Chapter Fifty-Nine Nina
Harland took a day to secure whatever boat passage could be found between Scurry and the surrounds of Kenton Hill.
In the interim, I pretended I was in some other room with Patrick, perhaps the cherry blossom room in Colson & Sons, my face pressed to Patrick’s chest for most of the day, and neither of us willing to leave the realm we’d carved.
Every so often, the need would eclipse me again, and he sated it as though helpless to resist. Sometime near midday, he laid his ear to my bare sternum and said, “It never slows.” I could feel it, too, the pounding of my heart.
“One day it’s gonna break out and make a run for it. ”
“It goes where you go,” I told him simply.
Patrick listened, enraptured, waiting for the tempo to come back down.
But I didn’t have that kind of heart. I had the kind that stampeded onward, always vigilant.
Bracing for the next blow. The blood surplus might have been armor.
It took hours for my heart to think itself safe.
When I was a child, it never did. The blood raced and raced, and I was perpetually shielded.
Children like that had hearts that grew accustomed to the quickening.
They became adults who would will let any fool in, mistaking the racing of their heart for love instead of danger.
How to consolidate that with the way Patrick made me feel safer than I’d ever been?
“Do you think there’s still a chance?” I asked him. It had taken half the day to build the courage.
“A chance at what?” he asked, his fingers skimming down my spine, back up again.
“At a life together,” I said. “At happiness.”
He sighed, his breath skittering over my skin. Why must his body fit so perfectly around mine? “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “Couldn’t say.”
“You’ll go back to Kenton Hill soon, after this business is settled?”
“I will.”
“And that’ll be it,” I said, chancing a look at him. He was looking over the crown of my head, frowning at the walls. “We’ll part ways.”
He grimaced, but didn’t argue it, either. “I need to think,” he said. “I need to talk to my brothers. To my mother.”
I shook my head. “They’d never take me back,” I said softly.
Patrick was quiet for a few moments, then said, “they might have to.”
The following day, rain sifted through a platinum-colored sky, carving networks of rivers through the slush and down into gulleys. Patrick, John, and I walked back to the rails between hills and followed the tracks into the pit.
John looked energetic. He was coaching Patrick through the personalities of each of the miners. It seemed he’d spent much of the previous day with them.
“Now Kelsey, he’s got not a single thought between the eyes and his family’s long gone.
Died years ago. He’s dependent on the bluff, in any case.
Ain’t gonna stick his neck out and risk Kicker chopping off his head.
Now, Tripp? He’s another story. Young lad, can’t get a solid read on him.
He’s listenin’ to everythin’, though. Clockin’ it.
Don’t know if it’s for Kicker’s benefit or his own.
But someone’s got his ear, you can be sure of it. ”
Patrick pulled his collar up to keep the rain off his neck. He’d given me his coat to hold over my head. Trickles of water were running off his hair and down the sides of his face. He seemed unperturbed by it, like his skin was made of something hardier. “I’ll keep an eye on him” was all he said.
The other men were waiting in the pit in their work collars and peaked caps and mud-caked boots. They had a cart already laden with pickaxes and shovels. Two were pushing it down toward the tunnel entrance.
Harland Seymour stood smoking, leaning against an overturned cart with the rest of his men. Each stood straighter when they laid eyes on Patrick and John. All except Harland.
“Mornin’,” he said on an exhale. “You Kenton boys don’t wake on the whistle?”
Patrick tsked. “We Kenton boys’ve repurposed the whistles back home.”
John lit his own cigarette. “We let the kids kick ’em round the dirt.” He chuckled at himself.
“If you’re all caught up on your beauty sleep,” Harland grunted. “Then how about a little wake-up, eh?” He pulled from his coat a flask.
“That’d better be whiskey, Kicker,” Patrick said. “ ’Cause if it’s junk you’ve cooked in the same pot you piss in, you can put it away. No dope.”
Some of the men looked suddenly stricken. “No dope?” one of them voiced.
“None,” John reiterated. “You’re goin’ down with a clear head, boys, and comin’ up just the same.”
A shiver seemed to pass through them.
“Some’d call that cruel,” Harland said with no small amount of agitation. “Puttin’ men in a hole with naught to distract ’em. You must’ve repurposed the miners in Kenton, too.”
“Some,” Patrick agreed. “Repurposed the hawkers, as well. We put ’em in the pig troughs as feed now. Thrown their vials of shit into the canals.”
Harland gazed at Patrick as though he were gazing upon a competitor in the ring. His eyes sparked with the challenge. “All right then, big man,” he said, tucking the flask back in his coat. “Don’t gotta get hysterical, if it offends you.” He gestured to the mouths of the tunnels. “Down we go.”
The shaft sank, and we jostled like swine in a stockyard, too close together. The lantern was dim enough to cast shadows over every face. Thirteen ghosts in a box.
Patrick had made sure to corral me into a corner, then stood in front of me with his hands hooked through the top of the cage. His positioning didn’t seem to go unnoticed by my uncle.
“Ain’t ever had a lady in the pit,” he said conversationally. A few of the men snickered. “She ain’t gonna faint, is she?”
The shaft clattered to its stop, and the men swayed with the shudder, their bodies long used to these mechanisms, while I stumbled into Patrick’s back.
Harland laughed.
“You’d better hope not, Kicker,” Patrick told him. “She’s your only chance of gettin’ out of here alive.”
That sobered the man instantly.
Patrick led the party down the tunnels, the path wide at first but closing as it continued.
The cart had been abandoned at the end of its tracks, the tunnel too narrow to push it farther.
They stopped when Patrick stopped, and I couldn’t tell if it was the same place he had determined before.
The walls were still bracketed by the same timber, the tunnel curved at the same angle.
Every inch looked the same to me as the last.
But Patrick stood with his fingers pressed to the dark rock as though something beyond it were whispering to him. He cocked his head at it and concentrated, the back of his neck suffused in gooseflesh.
He tapped the wall with his knuckle. “Here,” he said. Knocking at it as one knocked on a door. “Here is where we start.”
“It’s a straight shot beneath town,” said one of the men, the youngest of the group and the scrawniest by far.
He had golden-ginger hair and wore a miner’s bandanna round his neck, a smattering of freckles over his nose and green eyes.
He was considering the wall shrewdly. “A fork in any direction, and you’ll pass right under. ”
“Aye, well, that’s what my dear niece is here for, ain’t she?” said Harland. “We ain’t usin’ bangers.” Dynamite would blow the rock but ignite the gas pockets.
But those gas pockets could still erupt if a pickaxe struck flint, or if one of the idiots before me decided to light a smoke. The gas, if not avoided, could still suffocate us all.
“Off you go, swank,” Harland said, shooing me along. “Work your magic.” He rubbed his hands together—maybe to stave off the cold or his own greed—a thief at the vault’s door.
The miners stepped aside as I passed them, trepidation slowing my steps. Patrick still remained engrossed by that black rock wall and whatever he felt on the other side.
I stood as close to him as I could. “Please don’t give him any idium,” I whispered.
Patrick looked down at me, his trance broken. He grimaced. I felt Harland rearing up over my shoulder, as though he could feel his name in my mouth.
“Now, you wouldn’t be tryin’ to underhand me, would you, Nina?” he asked.
I didn’t turn. Didn’t trust my self-control. I hated the man, relation or not.
“A deal’s a deal,” Harland continued, speaking to Patrick now. “And that little boat to Kenton ain’t leavin’ the docks unless I say’s so.”
“You’ll get your dose,” said Patrick. “And then you’ll keep your end of the deal.” Patrick nodded to me, pointed to a spot on the wall, and backed away from it.
“Slow and steady, Scurry girl,” he said into my ear. “If Idia’s restin’ somewhere in here, we don’t want to wake her.”
Harland crossed his arms expectantly.
I blinked grit out of my eyes and stared ahead. I could feel the density of the earth here, trillions of particles compacted to stone. I suspected dynamite wouldn’t have rendered much of a dent.
The idium prodded at it, testing, feeling its weight in invisible hands. Feeling how unwilling it was to move. But my mind was expanding to several times its size. It could shift this weight no matter how reluctant it was. No matter how fiercely Idia guarded it.
The rock cracked, and I felt Harland flinch at my back.
Then I crumbled it to dust.
It collected in mounds at my feet and filled the air with soot. I had to lift Patrick’s coat to my mouth to keep from breathing it in. There was no hope for my eyes. They began burning immediately.
The wall opened. The smell of methane gas assaulted me. I stopped when Patrick took my shoulder. “Whoa, there,” he said.
I was already swaying.
The men, some ways behind in the main tunnel, were swearing. Spitting. A canary tittered lethargically.
“God almighty,” someone said. “Gas, lads!”
“Stay here!” Harland barked. “A single one of you tries to scamper away, and I’ll be comin’ to find you!”
“She’s gonna get us fuckin’ killed, Kicker!”
I looked at the progress I’d made. Twenty feet, perhaps.
“We have to let the gas find its way out,” Patrick said now, breathing like there wasn’t enough oxygen to harvest. And he was right.
We breathed though the fabric of our shirts for long moments until our heads cleared some, until the air became tolerable.
“Get to work, boys,” Patrick called once our chests stopped fighting for each breath. “Kicker, get your strutters in here.”
It went on like that for some time. The men shoveled out the debris with increasing listlessness and carted it back up the shaft.
Others, including John, framed the tunnel, strutting the ceiling, moving as though through molasses.
They marveled as John held the beams with his mind while they were nailed into place.
I charmed the earth aside at Patrick’s instruction, burrowing deeper and deeper inward.
“We’re close,” Patrick said, hours and hours later, sweat dripping off his chin, down the column of his throat. “You got one more push left in you, Nina?”
I swallowed thickly, feeling like I was halfway filled with soot. My nostrils and eyes stung with it. I could hardly remember what the point of it all was. For what did we toil?
I resorted to pushing my hands against the rock, thinking, in a detached way, that I’d scratch a hole through it with my fingernails. My mind slackened.
The rock gave way dispassionately. My energy waned. A cloud of gas seemed to swarm me.
But when I looked up, it was not a wall of ash that bore down on me.
It was studded with something jagged and glistening. Black as ink.
The tunnel reeled. I stumbled back and crouched down, my neck sagging.
A hand came to my back—hot and familiar. Patrick. I felt his mouth suddenly on mine.
I blinked slowly, and his face swam. His eyes were sparkling. “You’ve done it!” he was saying, perhaps shaking me. I felt it moments after the fact.
A great glittering wall of black.
We looked at it, all of us, almost serenely.
Every man in the tunnel was still, silent.
A miner’s shiver. Starbursts erupting, blinding me. That hole in my chest sang, triumphant. A breathless laugh broke free. “Terranium,” I said.
“Idia’s Seam,” Patrick said.
Behind us, the canary fell off its perch and went silent forever.