Chapter Fifty-Five Nina
I woke the next morning in a frigid and unfamiliar room.
I recalled tangles of nightmares all evening—holes opening up in the earth and me pinwheeling into them infinitely, bracing for a shattering end that never came.
There was mercy in the sunlight touching the little window.
I turned my head to find Patrick still in that chair, his head hinged back, his mouth slack, purple eyelids unmoving. He didn’t flinch when I slipped out of bed.
I leaned down to touch a wave in his hair, to push it off his brow, and for a moment I was captured by how peaceful he looked in sleep. It was the only time there was no edge of tension on his face.
Someone had slipped a fresh newsprint beneath the door, or rather, jammed it beneath. I had to edge the door open to pry it free.
I held it up to the light, shook open the paper.
And froze at the headline.
My eyes sped over the rest, stopping at certain points, reading and rereading but not fully absorbing. Lord Theodore Shop… killed… alongside one Ms. Polly Prescott.
For an endless moment I looked down at the front page, trying to make sense of it. A train crash? Trains driven by Artisans didn’t crash. Not unless they were blown up. Not unless—
Lavnonshire, surrounded by water and swamp, came rushing to mind. Then Theo aboard that train.
There was nothing about what had caused the accident. Only that Theo and Polly, not so long ago standing beside me, were now dead.
I dropped the newsprint to the floor and left the room.
I found myself slipping out of the now-empty pub into silent streets. I followed them down a familiar route. A strange sound was welling up inside me, spilling over. A keening. I pressed a hand against my mouth and bit down on it.
Theo. Dead. Theo and Polly.
There was an empty chicken cage strewn to the side of the road, and I kicked it hard. There was a roar, and it took several seconds to realize it had come from me.
I walked until I found myself somehow back at the front door of 348 Cobbler and Brum, Row 5.
The door opened without protest.
My father remained exactly as we’d left him, and I approached with caution.
Mornings had always been easiest. Dawn brought with it a na?ve hope. The film over his eyes would be thinner. His mind pounding but clearer, the drink sitting stale in his gut. Not so far gone that it consumed his thoughts, not so fresh that it made him unreachable.
“Dad,” I whispered, and shook him once, twice. He rolled over the third time I called to him, blinked like his eyelids were made of cement.
At one point, my mother must have been taken by those eyes.
“Rose?” he murmured, like he was praying.
I shook my head. “Nina,” I said.
He looked struck for a moment, his eyes tracking over my face. And then he exhaled in a gust that I thought might cave in his chest. “Oh,” he said. “Oh… love.” He reached out to me, thin arms lifting on either side, tears shaking off the rims of his eyes.
I went into them. Like I was a girl again, savoring those only good minutes. His hands clasped over my back.
“You went and grew,” he said into my shoulder. “You grew well and strong.”
I let loose a sob that seemed to have come from my bones. I let him console me this one last time before his mind was stolen. I sat with this version of him while it lasted.
“I had to leave,” I whispered, so softly I wasn’t sure he’d hear it. Didn’t much care if he did. “I had to.” I was only twelve, and the cupboards were empty, and the wages went to the bluff, and I needed someone to look after me.
“You went and got big,” he repeated, patting me over and over, his voice fading. “Big and lovely.”
Moments later, he was asleep again, his breaths coiling into my hair, his arms slipping away to the mattress. But my forehead remained pressed to his shoulder, and I gripped the front of his shirt in my hands like I could draw sustenance from it.
I found Patrick awake when I arrived back at the pub.
I already had my boots on. I’d found a hat my mother used to wear that covered most of my hair and could be pulled low over my face. I’d changed into her clothes, too—trousers and a coat and scarf.
Patrick was standing expectantly, like he’d been awaiting the moment I walked back in. Discarded on the chair he’d vacated was the newsprint, its headline now facing down.
He took one look at me and grimaced. “I’m sorry, Scurry girl.”
I had the vague sensation that I wasn’t really there, that I was wax all the way through. I wouldn’t feel a knife if it plunged into my stomach. “You shouldn’t be,” I said. I was surprised to find that I was, once more, crying. “There was… bad blood.”
Patrick came and tipped my chin up to his. “They were allies in the end, however reluctant,” he said. “And you cared about them.”
“I—I didn’t—”
“You cared about them,” Patrick said again simply. “You don’t need to try and understand any more than that. You cared for them, and now they’re gone. Of course you should mourn them.”
This gentle permission was enough to unbolt the grief. The confusion. The guilt. How did one reconcile the deaths of those who weren’t always friends, but weren’t quite enemies?
I cried silently while Patrick simply sat there with me, waiting. Until the well seemed to empty itself and fill with something else. A restlessness. A need to do something.
“Do you want to eat?” Patrick asked me quietly around the snores of his father one room over.
“No,” I said. “I want to find the Seam.”
“It can wait a moment—”
“I want to find the Seam,” I said with finality.
Moments later, John was struggling down off the stoop while we waited in the street. He pulled his coat around him and groaned. “Too fuckin’ early,” he said, squinting into the weak light. “Where’re we headed?”
“To the hillside,” Patrick said, rubbing the cold out of his hands. “We’ll see what there is to see.”
The rest of Scurry was slow to wake. We hardly passed a single soul as we left the town limits, back to the slope, and down into the soot-filled gullies by the crumbling hillside.
It was black and pockmarked, as though it had been decimated by giant vermin eating at its sides.
The exposed seams were empty now, long ago quarried by hand.
Pickers, we’d called them. Those daring enough—or daft enough—to steal little specks of terranium out from under the coppers’ noses.
When I was a child, I could see the glinting specks of terranium all the way from the schoolyard fence.
It reflected the light in the afternoon, like the incline was made of diamond.
Russel Stacker had his arm broken by a copper who’d caught him picking.
Another classmate had been found with her feet sticking out of the dirt after the small cavern collapsed on top of her.
Even in my most desperate moments, the idea of picking never took my fancy.
The coppers were too brutal, the risk too high.
I wouldn’t have even known who to sell the terranium to.
Now, the hills were dull and ugly. The coppers didn’t bother to watch them for pickers. We walked through the deep gully, with the face of the hill leering over us, throwing us into shadow.
“Lord,” John said. “Chewed up the entire hill.” He looked into the burrows and caverns with intense interest. “Bloody hell. They’ve got some big bullocks in Scurry. Wouldn’t catch me wormin’ my way into any of these.”
But this wasn’t half the danger. The real test was fathoms below them, where the shafts led to the deep seams.
It didn’t take long before the gullies became wooden tracks, abandoned terranium carts still sitting upon them. Shovels and picks left to rust.
The main pit entrance was twice the size of any they had in Kenton Hill. I used to think of it as a kind of monster, men walking willingly into its jaws.
A chill descended that had little to do with the weather. I watched as Patrick and John grew rigid, weary, as though donning some cloak that allowed them to keep moving forward when they wanted to turn back.
The pit diverted into several different tunnels, and we took one at random. There were no lamps in the pit, no strange hats like they’d fashioned in Kenton. We moved forward with only the flame from John’s lighter.
The shaft lift groaned as though disturbed from its deep slumber, the lantern within just barely flickering to life when John touched his flame to it.
It seemed to take an age to reach the bottom.
Patrick and I kept our sights on each other, anchoring ourselves to something.
When it seemed the shaft might be taking us into hell itself, it finally met with the bottom.
We walked the first tunnel with Patrick’s hand pressed to the walls, John and I trailing behind him.
“Well?” John said.
“Nothin’,” Patrick answered. “Not a single fuckin’ thing.”
It went on like that in the other tunnels, each shaft taking us deeper than the last, each tunnel barren and pitch-black, but yielding not a single nod from Patrick.
No indication that any terranium lingered here.
For the first time since arriving in Scurry, I began to fear that Theo had been right.
That Idia’s Seam was a hopeless endeavor.
Perhaps it had already been harvested without anyone realizing what it was.
These mines were surely as deep as a person could reach.
By the last tunnel, dejection came swarming in. There was no terranium here. This was a fool’s errand. A treasure hunt, just as Theo had tried to tell us. And who did I think I was, that I’d be the one to uncover such a thing?
We had sunk to the deepest fathom, then taken a hand-cranked mine cart down the tunnel, where the air was horribly torrid and thick. We were in unstable earth, and I felt the warning of it all around, bearing down on me.
“Patrick, we should turn back,” I said. The fear was overwhelming now, beating in my ears. “Patrick?”
“Shh,” he said in the dark, and I couldn’t see him, but I could feel the heat of his breath. I could hear the sudden tension in his voice.
Another moment passed without word.
“Patrick?”
“There’s something here,” he said. I heard him move from one wall to the next, traveling farther in. “Something big.”
John held up the lighter, and it threw into relief the shadow of Patrick pressing his ear to the wall as though he could hear something on the other side.
“It’s distant,” Patrick said, his voice energized, refueled by something unseen. He pointed a finger to a spot on the wall as though he were placing a pin on a map “But I can feel it,” a laugh of exasperation left him. “Oh, it’s big all right,” he murmured again, hand sweeping over the earth wall.
John hooted, laughed along with him. His hand came clapping down over my shoulder. “Ha ha! Ain’t nothin’ to it then, eh? These bloody Scurry miners stopped diggin’ too soon.”
“We’ll need a canary,” Patrick was saying, pulling his arms free of his coat as though he meant to start digging right this moment. “Find someone who can listen for the gas pockets.”
“There ought to be a few good men left in this sodden town,” John said spiritedly. “How far in, Patty?”
“I couldn’t say,” Patrick mused, pulling the cap from his head, looking at the wall like it was the gate to heaven.
“But it’s here, Dad. Never felt anythin’ else like it.
” He seemed to come alive, his hands trembling.
I knew the feeling well. I was suffused in it that very moment, the idium in my blood drumming in my veins.
“We’ll need to round up a crew, even with Nina here,” John said.
Patrick nodded. “It’ll have to be Union boys, assuming Scurry’s got some left.”
John scoffed. “The payoff will make believers out of ‘em. They’ll be sworn in by sundown.”
Patrick nodded. “Let’s find a foreman,” he said. “If anyone can corral a team, it’ll be their foreman.”
“Twelve diggers, I reckon?” John looked around in a knowing way. “Twelve who can keep their mouths shut. Ain’t no way we’re gettin’ that ore out of the parish otherwise.”
“We’ll have to go about it carefully,” Patrick continued. “Make sure none of ’em are friendly with the coppers.”
“Shouldn’t be difficult,” John said and clapped his hand over my shoulder again. Already celebrating.
All around me, the walls spoke.