The shaft sank, and we jostled like swine in a stockyard, too close together. The lantern was dim enough to cast shadows over every face. Thirteen ghosts in a box.
Patrick had made sure to corral me into a corner, then stood in frontof me with his hands hooked through the top of the cage. His positioning didn’t seem to go unnoticed by my uncle.
“Ain’t ever had a lady in the pit,” he said conversationally. A few of the men snickered. “She ain’t gonna faint, is she?”
The shaft clattered to its stop, and the men swayed with the shudder, their bodies long used to these mechanisms, while I stumbled into Patrick’s back.
Harland laughed.
“You’d better hope not, Kicker,” Patrick told him. “She’s your only chance of gettin’ out of here alive.”
That sobered the man instantly.
Patrick led the party down the tunnels, the path wide at first but closing as it continued. The cart had been abandoned at the end of its tracks, the tunnel too narrow to push it farther. They stopped when Patrick stopped, and I couldn’t tell if it was the same place he had determined before. The walls were still bracketed by the same timber, the tunnel curved at the same angle. Every inch looked the same to me as the last.
But Patrick stood with his fingers pressed to the dark rock as though something beyond it were whispering to him. He cocked his head at it and concentrated, the back of his neck suffused in gooseflesh.
He tapped the wall with his knuckle. “Here,” he said. Knocking at it as one knocked on a door. “Here is where we start.”
“It’s a straight shot beneath town,” said one of the men, the youngest of the group and the scrawniest by far. He had golden-ginger hair and wore a miner’s bandanna round his neck, a smattering of freckles over his nose and green eyes. He was considering the wall shrewdly. “A fork in any direction, and you’ll pass right under.”
“Aye, well, that’s what my dear niece is here for, ain’t she?” said Harland. “We ain’t usin’ bangers.” Dynamite would blow the rock but ignite the gas pockets.
But those gas pockets could still erupt if a pickaxe struck flint, or if one of the idiots before me decided to light a smoke. The gas, if not avoided, could still suffocate us all.
“Off you go, swank,” Harland said, shooing me along. “Work your magic.” He rubbed his hands together—maybe to stave off the cold or his own greed—a thief at the vault’s door.
The miners stepped aside as I passed them, trepidation slowing my steps. Patrick still remained engrossed by that black rock wall and whatever he felt on the other side.
I stood as close to him as I could. “Please don’t give him any idium,” I whispered.
Patrick looked down at me, his trance broken. He grimaced. I felt Harland rearing up over my shoulder, as though he could feel his name in my mouth.
“Now, you wouldn’t be tryin’ to underhand me, would you, Nina?” he asked.
I didn’t turn. Didn’t trust my self-control. I hated the man, relation or not.
“A deal’s a deal,” Harland continued, speaking to Patrick now. “And that little boat to Kenton ain’t leavin’ the docks unless I say’s so.”
“You’ll get your dose,” said Patrick. “And then you’ll keep your end of the deal.” Patrick nodded to me, pointed to a spot on the wall, and backed away from it.
“Slow and steady, Scurry girl,” he said into my ear. “If Idia’s restin’ somewhere in here, we don’t want to wake her.”
Harland crossed his arms expectantly.
I blinked grit out of my eyes and stared ahead. I could feel the density of the earth here, trillions of particles compacted to stone. I suspected dynamite wouldn’t have rendered much of a dent.
The idium prodded at it, testing, feeling its weight in invisible hands. Feeling how unwilling it was to move. But my mind was expanding to several times its size. It could shift this weight no matter how reluctant it was. No matter how fiercely Idia guarded it.
The rock cracked, and I felt Harland flinch at my back.
Then I crumbled it to dust.
It collected in mounds at my feet and filled the air with soot. I had to lift Patrick’s coat to my mouth to keep from breathing it in. There was no hope for my eyes. They began burning immediately.
The wall opened. The smell of methane gas assaulted me. I stopped when Patrick took my shoulder. “Whoa, there,” he said.
I was already swaying.
