Page 59 of The Sun He Buried

“Four still in,” the captain says.

“Three are tapping,” Ketill says.

The captain’s daughter lifts her head from the healer’s shoulder. “Ozur held the last prop. He made us go first.”

“Ozur,” I say.

“Lower cutter.” The captain wipes dust across his mouth. “No family, my Dróttin.”

A man goes into the dark, and there’s no one on the other end of it to be told.

The rescue captain crawls toward the opening.

I catch the back of his harness and pull him away.

“Clear the crawl.”

He twists under my hand. “They’re alive.”

“Which is why you’ll stop feeding the roof more bodies.”

I release him and strip the knives off my belt. Steel wedges in a crawl before my shoulders do.

Ketill watches them hit the ground. “No.”

“You used that word already.”

“The Dróttin doesn’t crawl into a grave.”

I strip off my coat and hand it to him. “Every one of us mends. I’m just the hardest to kill.”

“If the roof moves again, it’ll bury you with them.”

“It will bury one man instead of six.”

Ketill’s anger goes flat and cold. He takes my coat anyway.

“Keep them out,” I tell him. “I won’t dig through fools coming the other way.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Then who stops the fools?”

His jaw works once.

“A cruel use of my competence,” he says.

“You’ve survived worse.”

He moves aside. Barely.

I go in.

The first brace scrapes the mask. The second catches my shoulder. Past it, the crawl narrows until my back drags stone and I have to turn my head to breathe.

The air tastes of dust, lamp smoke, and four people trying not to die.

Three taps sound ahead.