Chapter 12 #2
“Yes, right here.” She patted the bag that she had slung across her body. There was a dull thunk. They had wrapped the tools in cloth to stop them from clinking together in the bag. That sound would be a dead giveaway that there was something afoot.
Clary glanced up at Thomas for a moment and then, with a little sigh, stood on her tiptoes, slipped her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
Thomas was taken completely by surprise, but he wasn’t about to protest this wonderful turn of events.
For a delicious moment, he wasn’t afraid, wasn’t worrying about what his parents or God would say about his actions.
He simply folded Clary against him and kissed her tenderly, savoring the softness of her lips and the way she melted fully into him.
When they pulled apart, he stood like a statue, a little stunned at what had happened.
“That was for luck,” Clary whispered, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed.
Thomas cleared his throat before speaking. Still his voice came out strange, and he had to clear it again to sound like himself. “Well, I feel very lucky now,” he said.
Clary grinned. Then they set off once again, this time moving with stealth. They made their way through the tents to the edge of the old town.
From there it was a straight run up to the mine entrance.
The only problem was that there was a lack of hiding places, and there were men on patrol.
Andrew had decided that taking the men off patrol would seem odd and might tip the spy off to there being something afoot.
So, he left the guards on duty as normal.
The only good thing about that was that they were calm, just going through the motions and not on high alert. It made it easy for Thomas and Clary to slip through.
He knew the area well and with him guiding them, Thomas steered himself and Clary to the smelter and then on. As he ran and stopped and waited, his mind whirled.
Even though Lizzy and Troy had walked him through everything he needed to do to break the elevator, Thomas was still unsure of himself.
If he got something wrong, which was always a possibility, then he might do more damage than he intended and Lizzy and Troy might take a month or longer to repair it.
“Okay, Thomas, take a deep breath,” Clary said. “You can do this.”
They made their slow way up to the mine entrance.
Once they were close enough, they waited for the guards to move off and then hurried to the deep shadows at the mine entrance.
Crouching down behind some of the mine carts, they were surely almost invisible.
Should a guard look in their direction, Thomas was pretty sure he wouldn’t see anything out of place.
Thomas took a deep breath. “Okay, this is it. The elevator is just over there.”
Clary couldn’t possibly have missed the huge tower and wheel that stood over the hole in the ground that was the entrance.
It was a natural cave, and the elevator had been specially designed to stand over the top of it.
In the beginning of the mine, they had used a simple rope system to get men in and out, but getting the ore out that same way had been painfully slow and clumsy.
That was why the elevator was so crucial to the mine’s operation.
“Are you ready?” Clary whispered.
Thomas nodded, squaring his shoulders. “Let’s get it done.”
He led the way to the elevator. The sound of the stomping of the guards told Thomas that they weren’t close. He and Clary had no trouble at all slipping into the framework of the elevator. They went right to the section that Lizzy and Troy had described to them.
From there they climbed up in the framework until they were quite high. It was a large elevator and worked on a complicated system of weights and pulleys and ropes.
“Okay, now we need to cut the third rope from the left,” Thomas said. He looked down at the pegs to which several ropes were attached.
“No, wait, first we had to turn that one handle all the way up, remember?”
Below them, the elevator shivered a little. Thomas looked around for some controls. Soon he found a bank of them down at the foot of the structure.
“I’ll go,” Clary said, heading to the ladder. “Just give me a moment.”
She climbed down the ladder … and stepped right into the arms of a waiting guard.
“All right, you!” a voice called. “Come on down. You don’t want to do anything foolish.”
Thomas groaned. That was just his luck. No, he didn’t want to do anything foolish, but his idea of it and the guards’ were two different things, he was sure.
What could he do? He needed to make the elevator unfit for duty. It had to be incapacitated, and this was his one shot, his only chance for Luke.
“Come down!” another voice called up. “Or we’ll shoot you.”
Was that Mark’s voice? Had he joined the mine guards for extra pay? “Come down right now!”
It was Mark. But the last thing Thomas could do was call him. He didn’t know what to do. All of Troy’s careful instruction leaked out of his mind.
The guards were climbing the ladder toward him. They had Clary, a hand clamped over her mouth. They would have him in a matter of moments.
Thomas said a prayer and quickly untied the various ropes that had been secured around their pegs. As he did, things began to shift and sway, and a moment later, the elevator fell.