Characters

Skot Larson is carved out of wood and wire — a wiry, athletic man of 49 who still moves with the easy stride of someone half his age. He has a full head of unruly brown hair just starting to show threads of silver at the temples, and an artist's restless energy that makes it impossible for him to stay still for long. He is the kind of man who took the 'C' out of his name just to be different.

A freelance graphic designer with a thousand brilliant ideas and a bank account that perpetually hovers just above zero, Skot chases experiences, not paychecks. He is the one who convinced Dave to try dirt biking in Moab, surfing in Costa Rica, and that terrifying motorcycle trip through the mountains of Vietnam. Their biannual thrill tours are his sacred ritual — a desperate pact against the slow, inevitable creep of middle age.

In the Colombian cave system, it is Skot's designer mind that maps the grotto, devises the breath-hold tunnel escape, and counts down the final desperate swim on three fingers. He is the accelerator. Dave is the brakes. And Buzz is the guy in the back seat asking if they're there yet.

When Buzz uploaded the footage and lit the world on fire, Skot was the quiet voice between Dave's panic and Buzz's explosion — the fulcrum, caught between his best friend's desperate need for privacy and Buzz's volcanic vision of what the story could become. He understood both of them completely, and agreed with neither. In the end, it was Skot who understood that the only way out was through.

Five years after the events at the Grotto, Skot Larson no longer exists. He lives as Angus Lowery on the windswept coast of New Zealand's South Island — painting, surfing, and living a quiet life that is not a lonely one. His art, sold under a pseudonym, is gaining a reputation for its vibrant, almost violent energy: an obsession with the interplay of brilliant light and crushing darkness. Twice a year, he vanishes from his new life to meet his old friends on a thrill tour. He is a ghost. He is a happy one.