“For how long?”
“Eight rotations.”
“Explain that,” I say.
“Mara — “
“No. Explain it.” I’ve got Lucas on my shoulder and I’m sitting on the floor of his family’s front room and I have never in my life wanted an answer more. “You’ve been carrying that thing in your shirt since I met you and it changes color, Cayzor, I’ve seen it, and every single time I’ve asked you’ve said it’s a personal crystal and every miner has one and changed the subject.”
“Every miner does have one.”
“Do they glow like that?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Cayzor.”
“No,” Chief says, from the other side of the room.
I look up.
Chief’s got his arms folded and he’s leaning against the wall, and he’s been listening to all of it, and so, I realize, turning, has everyone else. Trunk’s stopped mid-sentence. Heavy’s put his cup down. Rook’s sitting forward with his elbows on his knees.
“No, they don’t,” Chief says. “Not like that.”
“Then what is it?”
And there’s this long, strange pause, and then Trunk says, quietly, “It chooses. I want to be clear, because I know how it sounds to a being who wasn’t raised here. The Illibriumchooses.”
“Chooses what?”
“Who mines it.”
“You’ve been on this mine nine months and you’ve never asked why the attunement test exists,” Chief says. It isn’t unkind.“Every being who comes to Timbur goes in that little room and a staff member holds a crystal near their hand and either it warms or it doesn’t. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember. It went blue.”
“Do you know what happens to the ones it doesn’t go blue for?”
“I assumed there was a job somewhere else. Surface work, or Admin.”
“There is. And that’s exactly what they’re told.” Chief shrugs. “But nobody’s ever explainedwhy.Not to the humans, not to the Royal Pigment, not in any Minecorp document that’s ever existed. Because the honest answer is that we don’t know either. We only know what happens if you ignore it.”
“The seam goes dull,” Heavy says. “You put an unattuned being on a working face and the crystal pulls back into the rock. Goes small and grey and worthless. It’s not a superstition, Mara, it’s on every production chart for four hundred rotations. Admin has known it since before any of us were born and they’ve never once been able to explain it, so they call it aprocessing varianceand they staff around it.”
“It’s reacting to something biological. Some field, or a resonance?”
“Maybe,” Trunk says. “That’s what the Chronos labs have said for sixty rotations. They’ve never found it.”
“We don’t use the big drills below level nine hundred,” Cayzor says. “Everyone assumes it’s a safety rule. It isn’t. It’s because the vibration makes the seamflinch.You put a heavy drill on a good face and the crystal goes dull inside a shift and stays dull for a rotation. So we do it by hand.” He turns the crystal over. “Slower. Fewer crystals per diurnal. Every efficiency consultant Minecorp has ever sent here has written a report about it and every one of those reports has been quietly filed andignored, because the beings who actually work the rock know what happens when you push.”
“You’re telling me the Illibrium gets annoyed?”
“I’m telling you it stops giving.”
“That was the whole Vaszneth plan.” I’m shifting Lucas so I can use my hands. “Phase the Margol out, put Royal Pigment crews in the mine, own the supply. That’s what he said down there —it’s too important to be left in the hands of beings who dig it with their claws.They want to run this operation with their own people.”
“Yes.”
