carrying her weight, her elbow joints flaring with pain. She tries to keep her mind clear, but there's still the dim uneasiness she's had since starting the trip. Her foot dislodges a small piece of bone and June holds her breath as it tumbles beneath her into the abyss. She hardly dares to make a sound, waiting to hear the fragment hit the ground.

….And it does. Almost six seconds later.

June makes it about eighteen more paces down until her rope pulls taut. She tugs on it lightly to double check, but it doesn't give. She's reached the end of her rope.

The sound of her shaky breathing seems to be magnified ten times in the enclosed space. If she lets herself drop and falls too far, she could break a leg. If she lets herself drop and lands safely, she might not be able to climb back up to reach her equipment; she'd be stuck in the pit.

The air is just as hot down here as it is above ground, with no hint of a breeze – meaning that there's little chance of finding another passage out. Still, she seems to hear her name on some, non-existent wind. June, it whispers, breathing up from the abyss like an uncoiling, living monster. June.

She shivers, glancing back up at the mouth of the pit. Then she looks downwards. The torch on her helmet is weak at best, and illuminates the rocky face her feet are planted against. She thinks she can make out indistinct shapes beneath her, but it might be her imagination. It calls to her again. Whatever it is.

June.

"- just imagining things," she mutters to herself, quietly. Swallowing, June reaches to untether herself with one hand. Her fingers feel clumsy as she moves to unclip the harness. She hesitates for barely a breath, and then opens the belay loop.

She lets out a small yell as she plummets to the ground, the air instantly knocked from her lungs.

A/N Hi guys! I saw Suicide Squad this weekend and, whilst I will admit it was a flawed film in many ways, I was definitely intrigued by the relationship between June and Rick Flag. I really wish they'd explored it further and looked into their past more.

This will be an in-depth look at how the two of them fell in love, from both character's point of view.

Please remember to review!

Last Of The Lilac Wine