“How much longer?” he asked, for the third time in the last ten minutes.

They would have called it nagging if he had looked as though he remembered the last two times. If there hadn’t been that begging timbre in his voice, his eyes glassy and roving the rocky ceiling of the dead end where they would both most likely die.

It must have been easier for people trapped by cave-ins forty, fifty years ago. Before the handy devices, no larger than the palm of their hand, that could sit on the rubble-strewn floor and tell them exactly how much longer. How many hours, how many breaths before the air trapped in there with them would be too depleted to support life anymore.

Before they would start to grow drowsy, then sluggish, then everything, at last, would go dark. What were the odds of anyone digging their way down to them in the next six hours and thirty-seven minutes?

“How much longer?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just one minute and fourteen seconds ago.

In a weaker mumble each time, his eyes fluttering shut for longer, his fingers twitching with less strength. The light of that handy little device ticking down towards death barely reached as far, anoxic blue, as the crush of immovable rubble that covered everything below his waist.

“We were supposed to radio in an hour ago,” they said, skimming as little of that precious air as they could from the top of their lungs. “They’ll be looking for us by now.”

He rocked his head from side to side against the stone floor. His eyes sank shut for a longer blink, and they couldn’t decide, sitting beside him, whether to hope they would open again.

The number would leap up if he stopped breathing, after all. And if rescue had broken through the wall at that moment, it would still have been too late to save him.

“How much longer?”

Six hours and thirty-five minutes. They could almost double that, be rescued almost for certain, if they just held a hand over his mouth and nose for one of those minutes.

“Long enough,” they lied, the way a decent person would. “Just hold on.”

A decent person in the light, with enough air to share with everyone. What was it worth to be decent in the dark and die with him? They sat beside the sticky mortar of his blood holding the rubble together, and didn’t know.

“How much longer?”