He’d been wrong on both counts.
Agony splintered through his gut, made worse by the jostle of movement as Patrick and John leveraged him on their shoulders. His feet dragged over snow, then soil, then the metal slats of a mine shaft. He heard the groan of the pulley, the music of chains, the rhythmic plink of dripping blood.
“Theo?” Nina’s voice. Ice-cold hands on his cheeks. “Theo! Don’t close your eyes.”
“It’s gone all the way through,” Patrick was saying. “A graze, I think.”
Fuck off, Colson, he wanted to tell him. But his mind was turning to swill. He couldn’t find his eyes to open them. Something heavy pressed into his stomach, and he bucked with a new onslaught of pain.
“Easy,” Patrick said to him. “Nina, keep pressure on it.”
When Theo opened his eyes he saw nothing. Just encroaching darkness. Fingers insistent at his neck. “Why did you do that?” she asked him.
But he was being swallowed. Into the earth, into some black reprieve, andhe couldn’t force the words beyond that heavy barrier. In his mind, he saw Nina’s face in Dumley’s office levitating soil, in the shadows of an Artisan theater, in the rubble of the first attack, and in his dreams every damned night.
Because I love you, he thought. He hadn’t found a way, just yet, to make it stop.
In his disorientation, Theo awoke with the surety he was in Kenton Hill, deep underground. He felt the damp earth beneath him, heard that suffocating quiet, and tried to organize the tangle of his thoughts. Where was Scottie, or Briggs? Where was Gunner, shouting at him for daring to rest? Why was he here, seated? Had he fainted again? As he had on his first descent?
But pain lanced him, spiking up his side and into his lungs, stealing his breath. “Fuck,” he groaned, and cupped his hand over his waist just above the hip bone, where a coat covered him.
“It’s all right” came not Nina’s voice, but Polly’s. Theo blinked, and her face pieced together. “Don’t sit up,” she said. “The bleeding will start again.”
He realized then that her hand was gently pressing a wadded rag over his wound.
He frowned, his eyes wanting to close again. Fuck, but it stung. “You’re not planning to sleep?”
She shook her head. “Truth be told, I’m terrified of the tunnels.”
He nodded. He was, too. He looked farther down the tunnel, to where John and Patrick were also awake, their back pressed to the walls and a lit gas lamp between them. Nina was curled onto her side, asleep.
Theo nodded in the direction of their party. “You didn’t want to be closer to the light?”
She grimaced. “It’s a little crowded down there.”
“I’ll say.”
She smiled at him wanly, then looked into her lap, shame spilling across her expression.
Theo exhaled, then winced. “You don’t need to fear them, Polly. They can hardly be rid of you, can they?”
She looked at him dubiously. “And how long does that last?” she murmured. “My usefulness runs out the moment they find Idia’s Seam or give up on the endeavor entirely.”
He scoffed. “Men like Patrick and John—my father, too—they don’t give up on things like this.”
Polly’s stare was distant. “Do you remember that drunk back in Kenton?”
“You’ll have to be a lot more specific.”
“The one who cursed at Mrs. Colson and kicked Isaiah?”
A man from Dorser came to mind. He’d been granted amnesty at Colson & Sons, just like Polly and Theo. He’d said he was a businessman, though Theo suspected he was just a criminal to whom they owed a favor. He’d gotten carried away one evening and turned cantankerous, knocking over a table, throwing his brandy onto an unsuspecting woman, screaming at Tess when she came to clear him out, then gave Patrick’s dog a firm kick in the ribs as he left.
He’d been a novice to Kenton Hill. He’d yet to understand the codes of the Colson empire, and the rest of those in the pub had watched on in quiet anticipation.
It surprised no one when Patrick downed the rest of his drink and stood, or when Gunner adjusted his belt and opened a switchblade, both of them following the Dorser man calmly out to the road.
The man ended up on his back in the middle of Main Street, his cheek slashed open and his shoulder bleeding from the puncture wound beneath.
