“Not happening,” Heavy grouses. “My bride will not play favorites amongst the crews.”
Cannibal crosses his massive arms. “She will givemesomething extra.”
The cage rises and we pass level after level…twenty-five hundred, two thousand, the long stretches of worked-out rock left dark to regenerate. At level fifteen hundred the doors open and another crew of miners push inside. The new ones move past and go quiet when they see me. It’s the face. A young Margol near the door stares for half a beat too long at the deep scar on my cheek and then studies his own boots like they’re the most fascinating things in the Four Sectors. It is unsettling to them that I never went into the med lab to get this removed. But why would I want to make sure that no one remembers that night our compound was attacked and my parents murdered? Why make it easy for everyone to forget that happened? Let them look at me and remember. Remember until I receive justice.
Cannibal continues to discuss dessert with Rook. Trunk starts in on the manifest numbers with Hook over my head. All the miners in the lift are talking with each other now, the two crews amicably comparing work ratios.
Everyone talks except for me.
The cage continues to climb. More levels slide past, the processing floors where the raw crystal gets sorted, graded and crated for the transport runs, the long windows where you can see the whole operation laid out below like the inside of a machine. Then the noise drops away and the light goes flat and artificial. We surface into the Admin level, the ground floor of the whole mine, where the rock ends and the offices begin.
The staff cafeteria takes up the near end. Jana runs the place with an iron ladle and a soft heart, feeding lunch to the whole mine.
“There she is,” Heavy says, his voice tinged with pride.
Jana stands behind the buffet, her hair tied back, belly round under her apron, pointing two junior cooks in two different directions at once.
We all get into the long, fast-moving food line.
“You eating with the living today, or are you getting your food to-go again, so you can disappear into your fancy office?” Chief questions, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder.
And there it is.
Everyone else grabs a tray and a plate. I grab a to-go box.
“He’s going to the office,” Claws confirms. “Look at him. He’s already gone.”
“Our brother,” Heavy announces, “has an office now. With a door. That locks.”
Cannibal starts loading a plate. “Cayzor of Eighteen. Special Advisor to the Office of the CEO.” He says the title the way you’d hold something up to the light to check it for cracks. “Grytel gave him a plaque.”
“Grytel did not give me a plaque,” I grouse.
“He gave you an office.”
That part’s true, and I still don’t fully know what to do with this new situation. Two moon cycles ago the CEO of Timbur Minecorp wanted us gone, quietly and permanently, the way the Royal Pigment have always wanted my family gone. But now Grytel of Thirty-Nine knows what I know, that the real criminals worked from Chronos. And a male like that, once he sees how badly he’s been used, doesn’t take that lightly. I’ve been learning that Grytel is actually reasonably honorable, for a Royal Pigment asshole. He asked what I needed and when I told him I required access to the surveys, shipping records, years of manifests his own administration had been sitting on…he gave me a room on the Admin level and the clearance I needed. Minecorp security moved their extra equipment elsewhere and now I am installed.
My brothers think this is hilarious. The most paranoid male on Timbur, the one who kept his whole investigation in his own head because he trusted no one, was handed a sanctioned office by the very being he used to want dead.
“Does it have a window?” Heavy chuckles.
“It has a window that leads to the hallway.”
A low whistle goes down the line.
“Eat something first,” Trunk says to me, quieter, under the noise. “You need to keep your energy up.”
“I will eat when I get there,” I tell him.
And then I leave with my box of food in my hand, ready to get back to my second line of work. Each diurnal I start in the mine and then finish up my shift in the office.
I march down the main corridor, filled with other Xylan moving toward the cafeteria I just exited. I clock the exits as I cross the Admin level. Two on this hall, the lift bank behind me, the long corridor to the new transport platform ahead. I can’t switch it off and stopped trying a long time ago.
My office is at the far end, past the office dwellings, a door most beings walk by without thinking about. Inside it doesn’t look like much. A console and a wall of screens. There’s an unused second console beside mine that sits dark right now, because the female it belongs to is home in the compound with a newborn at her chest. Ines set this up herself before she went on maternity leave. She continues to send over what she digs up from the compound between feedings, and I send back what I can’t make sense of, and her tablet lights up at odd hours the way mine does.
Neither of us sleeps much. Different reasons, these days.
The rest of this research is mine. Survey maps, shipping manifests going back years, recordings, schematics, the slow patient accumulation of everything I’ve been able to learn about everyone who’s ever wished my family harm.
