“It goes where you go,” I told him simply.
Patrick listened, enraptured, waiting for the tempo to come back down. But I didn’t have that kind of heart. I had the kind that stampeded onward, always vigilant. Bracing for the next blow. The blood surplus might have been armor. It took hours for my heart to think itself safe. When I was a child, it never did. The blood raced and raced, and I was perpetually shielded. Children like that had hearts that grew accustomed to the quickening. They became adults who would will let any fool in, mistaking the racing of their heart for love instead of danger.
How to consolidate that with the way Patrick made me feel safer than I’d ever been?
“Do you think there’s still a chance?” I asked him. It had taken half the day to build the courage.
“A chance at what?” he asked, his fingers skimming down my spine, back up again.
“At a life together,” I said. “At happiness.”
He sighed, his breath skittering over my skin. Why must his body fit so perfectly around mine? “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “Couldn’t say.”
“You’ll go back to Kenton Hill soon, after this business is settled?”
“I will.”
“And that’ll be it,” I said, chancing a look at him. He was looking over the crown of my head, frowning at the walls. “We’ll part ways.”
He grimaced, but didn’t argue it, either. “I need to think,” he said. “I need to talk to my brothers. To my mother.”
I shook my head. “They’d never take me back,” I said softly.
Patrick was quiet for a few moments, then said, “they might have to.”
The following day, rain sifted through a platinum-colored sky, carving networks of rivers through the slush and down into gulleys. Patrick, John, and I walked back to the rails between hills and followed the tracks into the pit.
John looked energetic. He was coaching Patrick through the personalities of each of the miners. It seemed he’d spent much of the previous day with them.
“Now Kelsey, he’s got not a single thought between the eyes and his family’s long gone. Died years ago. He’s dependent on the bluff, in any case. Ain’t gonna stick his neck out and risk Kicker chopping off his head. Now, Tripp? He’s another story. Young lad, can’t get a solid read on him. He’s listenin’ to everythin’, though. Clockin’ it. Don’t know if it’s for Kicker’s benefit or his own. But someone’s got his ear, you can be sure of it.”
Patrick pulled his collar up to keep the rain off his neck. He’d given me his coat to hold over my head. Trickles of water were running off his hair and down the sides of his face. He seemed unperturbed by it, like his skin was made of something hardier. “I’ll keep an eye on him” was all he said.
The other men were waiting in the pit in their work collars and peakedcaps and mud-caked boots. They had a cart already laden with pickaxes and shovels. Two were pushing it down toward the tunnel entrance.
Harland Seymour stood smoking, leaning against an overturned cart with the rest of his men. Each stood straighter when they laid eyes on Patrick and John. All except Harland.
“Mornin’,” he said on an exhale. “You Kenton boys don’t wake on the whistle?”
Patrick tsked. “We Kenton boys’ve repurposed the whistles back home.”
John lit his own cigarette. “We let the kids kick ’em round the dirt.” He chuckled at himself.
“If you’re all caught up on your beauty sleep,” Harland grunted. “Then how about a little wake-up, eh?” He pulled from his coat a flask.
“That’d better be whiskey, Kicker,” Patrick said. “?’Cause if it’s junk you’ve cooked in the same pot you piss in, you can put it away. No dope.”
Some of the men looked suddenly stricken. “No dope?” one of them voiced.
“None,” John reiterated. “You’re goin’ down with a clear head, boys, and comin’ up just the same.”
A shiver seemed to pass through them.
“Some’d call that cruel,” Harland said with no small amount of agitation. “Puttin’ men in a hole with naught to distract ’em. You must’ve repurposed the miners in Kenton, too.”
“Some,” Patrick agreed. “Repurposed the hawkers, as well. We put ’em in the pig troughs as feed now. Thrown their vials of shit into the canals.”
Harland gazed at Patrick as though he were gazing upon a competitor in the ring. His eyes sparked with the challenge. “All right then, big man,” he said, tucking the flask back in his coat. “Don’t gotta get hysterical, if it offends you.” He gestured to the mouths of the tunnels. “Down we go.”
