25. Hannah
HANNAH
The truck stops where the road runs out of gravel and the mountain starts in earnest. I'm down on the verge before Alaric has the engine off, crouched over the bloodroot that grows thick along the ditch.
Someone's been at it. The stems are sheared clean, the cuts still weeping rust-red, and the boot prints pressed into the wet ground beside them are new — four sets, maybe five, all angled downhill toward the black mouth of the main adit.
"They've already gone in," Alaric says.
"How far ahead?"
"Not far. The sap hasn't even browned." He touches a cut stem and his fingertip comes away red and sizzling. "Within the hour."
Headlights wash through the trees behind us. A county cruiser climbs the last of the road and stops, and Sheriff Holloway, Ben, gets out slow, one hand resting near his belt.
"Hannah." He names me like he's making sure. "You want to explain the three trucks with downstate plates parked off the fire road? And the men in my woods carrying rifles they're calling survey gear?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me with the part I will." He thumbs his flashlight on and runs it across the cut bloodroot, the churned ground, Alaric standing quiet. His attention holds there for too long. "Elspeth send you up here before she passed?"
"In a manner of speaking."
That's enough for him. Whatever he makes of Alaric, whatever he doesn't understand yet, the name does the work. He knew her. Half the county did.
"They told the clerk they're a historical society," he says. "Historians don't cut a padlock."
"No. They don't."
He crouches across from me and spreads a map over his knee — old paper, the county seal faded to a ghost. "My granddad's. He surveyed these workings before they sealed them. Pulled it when the new trucks showed." He taps a second map, a glossy county print, laid beside it.
I look between them. It takes a moment, and then it's plain. The old map has a road the new one doesn't — a thin spur breaking off below the main adit, curving east along the slope before the paper crease swallows it.
"That road's gone," Ben says. "Not collapsed. Gone. Somebody scrubbed it off when they redrew the county. You don't lose a road by accident."
"No," I say. "You lose it on purpose."
And then I see the mark. It's small, inked in the margin beside that vanished spur — three short strokes and a fourth off on its own, scored a shade deeper.
My pulse goes loud. I've seen it on the door of the old church annex, under the eave of a barn, carved into a post we found before. Elspeth's hand. Her counting.
"Sheriff. Who marked your grandfather's map?"
He frowns at the margin. "That's not — huh. I always took that for a fold guide."
"It's not. It's hers. She was on this map before anyone."
Alaric leans in to look, and stops moving entirely — too still, the way he gets when something underground reaches him before it reaches us. He catches himself fast and straightens. "Engine," he says, mildly. "Down the slope. Idling."
Ben's head comes up. "I don't hear an engine."
"You will."
I'm already counting it through. Three strokes and a fourth apart. Three workings any map will give you — the main adit, the upper air shaft, the haulage cut. And a fourth, set apart, that no map will. The fourth way. The one Lily said about the sons in the song.
"It's not the entrance they want," I say, and I stand, because I'm sure of it now and being sure is its own kind of standing. "Nathan's people went down the adit because it's the only door their maps gave them. But Elspeth never counted the front one. She counted the one that drains."
Ben rises with me. "Drains where?"
"There." I point east, past the cut bloodroot, to where the laurel grows in a line too straight to be wild.
"Old workings flood. Every one of them needs a way to bleed the water off, low and out of sight.
An ore spur, an exit nobody bothered to seal because nobody remembered it.
That's where she'd put something. Not behind the obvious door. Past the one that drains."
"Hannah." Alaric's voice drops — the worry rising under it. "If you're right, that's exactly where they'll come up when the adit dead-ends on them. You'd be walking toward four armed men."
He's not wrong, and for a breath I watch him want to finish the thought, want to put himself between me and end the argument with his body. He stops himself because he remembers what we said to each other — that I get to stand in this, not behind it. His hand opens at his side.
"Then we move before they do," I say, gentle, because I understand what he just gave me.
Ben's reading something he can't fully see. "If we go off the marked workings, I'm not radioing this in. Two of you and me against four rifles, in tunnels I can't map—"
"You can map this one." I crouch back to his grandfather's paper and trace the vanished spur, off the crease, to where the old man's pencil ghosted a small square. "He drew the outflow. Right here. Your granddad knew about the fourth way too." Ben stares at the square.
We gather everything and move fast. The laurel line gives onto a cut bank, and the timbers begin where the brush thins — pit props, gray and split with age, leaning out of the hillside like the ribs of something long dead.
I run my light along them. On the third post, low, where a careless eye skims past, the bark's been shaved and the wood beneath scored with my grandma's symbol
"She marked the way in," I breathe.
I clear the moss above the fourth stroke with my thumb, and the wood under it is pale and raw. Somebody else scraped here, recently, and got the count wrong — cleared the three and missed the fourth. They read part of her and not the rest.
A sound carries up out of the dark below us. Metal on stone, then metal on metal — a chain, dropping somewhere deeper in.
Ben's flashlight finds the old gate twenty feet down the spur, hanging open on a sheared hasp. He goes to it, touches the bright cut edge, and his face changes.
"That's cut from the inside," he says quietly. "Somebody came up to open it."
Below us, deep in the throat of the fourth way, a lantern swings — once, slow, where no honest light should be. I switch mine off.
"Then we already know the way," I whisper. "We just have to reach it before they figure it out."