Patrick shook harder now. His father, dead. His mother with a rifle at her feet.
“Why?” Patrick asked, eyes cinched shut.
“Had to,” she said again. Tess fell to her knees, pushed her face into her hands. “Lord,” she moaned. “Your brothers…”
Patrick felt a wave of nausea come over him.
“Look at me,” he said, hauling her against him for support. She coughed in a stream, panted for air in a way that frightened him.
“Just—just listen. I can fix this.”
“Lord, I didn’t mean…I had to.”
A wrenching sob left Patrick’s chest. He gripped his mother’s frame and rocked her. The ground shook. Pebbles danced around them.
Nina.
“Listen to me,” he said, though his heart had shaken free of his chest and sunk to his stomach. “Go down to the docks. Right now. You hear me? One foot in front of the other.”
She seemed to shrink in his arms. A low keening sound was coming from her. “Don’t think,” Patrick told her. “Don’t think of anything else. Just one foot in front of the other. Come on.”
He lifted both of them off the ground. He shouted the names of his brothers as loud as he could, hoping the sound would carry down those hills to the river. “Go,” Patrick told Tess, placing a hand between her shoulder blades and leading her away from the body. “Don’t think. Say nothin’. You hear me?”
She nodded continuously, like her head was trapped in the motion. With her fists clenched to her chest she moved forward, momentum carrying her, as though she was very slowly falling.
Patrick left at a sprint.
Back down the alley to the street.
But Nina was nowhere. All around, Scurry was alive and running through the street. The siren chased them onto the hills beyond. Sallow-faced mothers with wide-eyed children at their hands. Men hauling suitcases.
No Nina among them.
“Fuck,” Patrick intoned, turning in circles to catch a glimpse of her. Perhaps she’d retreated to her father’s house. Or to the hills with everyone else.
The tremble beneath his feet became a quake that shook buildings. No telling where it was coming from. But it meant she was in trouble.
“Nina!” he yelled, running toward the main square as though she was calling directly to him. People were suddenly screaming, running in the opposite direction. Then he saw what they were all running from.
The ground cleaved, separating, toppling the townspeople left in Scurry.They screamed and fled. Facades cracked and the clay tiles shook free, falling in cascades and exploding on the frost-hardened ground.
He ran like there were walls caving in around him, like the crumbling earth chased his heels and the light was just ahead. And then the ground stilled, quieted. The houses settled back on their foundations. Ahead, a cloud of dust plumed where the church had been.
He heard her cry before he saw her, tied to a post. Nina. Her head was down, hair sticking to the soot and sweat on her face.
“Nina!” he shouted. He moved faster still.
There were tear tracks over her cheeks, a tremble to her chin.
He finally reached her, ripped at the bindings around her. “Come on,” he said to his own hands, begging them to hurry.
There it was: the miner’s shiver. No canary in sight, but he could already smell the gas.
When the last binding was freed, Nina fell into his arms, barely conscious.
“We have to run,” he told her, already lifting her arm over his neck. “Listen to me, the ground is full of gas, we have to—”
Thunder roared.
