“I want to find the Seam,” I said with finality.
Moments later, John was struggling down off the stoop while we waited in the street. He pulled his coat around him and groaned. “Too fuckin’ early,” he said, squinting into the weak light. “Where’re we headed?”
“To the hillside,” Patrick said, rubbing the cold out of his hands. “We’ll see what there is to see.”
The rest of Scurry was slow to wake. We hardly passed a single soul as we left the town limits, back to the slope, and down into the soot-filled gullies by the crumbling hillside. It was black and pockmarked, as though it had been decimated by giant vermin eating at its sides. The exposed seams were empty now, long ago quarried by hand. Pickers, we’d called them. Those daring enough—or daft enough—to steal little specks of terranium out from under the coppers’ noses. When I was a child, I could see the glinting specks of terranium all the way from the schoolyard fence. It reflected the light in the afternoon, like the incline was made of diamond. Russel Stacker had his arm broken by a copper who’d caught him picking. Another classmate had been found with her feet sticking out of the dirt after the small cavern collapsed ontop of her. Even in my most desperate moments, the idea of picking never took my fancy. The coppers were too brutal, the risk too high. I wouldn’t have even known who to sell the terranium to.
Now, the hills were dull and ugly. The coppers didn’t bother to watch them for pickers. We walked through the deep gully, with the face of the hill leering over us, throwing us into shadow.
“Lord,” John said. “Chewed up the entire hill.” He looked into the burrows and caverns with intense interest. “Bloody hell. They’ve got some big bullocks in Scurry. Wouldn’t catch me wormin’ my way into any of these.”
But this wasn’t half the danger. The real test was fathoms below them, where the shafts led to the deep seams.
It didn’t take long before the gullies became wooden tracks, abandoned terranium carts still sitting upon them. Shovels and picks left to rust.
The main pit entrance was twice the size of any they had in Kenton Hill. I used to think of it as a kind of monster, men walking willingly into its jaws.
A chill descended that had little to do with the weather. I watched as Patrick and John grew rigid, weary, as though donning some cloak that allowed them to keep moving forward when they wanted to turn back.
The pit diverted into several different tunnels, and we took one at random. There were no lamps in the pit, no strange hats like they’d fashioned in Kenton. We moved forward with only the flame from John’s lighter.
The shaft lift groaned as though disturbed from its deep slumber, the lantern within just barely flickering to life when John touched his flame to it. It seemed to take an age to reach the bottom. Patrick and I kept our sights on each other, anchoring ourselves to something. When it seemed the shaft might be taking us into hell itself, it finally met with the bottom.
We walked the first tunnel with Patrick’s hand pressed to the walls, John and I trailing behind him.
“Well?” John said.
“Nothin’,” Patrick answered. “Not a single fuckin’ thing.”
It went on like that in the other tunnels, each shaft taking us deeper than the last, each tunnel barren and pitch-black, but yielding not a single nodfrom Patrick. No indication that any terranium lingered here. For the first time since arriving in Scurry, I began to fear that Theo had been right. That Idia’s Seam was a hopeless endeavor. Perhaps it had already been harvested without anyone realizing what it was. These mines were surely as deep as a person could reach.
By the last tunnel, dejection came swarming in. There was no terranium here. This was a fool’s errand. A treasure hunt, just as Theo had tried to tell us. And who did I think I was, that I’d be the one to uncover such a thing?
We had sunk to the deepest fathom, then taken a hand-cranked mine cart down the tunnel, where the air was horribly torrid and thick. We were in unstable earth, and I felt the warning of it all around, bearing down on me.
“Patrick, we should turn back,” I said. The fear was overwhelming now, beating in my ears. “Patrick?”
“Shh,” he said in the dark, and I couldn’t see him, but I could feel the heat of his breath. I could hear the sudden tension in his voice.
Another moment passed without word.
“Patrick?”
“There’s something here,” he said. I heard him move from one wall to the next, traveling farther in. “Something big.”
John held up the lighter, and it threw into relief the shadow of Patrick pressing his ear to the wall as though he could hear something on the other side.
“It’s distant,” Patrick said, his voice energized, refueled by something unseen. He pointed a finger to a spot on the wall as though he were placing a pin on a map “But I can feel it,” a laugh of exasperation left him. “Oh, it’s big all right,” he murmured again, hand sweeping over the earth wall.
John hooted, laughed along with him. His hand came clapping down over my shoulder. “Ha ha! Ain’t nothin’ to it then, eh? These bloody Scurry miners stopped diggin’ too soon.”
“We’ll need a canary,” Patrick was saying, pulling his arms free of his coat as though he meant to start digging right this moment. “Find someone who can listen for the gas pockets.”
“There ought to be a few good men left in this sodden town,” John said spiritedly. “How far in, Patty?”
“I couldn’t say,” Patrick mused, pulling the cap from his head, looking at the wall like it was the gate to heaven. “But it’s here, Dad. Never felt anythin’ else like it.” He seemed to come alive, his hands trembling. I knew the feeling well. I was suffused in it that very moment, the idium in my blood drumming in my veins.
“We’ll need to round up a crew, even with Nina here,” John said.
