Page 45

Wet rot, peppery root, kerosene fumes, and ten bodies stuffed in a small pocket. It climbed into my nostrils and clung. The canary tittered, stressed and desperate.

I wondered if the miners shivered the same as me when they burrowed inside the earth’s crust. I wondered if they heard it hum the same dirge, cautioning the prey that clambered into its mouth. Or was it just the idium in my blood that made me hear the creaks and groans and warnings in the walls?

How did they come below each time, knowing they’d be unable to dig their way out?

My body wanted to crouch, though there was room enough to stand straight. Even Scottie, who was surely one of the tallest men I’d ever seen, stood easily. The timber rafters did not graze his head.

We stood in a narrow antechamber before the shaft. A shaft that would sink a person far deeper than they ought to go. Three dim lanterns flickered gaily, unfazed by the finite air.

They all looked to Patrick as he entered as though it were routine. He wore stained Crafter clothes, just like the rest: a cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows, suspenders, trousers, thick-soled boots.

A picture of my father in identical wear blazed to mind, limping toward me.

The shaft held three people, and it was one person too many.

I found myself between Patrick and Gunner, my shoulders pressed so closely to their chests that they could feel every quake of my body.

The shaft clanked down interminably in almost complete darkness, save for one insubstantial lantern. The air turned gaseous and torrid.

It wasn’t fear of the tunnels that made me shake.

It was pressure. To be encased by so much to which my mind connected sparked fire all over my body, down my spine.

Professor Dumley had once told me that when Artisans restrained their magic in the presence of their medium, it was a kind of starvation. That was how I felt now. Starved.

How long had it been since I’d feasted?

Gunner operated the pulley. With each grunt of exertion, sweet remnants of whiskey filtered through his pores and filled the shaft. We descended at a pace that was surely unsafe. I stumbled slightly.

Patrick caught my elbow as I fell into him.

I felt the wall of his muscles suddenly heating me.

“Just breathe,” came his voice, coiling into my ear.

He spoke more softly than I knew him to speak.

His hand slipped away from my elbow, down to my waist, and he leveraged me upright again. “Gunner won’t drop us.”

“I might,” the man rasped. “If this Charmer of yours turns traitor on us.”

Bile rose in my throat. My hand reached toward Patrick, unbidden.

“No threats, brother,” Patrick warned. “The lady and I have an agreement.”

Gunner didn’t question further. He merely cursed as the rope in his hand bit into the skin, and then finally, finally, the shaft clattered gracelessly atop solid ground, and cool air rushed in.

Theo, Briggs, and Donny awaited us, lanterns already lit, the canary cage set down before a vast wormhole channeling through the earth beyond.

Here, the ceiling was much lower. I ducked my head to exit the shaft, and Theo came to me immediately.

“Are you all right?” he asked. I’d forgotten how much he used to ask it, a habit returning. He reached for my hand and gripped it in his, pulling me through.

Patrick stared at where Theo and I connected. There was a tick along his jaw.

“You know each other,” he said to Theo rather than me. It wasn’t a question.

Theo simply nodded once. His hand tightened around mine. A signal.

Patrick’s eyes swept to me, crystalline blue, and I felt the distinct urge to pull my hand free, make it my own again.

As it was, Theo gripped it too tightly.

“Get started, boys,” Gunner intoned. He pulled buckets and timber from the shaft and into the tunnel. “Ladies first. And Teddy, do somethin’ with all these puddles, would you? I want dry boots when I walk out of here.”

“For the last time,” he said through gritted teeth, “it’s Theo.”

“Don’t sulk, Teddy. Come on, get rid of these puddles before we all catch our death.”

“You’re with me, Nina,” Patrick said. He walked past me, disappearing down the wormhole where the light couldn’t chase him.

I gave Theo a resigned look, and he returned it. It reminded me of how we’d once parted ways to attend separate classes. “Good luck,” he said, offering a quick grin.

I followed the walls slowly, my hands to either side, my heart galloping, watching as more gas bulbs ignited ahead, illuminating the path. My skirt dragged heavily through bog.

I collided with Patrick, his form suddenly there where before there’d been nothing, and I grunted, almost slipped.

“You’re clumsier than I remember,” he said, his face just visible. A deep frown lined his forehead. He knelt, upturning a square barrow with four wheels. He tied a rope to one end.

“You could have given me some warning that I’d be belowground,” I grumbled. “I would have dressed more appropriately.” Already, the skirt felt weighted. My back ached from it. The white blouse was likely ruined.

“Well, you dropped your skirt in front of me once, Nina Harrow. By all means, do it again.”

I whacked him, my hand glancing the back of his head.

“You disappoint me,” he said happily. “That deserved a closed fist, at the very least. One of these days, I’ll teach you to hit me properly.”

“Keep talkin’ and it’ll surely come to me.”

“Ah, there’s that Scurry mouth.” He tied off the rope with a flourish. “Like cornering a feral cat.”

I tasted blood when I swallowed, breathed deeply to collect myself. “You might just be the most infuriating man I’ve ever met.”

He stood, as well as a man his height could stand in close conditions. “I’m honored. And what of Teddy, son of a lord. What is he to you?”

The bloodlust lingered. “Your exact opposite.”

“Figured that much out for myself. First time he came down here, he fainted, started mumbling hymns in his sleep.”

“He’s kind. Intelligent. Well-spoken.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Patrick interjected. “I want to know why he looks at you like he’s the judge at a country fair and you’re the prize pig?”

“A pig ?”

“A steak then, if you like. Or a sponge cake.”

“I’d like not to be described as something to eat.”

“And yet,” Patrick said, looking back down the tunnel to the shapes that disentangled from the dark. “I bet that boy would take a bite.”

I shook my head. He was jumping to conclusions. “We knew each other well when we were apprentices, but we haven’t known each other since.”

Patrick waited for more.

I sighed and relented. “He broke it off with me before we graduated.”

Patrick’s eyes dipped to my mouth. Suddenly, he felt too close. “And did you love him?”

“Yes.” I shivered.

“And he you?”

“I believed he did.”

“And do you love him still?” He asked it so quietly I strained to hear. His face took on the visage of a ghost, lantern light only settling on the sharpest bones.

Breath weighted my lungs, and my feet sunk another inch. Why did all things become heavier in the dark?

“It isn’t your business to know who I love.” But I said it to the ground, where there was no brilliant blue. Beneath my skin, blood raced.

Silence. Sounds suffocated on the hot air. Patrick waited an interminable moment, until it was impossible not to look at him again. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, low and exact, “I’m inclined to make it my business.”

I was twelve years old in a courtyard, and a furtive hand slipped vials into my pocket. You’ve got a mind of your own , the boy said. Don’t let those fuckers take it. And then he faded from view.

The work was simple enough. I was to break sideways through ground, Patrick and Otto would collect the loose dirt in the barrow and careen it down the line to Gunner, then Briggs, who would take it up the shaft.

There was a secondary tunnel that ran under Kenton and out to pasture, where the earth would be discarded via a pulley mechanism, according to Briggs.

Theo would control the water, which seeped through hidden veins, ravenous for empty space.

The walls bled with it incessantly, the ceiling a leaking faucet.

I was drenched before I could even begin.

Donny began with me at the prow. He had what looked like a doctor’s stethoscope, slightly rusted, its lead mangled. Its earpieces clung to his neck as he crouched beside me, humming some worker’s tune he’d dredged from the recesses of a memory I’d long ago shut away.

“How will I know which way to bend the tunnel?” I asked, my fingers itching to start.

Donny stopped humming. He turned his face in an approximation of where I stood and polished the head of the stethoscope on his shirt. “I’m captain of the ship, darlin’,” he said. I wondered how his squatted knees did not protest. “Just dig where I point, all right?”

I was skeptical. “And, erm… how will you know which way to go?”

Donny tapped his temple with a boyish grin. “Got a built-in compass,” he said. “I was gifted second sight, when the first was taken from me—”

“He listens for the flow of water and keeps us away from it,” Patrick interjected. “I’ve got the compass.” He held one up. It was edged in rust and clouded. “Stop windin’ her up, Donny, or we’ll tiptoe out and leave you here.”

Donny nodded, unapologetic. “Righto. Onward, milady.”

I felt each one of the men fall still behind me. Someone lifted a lantern to better see. Before me, my own shadow was cast onto the wall.

I lifted my hands. I welcomed the expansion of my mind, as Professor Dumley had once directed me. I felt my awareness of the earth unfurl, tenfold in size, commands rushing from the channels of my nervous system at light speed.

Then I felt the earth as though my fingers were touching it.

And I tore it to pieces.

The dirt took the shape my mind bid it to, large chunks crumbling away, the walls of the tunnel elongating before me, the ceiling climbing to allow room to stand. The wall moved back, back, an invisible pressure pulverizing it, roaring in my ears, a trillion mites burrowing through.

And I was caught in the ecstasy of it.

“Stop!” called a voice. “Fuckin’ hell, STOP HER!”

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 twenty yards. 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.