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“Two years ago,” she chuckles. “Fell down a mineshaft with Loran. Never found the bodies.”

“Why the hell are you laughing?”

“Your father’s brother was always the black sheep of the bunch.” She sips her tea. It’s still too hot for me. “Suppose it makes sense he’d be as hard to kill as a cockroach. So I’ll believe he’s dead when I see him in the Vale. Shifty bugger.” She speaks slowly, like most Reds. The lisp from the stroke is faint, but always there. “I think he left this place and took Loran with him.” The way she says it makes me know she understands there’s more beyond the mines. Perhaps she doesn’t know the whole truth, but she knows a part. Maybe my uncle and cousin aren’t dead. Maybe they left to be with the Sons.

“What of Kieran? Leanna? Dio?”

“Your sister is remarried. Lives with her husband in Gamma Township in the house of his family.”

“Gamma?” I sneer. “You let her—” I stop as soon as I see the fresh twist in my mother’s mouth. I might wear the trappings of a Gold, but I better shut the hell up about her daughter.

“She’s got two girls that look more like you than her or any Gamma I’ve ever seen. And Kieran’s well.” She smiles to herself. “You’d be right proud of him. Not the sniveling child you might remember squabbing up his chores and talking in his sleep. Man of the house. HeadTalk for the crew after Narol slipped down. Kora, his wife, died in childbirth, though. He took another a few months back.”

My poor brother.

“And what of Dio? Eo’s parents?”

“Her father is dead. Killed himself not long after you tried the same.”

My head sags. “So many deaths.”

She touches my knee. “It’s the way of it.”

“Doesn’t make it right.”

“It was a hard time after you and Eo left us. But Dio’s well. Fact, she’s upstairs.”

“Upstairs? What do you … Did she marry Kieran?”

“Aye. And she’s pregnant. I’m hoping for a girl, but with my luck it’ll be a boy who wants to dodge pitvipers and steam burns his whole life. If he’s got the choice, that is.”

“W

hat do you mean?”

“Things are tough. Changed. Mine isn’t giving the way it ought. Some of the men are whispering this corner of the world is all used up. And it makes them start fearing—what happens to the miners when there’s nothing left to mine? They’re hoping the terraforming will catch on before we run through our helium deposits.”

“Nothing will happen to you. I promise I will protect this mine. No matter what.”

“How?”

“I just will.”

“My turn.” She eyes me over her tea. “Where you been, child?”

“I … I don’t even know where to start.”

“With Eo’s death, I think.”

I flinch. My mother was always blunt. Made Kieran cry his way through his childhood. But that bluntness makes calluses out of blisters. So I owe her a reply in kind. I tell her everything, starting with the moments after Eo’s death and ending with the promise I made to the ArchGovernor.

Our tea is long gone when I finish.

“That’s quite a tale,” she says.

“Tale? It’s the truth.”

“They won’t believe you, the rest of them.”