We worked in tandem, as we’d done in that field, him pushing the water back into the walls and me compacting the earth, stabilizing the ceiling, the timber frames groaning in relief. We moved quickly at the spearhead, the presence of those behind us nearly forgotten. Escaping into one’s medium was all-consuming. I wrapped my expanding mind in the weight and texture of the earth, and it was a relief. I did not batter Theo with questions about his attempts at redemption. I didn’t think of Polly, who had betrayed us, betrayed Kenton, or even of Patrick, who, after everything, carried my heart around in his hands. I didn’t think about his fingers on my thigh, his voice in my head.
I thought of nothing but earth.
Hours passed before we parted with Tamir at an indiscriminate fork, and I wondered how Patrick knew the way to go, how many times he’d traveled under the Trench. The tunnel opened and dried underfoot, and Patrick led the way to Hoaklin, holding a lantern. John whistled a miner’s tune happily from behind them in place of a canary. I got the sense he was at home here, where ribbons of dark distended and took shapeless forms. He spoke ahead to Patrick as though he were stretching his tongue, sinking into a language he’d longed for.
“Thirty fathoms or more here, Patty.”
“Thereabouts.”
“You need intersectin’ struts every three feet, son. These are every four.”
“They’re bearin’ just fine.”
“Get Welsh down here. Tell him to reinforce every other cross section.”
“Welsh is dead,” Patrick said tiredly. “Got buried on the south line.”
“Bullerman, then.”
“He’s in the Coal Works now,” Patrick said. “And I’ll be gettin’ no one down here anytime soon. There’s more to do at home.” There was finality in it, a trace of ire.
John clicked his tongue loudly, mockingly. “Well, now. Got it all figured, have you?”
“I do.”
John chuckled. It weaved darkly into their midst, a monster rising. “Careful, son,” he said. “Don’t overstep.” And for the first time, I heard in his voice the ghost of Patrick’s—smoky, smooth, unsettling.
I shivered.
Ahead, Patrick showed no outward reaction, though I thought I saw the expanse of his shoulders go taut, tasted a tang of violence in the air.
Or perhaps the aggression was my own. Perhaps only I felt the sting of the barb. “Overstep?” It had escaped some cage in my chest. I’d stopped on the path, turned to buck at John. “Patrick has run Kenton Hill for the past two years.” And he’d hated it. Hated every second of it. “Youwere nowhere to be seen.”
The entire party stuttered on the path.
I could hear John’s tongue rolling about in his mouth, hear it flick out and slide over his lip as though readying it. “And in that time, he found himself a bunch of swanks and let ’em run the whole fuckin’ thing into the ground.”
He was amorphous in the dark, a grunting, spitting outline, dissolving into men whose faces were indistinct, men from Scurry, my own father. He might have been any one of them.
I bypassed Polly and collided with Theo’s arm, barring me from passing. “Nina, don’t—”
“And what wereyoudoing?” I asked, my voice tripling down the fathoms. “Two years a prisoner, and there’s not a mark on you to show for it!You look like you’ve eaten three square meals a day. Less can be said for your Union members in the brink.”
“The other Union prisoners were hanged,” added Theo, now frowning in thought. “It is a wonder that you were kept alive.”
“Information,” said Polly, breaking her self-imposed silence. “The House only trades in information.”
There was the sound of a pistol hammer drawing back, the flash of steel in the lamplight, the hollow middle of a barrel pointing between us in no particular direction. “You know,” mused John, “there’s a lot I’ve endured in the last two years, caged like adogin that fuckin’ swank city.” His tone turned gravelly, as though he were spitting the words through gaps in his teeth. He came into the nimbus of the lamp. “One by one, the other prisoners swung from the gallows, but a smarter man knows how to give ’em a proper runaround. How to get inside their heads. And I won—I managed to keep myself alive. So now, I won’t be lettin’ a trio offuckin’ swanksimply that I’ve been on holiday.”
The pistol oscillated between us, but John’s gaze was for me.
The moment hovered dangerously, stretching to its limit, the recoil sure to be punishing.
Instead, the sound of Patrick’s voice filled the tunnel. It was calm. Calculating.
“There’s not a single bullet in the barrel, Dad,” he said. “Put it away.”
The gun wavered, John’s face turned terrible, then abruptly expressionless. “Just makin’ sure they were listenin’.”
