Finally, the elevator stops and the doors open.
“Goodbye, hope you have a great day. I’m off to drop Argyl at daycare.” Leah gives her husband a kiss then waves goodbye to me as she heads for public transport with her son on her hip.
Hook lifts one enormous hand in farewell and heads around the long way toward the mine’s main entrance.
Andrew and I go our usual way, toward the side doors.
And that’s when I decide I’m not going to tell my brother what I learned last night, which is unusual considering Andrew and I don’t have secrets. Except that most of what happened last night involved stories that aren’t mine to tell. The records, sure, that’s the job. But the rest of it was personal. Something I know Cayzor doesn’t tell everyone. I suspect I’m one of the few beings he’s fully opened up to about this and I need to take that trust seriously.
“So.” Andrew bumps my shoulder again, grinning, back to himself entirely. “Since when are you and the scary miner having cozy dinners?”
“Since he brought me the grid records he keeps on his personal system. He’s helping with the audit. That’s it.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s still grinning. “Be careful with those Fever Brothers, Mar. Seriously. I’ve heard bad things about them. They were banished and demoted to the worst housing on Timbur for a reason.”
“Thanks for the warning but I feel I’ve gotten to know Cayzor pretty well and I trust him. He’s someone I can work with.”
“Cayzor?”
“Oh, that’s his birth name.”
He looks at me, puzzled. “You’ve only had one dinner with him and you call him by his given name and you’re defending his family. What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. I just feel friendly towards him. We’re coworkers who get along well. And I got the schematics,” I say. “The whole pre-upgrade archive. Load histories, failure logs, everything, going back forty years. It was all sitting on Cayzor’s system, nobody ever thought to keep it after the upgrade except him.”
Andrew’s whole face lights up, the way it does when a job cracks open. “The full archive? Mar, that’s the thing we’ve been missing.” He’s already thinking, already moving. “That changes everything. We can actually work the old grid now and get this job finished faster than we thought.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Good.” He holds the side door for me. “Great. Let’s dig into it today.”
And we head into the mine, the two of us, a real lead in hand at last.
Chapter Eight
Scar
The seam on level nineteen hundred runs clean. The crystals embedded within the walls that are ready to be extracted, gleam in the darkness. I work through the tunnel, steady, looking for anything that could cause trouble. The crew’s noise comes and goes around me the way it always has and the way it always will, until the day I cannot physically do this work and must retire.
It’s good to be back in the rock with my crew. My brothers.
Last night, I lay in my bunk in my private bedroom at the compound after I came home from Mara’s quarters and I did not sleep well. Every time I closed my eyes, I could visualize an intriguing small human, the sound of her voice, and the lovely smile on her beautiful features. I went over, again and again, every word she said to me, cataloguing it like something I never wanted to let go or lose.
And I remembered every single story I told her about myself, things I’ve never told anyone else.
Why?
Cannibal sets a charge two galleries over.
Claws argues with Heavy about something, their voices booming and folding down the tunnel.
Rook tells a story to Chief, which I’ve heard four times already and it’s gotten better each time.
It’s an ordinary shift.
And then Hook stomps off the lift. He’s always the last to arrive because he checks in with a new miner he’s mentoring on another level.
“I’ve got news,” he shouts.
