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A hand on my arm. Not the hand I was expecting: Theo’s, precise and warm and sure.

“Hold up,” he told me. “You’re scaring our friends.”

I’d already dropped my hands, and the dirt stilled. In its absence, a monstrous groan resonated all around, like the hull of a ship straining against the waves.

I turned to find the men some distance behind me, perhaps twentyyards. The path between us strewn with matter. It piled in mounds, some of it threatening to reach the ceiling.

Through a gap in the wreckage, Patrick held up a lantern and looked around. Then he stared at me like I was an earthquake, a specter of disaster.

CHAPTER 31PATRICK

He got down on his belly on the incline of a black mound and counted the seconds passing as the walls settled.

They wailed for longer than they should without folding inward.Five… six… seven… eight.

Accompanying the groan was the blare of a hand-wrenched siren that only existed in his mind. A miner’s siren.Run, hurry, there’s men below the surface.He had to shake his head to dispel it.

But the walls held. The ceiling settled. A ways ahead, Nina looked back toward him, her face streaked in mud. If he’d had a talent for art, he’d have wished to freeze time to paint her, just the way she was.

Theodore had his hand on her wrist again.

“Fuckme.” Gunner was panting. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His voice trembled. He hammered a fist into the ground where he knelt.

“It’s all right,” Patrick said, his hand slapping Gunner’s back, feeling the sweat and panic that had accumulated there. “She’s held. Walls are up.”

Gunner shook regardless, Briggs beside him and Patrick in front. Three trembling fish in a barrel. The canary screeched.

“Briggs?” Patrick called, his stare still plastered to the woman with hands fit for a malevolent god. “Reckon we’re gonna need some more men.”

“You fuckin’ think so, Pat?Bloody hell.”

“Go topside. Tell Mrs. Colson to find some men with empty pockets and deaf ears to move all this dirt. We need strutters, too.”

“Three, Pat?”

Patrick thought for a moment. “Better make it four.”

“All right. Give me a minute, me fuckin’ balls got lodged somewhere near my lungs.”

“And while you’re up there,” Patrick added. “Tell my mother… that the timeline has been accelerated.”

A beat passed, and then, “By how much, Pat?”

He thought through it. Twenty yards in twenty seconds.Twenty fucking seconds.

“Tell her we’ll be there in four weeks.” Beneath the pounding adrenaline, there was hope burgeoning. Patrick grinned.

Four weeks.

“Come on, Gun,” he said now. “We need to get some timber on these walls.”

His brother was still breathing too heavily, his hands on his knees. But Gunner nodded, wiped his nose.

On his belly, Patrick slid through the spaces left between ceiling and floor, the lantern he carried now the only one that hadn’t flickered out. Water seeped through the ceiling. “Teddy,” Patrick called. “Might be a good time to use some of your Artisan shit on all this water, eh?”

Theodore looked down at him, seemingly in no hurry, and Patrick got the inkling that the Charmer rather liked seeing him crawl through mud.

In any case, Nina withdrew herself from his hold. Patrick’s jaw loosened.