The men, some ways behind in the main tunnel, were swearing. Spitting. A canary tittered lethargically.
“God almighty,” someone said. “Gas, lads!”
“Stay here!” Harland barked. “A single one of you tries to scamper away, and I’ll be comin’ to find you!”
“She’s gonna get us fuckin’killed, Kicker!”
I looked at the progress I’d made. Twenty feet, perhaps.
“We have to let the gas find its way out,” Patrick said now, breathing like there wasn’t enough oxygen to harvest. And he was right.
We breathed though the fabric of our shirts for long moments until our heads cleared some, until the air became tolerable.
“Get to work, boys,” Patrick called once our chests stopped fighting for each breath. “Kicker, get your strutters in here.”
It went on like that for some time. The men shoveled out the debris with increasing listlessness and carted it back up the shaft. Others, including John, framed the tunnel, strutting the ceiling, moving as though through molasses. They marveled as John held the beams with his mind while they were nailed into place.
I charmed the earth aside at Patrick’s instruction, burrowing deeper and deeper inward.
“We’re close,” Patrick said, hours and hours later, sweat dripping off his chin, down the column of his throat. “You got one more push left in you, Nina?”
I swallowed thickly, feeling like I was halfway filled with soot. My nostrils and eyes stung with it. I could hardly remember what the point of it all was. For what did we toil?
I resorted to pushing my hands against the rock, thinking, in a detached way, that I’d scratch a hole through it with my fingernails. My mind slackened.
The rock gave way dispassionately. My energy waned. A cloud of gas seemed to swarm me.
But when I looked up, it was not a wall of ash that bore down on me.
It was studded with something jagged and glistening. Black as ink.
The tunnel reeled. I stumbled back and crouched down, my neck sagging.
A hand came to my back—hot and familiar. Patrick. I felt his mouth suddenly on mine.
I blinked slowly, and his face swam. His eyes were sparkling. “You’ve done it!” he was saying, perhaps shaking me. I felt it moments after the fact.
A great glittering wall of black.
We looked at it, all of us, almost serenely.
Every man in the tunnel was still, silent.
A miner’s shiver. Starbursts erupting, blinding me. That hole in my chest sang, triumphant. A breathless laugh broke free. “Terranium,” I said.
“Idia’s Seam,” Patrick said.
Behind us, the canary fell off its perch and went silent forever.
CHAPTER SIXTYPATRICK
They came topside victorious.
Patrick held a bag of terranium ore, the other miners singing their songs up the shaft until the light came. By the time they funneled out into the mouth of the pit, the men were soot-painted and red-eyed. Their throats bobbed in laughter—they were drunk already on the triumph, heads full of gas.
Nina looked ill, soot hiding the blood in her cheeks. But she was smiling, too. She looked at Patrick every so often and shook her head in wonderment.
Even Harland had lost his menace. He took one of his men in a headlock and mussed his hair.
