An epic survival-thriller about four teens who get lost in the Paris catacombs for days—a gripping and propulsive story of love, danger, betrayal, and hope… even when all seems lost.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Diana Urban’s Under The Surface, which is out August 13th 2024.
Ruby is terrified to cave to her feelings for Sean and risk him crushing her heart.
Sean is pumped to spend a week with Ruby in Paris on their senior class trip, and he’ll wait however long until she’s ready to take things further.
But when Ruby’s best friend sneaks out the first night to meet a mysterious French boy, Ruby goes after her with two classmates, but caves to another temptation: attending mystery boy’s exclusive party in the Paris catacombs, the intricate web of tunnels beneath the city, home to six million long-dead Parisians. Only they never reach the party.
Underground, as something sinister chases them, they get lost in the endless maze of bones, uncovering dark secrets about the catacombs… and each other. And if they can’t find a way out, they’ll die in the dark beneath the City of Light.
Aboveground, Sean races to find the girl he loves as a media frenzy over the four missing teens begins.
Chapter 11 – Ruby
This isn’t the first time I’ve woken to the sound of screaming.
Not that you ever get used to it. Dad’s night terrors have jolted me awake ever since I was little, back when he’d feign ignorance and I’d dive‑bomb under my covers thinking some ghoul was haunting our house. Once I was older and braver, I crept down the hall to investigate and found him hunched over in bed, clutching his forehead, unable to wipe away the fat tears rolling down his cheeks fast enough.
That’s when he finally admitted the truth. After drowning his sorrows in wine, his brain would replay my mother’s death in vivid clarity until he’d wake up screaming, and no matter how hard he tried, the vicious cycle kept on cycling. It explained why he spiraled so hard whenever I came to him with my grief. There’s only so much you can buoy someone else up if you have no life raft of your own.
But Selena’s the one screaming now. I’m having a night terror and can’t open my eyes to see what’s happening—
Oh wait. My eyes are wide open.
It’s just so dark, I can’t see a damn thing.
I jolt upright and my neck cricks painfully. My head somehow wound up on Val’s abdomen, which wasn’t a particularly supportive pillow.
The screaming has silenced. Maybe I did dream it. “Selena?”
Someone knocks something over, fumbling in the darkness.
“Shut up,” Val groans. Then reality sets in. “Oh God . . .”
“What time is it?” Olivia asks.
Julien’s the only one wearing a watch. It blinks on in the dark. “Almost nine.” I’m surprised we got as much sleep as we did.
“Welp, everyone must know we’re missing—”
There it is again. A scream in the distance.
Not just a scream; a veritable shriek.
“Selena!” I scramble to my knees and dive for the lamp—at least, where I think the lamp should be—and crash into someone.
Julien grunts, and I tumble back onto cold stone, the wind knocked out of me in a whoosh as pain blooms up my shoulder where we collided.
“Are you okay?” He switches the lamp on low, filling the alcove with an eerie orange glow.
“I’m fine,” I grunt, shaking out my arm. That’ll bruise quick. I stand and loop my purse across my chest, grab a flashlight, and make for the corridor.
Julien stands and lunges for my wrist. “Hang on.”
“Why?”
“We have to pack everything—”
Another scream.
There’s no time. I try to yank myself free from Julien, but he holds firm.
“Why’s she screaming like that?” I ask as Val and Olivia groggily gather our belongings.
“I don’t know.” His wide eyes and puckered forehead say otherwise.
He’s frightened.
“Who else is down here?” I demand.
“No one! I mean, maybe other cataphiles . . .”
Selena shrieks again, and I can feel every ounce of her terror reverberate in my own chest. No nerdy urban explorer would make her react like that.
I twist from Julien’s grasp and race out into the corridor.
I can’t lose Selena all over again. Like last year when she ditched me for her shiny new drama club friends, and I stretched through that dark loneliness to snatch her back. In my desperation to latch on, I made a terrible mistake.
The worst mistake of my life, until this.
Going to Tyler’s Cinco de Mayo party made me feel like a butterfly packed in a cocoon that had fallen into a beehive. I sat alone on his couch nursing a Solo cup of fruity God‑knows‑what while Selena spread her wings, barely recognizable in a vibrant, colorful crop top and sultry eyeliner, gyrating her hips to the beat as Aliyah, Lisa, and their posse buzzed around her and Tyler played beer pong nearby. Selena had invited me, but clearly all she cared about was vying for his attention.
I wished I could ditch my comfort zone with such abandon and join her.
I wished she’d stop chasing social clout to get close to a boy.
But the fact that neither would happen made panic flutter through my chest. So I downed my drink and decided to play matchmaker, to hell with her roundabout strategy.
Mistake number one.
I bumbled over to Tyler, set on setting them up, but the music was blaring too loudly to think straight, let alone talk straight, and you can’t exactly be subtle while screaming. I turned tomato red and nearly skulked away, but he was sweet as honey, not snobbish like I’d expected, and invited me upstairs to find reprieve from the noise. In his bedroom, the postcards lining the wall above his bed distracted me from my mission. London. Paris. Tokyo. Rome.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been to all these places,” I said.
He mashed his lips together, following my orders.
“You have! Tell me about Rome. Could you just feel the history seeping from the buildings?”
“Actually, yeah.” He smiled, his words slurring a bit from drinking.
“It’s not like New York, where the historic shit’s squished between modern buildings. There, everything’s ancient.”
“Wow. What about Tokyo? I’d give my left arm to see Japan.”
His laugh lilted like wind chimes in a summer breeze. “Let’s see. There’s this pulsing energy to the city, and everything’s so clean. And there’s nothing like authentic sushi. The fish tastes fresher, more buttery . . . it’s hard to explain.”
I tipped my head back. “Ugh, you’re doing great.”
His grin widened. “And Paris?” He pointed to his Eiffel Tower postcard. “When you bite into a baguette, it’s crusty on the outside . . .” I soaked in every word as recounted his favorite foods in each city, and as I watched his energized face, I understood what made Selena swoon.
Such sharp angles. Such bright, blue eyes. Such tantalizing lips . . .
He must’ve noticed my focus shift, because suddenly he was staring at my lips, trailing a finger along my cheek.
I basically stopped breathing. I’d never been kissed before, never imagined someone like him would want to, never felt this overpowering longing that curled up my spine. I knew it was wrong to kiss the boy my best friend liked. But I wanted to know what she was so willing to stomp all over our friendship to get. So when he touched his lips to mine, I didn’t stop him. I even kissed him back.
Mistake number two.
A minute later, I got the sense to back away. But it was too late. I’d felt the way my lips parted, the way the tip of his tongue swept across mine, the way I’d clung to the back of his neck, holding him close.
Dizzy with regret and mortification, I hurtled from the room, down the stairs, and out the front door without a word to Selena, knowing how much this would hurt her, knowing if she found out from someone else, it would hurt even worse.
Mistake number three.
Tyler couldn’t keep his mouth shut, so by the time I wrote my three‑page letter begging her forgiveness, I was dead to her.
You can fuck all the way off now.
Now I’m desperate to get Selena back again, only this time I’m chasing her disembodied screams through the darkness.
Unlike last night, I’m leaving a trail. At each intersection, I tear two pages from my pocket‑sized notebook and drop a crumpled ball on dry ground before and after the turn. If nothing else, I’ll be able to find my way back to the others.
But now I can’t hear her.
Fear blooms in my chest, and I listen for signs of a struggle, of life, anything. I hear Julien and Val arguing somewhere behind me, but besides that—
A crunch over pebbles.
A footstep.
Coming from ahead.
I slink to the next intersection, cautious now. Another crunch. I look left, where a faint glow emanates down the perpendicular corridor. It blinks off. On. Off again.
Selena, maybe?
Something stops me from calling to her.
There must be a reason she stopped screaming.
I hear no music, so it’s not a cataphile—at least, not one who knows their protocol.
I crumple two pages and drop them, then follow the intermittent light. Hundreds of eyes stalk my steps—a floor‑to‑ceiling wall of skulls to the right. I swallow hard, trying not to think about the brittle crackling under my footfalls.
Bones.
Bile rises in my throat, but I press on toward that blinking orange glow until the passageway spills into a cavernous den with four intersecting passageways. The wall of skulls extends into this space to my right, their stares unyielding. The blinking light has stopped. I don’t know which corridor it came from.
I pause and wait for one of the passageways to brighten again.
None do. Or maybe I can’t tell.
With a sharp inhale, I switch off my flashlight. I don’t hear Val and Julien anymore. I don’t hear anything besides blood thundering in my ears. I’m holding my breath and can feel the ominous presence of death beside me, prickling my skin like someone’s blowing icy air under my ear, taunting me.
A light blinks on. The tunnel to the right.
Could be Selena. Could be her attacker, summoning me into a trap.
I shudder and turn on the flashlight, darting the beam around to make sure I’m alone.
I am. Unless you count the skulls.
As I creep down the right‑hand passageway, a subtle tang overtakes the corridor’s damp and dusty odor until it’s so putrid I have to cup my nose.
The light’s not blinking off anymore, and I follow the curving tunnel ahead, the stench leeching through the cracks between my fingers.
There she is.
Still as a statue.
Facing away from me.
Frizz from her dark mane haloes her head, and the way she’s standing there, deathly silent, as though she’s melding with the labyrinth’s shadows, makes a shiver curl up my spine.
“Selena?”
She gasps and spins. The motion makes her lamp flicker off. “Ruby.”
She lumbers over and clutches me tight.
Like the past ten months never happened.
I hug her back, eyes squeezed shut, hardly noticing the smell anymore, grateful, so grateful, not just that I’ve found her, but that even if only for a moment, it feels like I have my best friend back. I’m not sure what surprises me more: her reaction or mine—that I want her back.
I’ve been so angry with her for ending us over one fight, one mistake, so angry I consider her my nemesis.
She’s probably hugging me out of sheer relief, though. I’m reading too much into it.
I pull back. She’s aggressively shivering, tucking her injured arm into her chest. Even in the darkness, I can tell she’s paler than usual, her cheeks streaked with crusted mascara, her light blue cardigan caked with dirt and blood, especially her left sleeve above where she’s wrapped her arm with Julien’s gray shirt— “Your arm.” Blood has soaked through the fabric, darkening it to almost black.
“I know. It hurts—” Her lamp blinks on, then off. She jiggles it.
“Something got loose when I fell, I think.” It flashes on.
I gasp, catching sight of what’s behind her, of what she’d been staring at before, and goosebumps coat my arms like a rash.
There, nestled under a low arch, is the most grotesque sight I’ve ever seen.
