Chapter Thirty Nina
My elbow wedged into my own sternum, the bones there grinding against one another. Dirt seeped inward, clung to the inside of my nose and stifled the air.
Earth had a tendency to behave like water belowground. It threaded into every space, found impossible pathways, drowned its venturers.
I coughed, tried to find a remaining bit of power to push the dirt back, push it out of my lungs.
Bodies on every side of me, angular and unnatural.
The blade of an arm, or a shin, or a foot at my back and sides.
They were just more things pushing the oxygen from me, making it impossible to snatch it back in.
In the back of my mind, a thought rose, that if this is what it was to be buried alive, then it was too slow.
But there was grunting, too. Grunting and breathing and shifting. A weight lifted from beneath me and on top of me. I inhaled like my head had breached water.
“Fuck!” came a voice. John Colson’s.
Then another, Patrick’s. “The pulley,” he said. “Someone find it.”
Slowly, I became aware that the angular bones at my back were rungs. Someone shifted and grunted in exertion. The sound of screeching metal accompanied it, followed by collision.
A lighter flickered—Patrick’s, illuminating his own face, then the rest of us.
We were encased in a shaft lift, its metal cage closed, barring out clods of dirt and rock.
Patrick bore down on me, held the light so close to my face I could feel its feeble warmth.
“You’re all right,” he said, putting his hand against my sternum, reassuring me, or himself, perhaps, that my heart still beat. We were alive.
“Fuckin’ damn it,” John expelled, maneuvering himself hurriedly, his hands searching the walls. “Didn’t I say it, Pat? The struts were too far apart. Fuck.”
Polly was gasping noisily for air. Theo was struck, it seemed, by the same thing I had been just moments ago, the sensation that we weren’t dying by degrees, but somehow, miraculously, still alive.
Patrick stood upright. “Just breathe slow as you can,” he said. “Try not to talk. We only got so much oxygen.”
Immediately, Polly stopped breathing altogether.
The light petered out, and a moment later, I heard the slap of metal against metal, the chink of chains, the expelled exertion of John and Patrick as they heaved at something.
They worked mechanically, as though operating on some sort of default, lifting us upward.
Any moment, I thought. Any moment, the chains will break. They’ll lose their grip.
But we jolted upward in increments, the smell of sweat permeating the air. In the dark, I felt we could have been moving sideways, or farther down, delivering ourselves to the heart of the earth.
They worked, alternating. Pull, pull, pull, for an impossible amount of time, until long after I measured a human capable. The air grew thin. I couldn’t seem to fish enough oxygen out of it.
An almighty heave, a final shout of exertion from Patrick, from some supernatural reservoir of strength, and the lift collided—or bottomed out, it was difficult to distinguish. I felt, with a narrowing awareness, that I was only halfway there.
“All o’ you,” John panted. “Get up,” he said. “All hands.”
There were the sounds of our scrambling, the feel of a hand around my wrist, pulling it toward something, flattening my fingers against a cool metal ridge. “Dig your fingers in,” Patrick said. “Pull it apart.” And even his voice had begun to err toward a void, reduced to gasps.
“Give it all you got,” said John.
Shoulders clashed against mine, all five of us jammed together, and we worked to pry apart the doors. A memory surfaced: Patrick and I in a collapsing mine. The gate jams in a collapse, he’d said.
We’re stuck, I thought. We’ll all die here in a shared tomb.
I felt rendered useless, my body no match for the weight of the door.
But then, a whisper of something on my throat. Air, trickles of it. Then light.
Another jolt, another growl of exertion, and the doors shuddered back an inch. My hands fed all the way through and gripped the sides.
We were washed in oxygen and light, made delirious by it. I threw every ounce of weight against the door and heard the others do the same.
Like the jaws of a beast relinquishing, the doors shuddered apart, and one at a time we spilled out onto our fronts, breaths rattling, wailing through our chests.
Polly shook beside me, her ribs against my forearm. She might have been weeping or exalting.
“Till the light comes, Patty,” I thought I heard John pant out. His face marred in sweat, in mud. He slapped his son on the back twice, the two of them staring at each other, then somehow, laughing. Falling into great, chest-rattling fits.
“Can’t imagine… anything… less funny,” panted Theodore on all fours, trying and failing to stand.
“Try this one then, Teddy,” John said in response. “What d’you call a swank in a hole?”
Theodore frowned.
“A good fuckin’ start.”
Theodore stood, then leaned to touch his fingertips over my knuckles. “Cl—Nina?” he said breathlessly. “Can you stand?”
I blinked grit from my eyes, nodded, then let him pull me up. He did the same for Polly.
“Where are we?” Theo asked now, blinking out into the gray light. The pit exit loomed a short way ahead, the climb abruptly ending with that circle of merciful sun.
“Trent,” Patrick said, his eyes homing in on Theo’s hand, still wrapped around mine. “We’re in Trent.”
When last I’d ventured into Trent, it was bustling with industry, heavy convoys of wagons and steam carts packed with tree logs. The roads in and out of town clogged with farming Crafters, the landscape heavily wooded and dotted with livestock, but peppered by police.
When I pointed this out to Patrick, he said, “Nowhere to go but out.”
We came aboveground in the outskirts to find it unrecognizable.
The woods were stripped of foliage and blackened, the trunks crumpled, half their size—some fire Charmer’s doing.
Snow piled the forest floor. The cold rushed in from the distant mountains, and without the windbreakers of pine and spruce and birch, it stole my breath.
Sheep stood unperturbed, the thick wool of their coats overgrown, but there were no fences to contain them now. No Crafters to herd them.
We journeyed a road into Trent by foot, passing a boundless grave of tree stalks, the necks craning. We never passed a single soul. I reasoned that the weather was too cold, though I suspected something far more horrible.
“Razed to holy hell,” John said unnecessarily, passing a broken wagon, its bed heaped in snow. “When did the army march in?”
“Couldn’t say,” Patrick frowned, concern marring every inch of his face as he took in the surroundings. “Must be recent. I never received word before we left Kenton.”
“Aye. Well, let’s see who’s left.”
The town proper was made of wide lanes, big enough for tree logging carts. The roads were made of tar and stuck underfoot in the summer, easily ploughed in the winter, yet Trent was mired in fresh snow. Not a single set of footprints in sight.
Signs of conflict seemed stark against the white canvas of it. The brick exterior of Trent’s largest timber mill crumbled into the street. A coal bin had overturned and spilled. Most windows had buckled outward from fire.
“You think any made it to the tunnel?” John asked Patrick, kicking over a stray boot, half buried. “Maybe they’re all holed up in the next parish.”
Patrick looked doubtful. “I hope so.”
I shared his doubt. I suspected that beneath all the snow, blood stained the tar.
In the distance, toward the center of the town, a single chimney coughed into the gray sky, the only sign of life.
“There,” I said, pointing to the smoke. “You see it?”
And Patrick let out sigh of relief, nodded. “Let’s go introduce ourselves, shall we?”
“You’ll be doing no such thing,” came a voice from behind us, and I whirled to the sight of Theodore looking stricken, an arm pressed tightly around his throat, his feet slipping from beneath him.
And a woman at his back, the filleting knife in her hand poised near Theo’s ribs, resignation written all over her. “You’ll stay right where you are and go no further.”
There were voids beneath her eyes, a cracked tooth in her mouth. A bruise on her chin had yellowed her brown skin. She couldn’t have been older than thirty, though she spoke with authority. She handled the knife like she knew how to use it.
Patrick raised his hands cautiously, placatingly, but it was John who said, “Afternoon, miss.” His voice was carefully modulated, the way one would coax a spooked horse. “Before you kill us, at least let me introduce—”
“I know who you are,” she said, throat bobbing. “Your face is all over the bulletins. All over the papers. You’re the new Alchemist from Kenton Hill,” she said to Patrick, then her eyes skirted to mine. “And she’s the earth Charmer. You’re said to be workin’ for the House now.”
“We’re Union,” Patrick said immediately. “And we escaped.”
“Then you’ll surely bring the infantry after you,” the woman said, voice wobbling. She looked over one shoulder, as though she might find them marching up from between the skeletons of trees.
“Looks like they’ve been and gone,” John said. It wasn’t unkind.
The woman’s eyes glossed over. A tear fell.
“They can’t be beaten,” she said hopelessly.
“There’s too many of ’em, and their fire Charmers—” Her lips pressed together, suppressing a sob.
She sobered and pulled Theo in tighter. “We need bluff,” she said, eyes leveling Patrick’s.
It struck me how courageous she must be, to look in the eye of a man and make demands, while holding a knife to another. Completely alone.
Patrick shook his head. “There’s none to be found in the brink. The infantry took the Union’s stores.”
“Liar,” she spat. “Word is, Kenton’s keepin’ it for themselves. Fuckin’ speck of a town.” She shook her head. A lie. “The Union is done,” she said. “It’s every parish for themselves now.”