Page 64

The wall of dirt came crashing downward, ripping tree roots in its path, ever closer.

Strong enough, I knew, to demolish buildings. Behind me, at the town’s border, was the fenced yard of a school, the children within shoving through the door, hiding beneath their desks. Nothing to save them now but brick and mortar.

I climbed over a low fence, ripped my skirt free when it caught, and wove through the torrid sea of bodies rushing in the other direction, abandoning their shovels and picks. I heard Patrick shout my name, again and again.

But the crush of dirt was nearly upon us, close enough to swallow us all. Specks of it hit my face, sharp as knives. Seconds left.

Adrenaline flooded my chest, coated my tongue. Idium bloomed in my blood.

If someone had asked me in that moment, I could have told them the precise texture of all that earth, the way it would taste—copper, grit, sharp and mired.

Its smell and the color and exact weight.

All of it burst into my mind. I felt its ridges and planes and the exact points of momentum.

I raised my hands, felt the expanse of all that earth in the widths of my fingers.

Then I bent it all.

I crushed it in on itself, brought billions of tumbling particles to a grinding halt. They were impossibly heavy. Heavier than anything I’d commanded before. I gasped beneath the weight of it. It rose up before me like a wave, and I shuddered beneath it, holding it steady.

But then slowly, ground shaking, I forced it back, back, then held it steady.

I held it until the rumbling stopped, until I felt my mind might burst, stray pebbles and clumps tumbling to my feet.

It settled in enormous mounds a foot from the fence line, splaying up the hill. But it did not breach the town.

And all went silent, the ground no longer shuddering, no longer roaring. Only the scream of the siren from Kenton’s belly.

“Nina!” called Patrick. And quite badly I wanted to heed that call, but instead, I climbed.

I climbed and climbed, my shoes sinking into the mud, up and over the mounds.

And behind me I heard others follow, climbing through the formicaries and shouting to one another again.

Get to the pit. Dig. Idia, please, grant them a few minutes more.

Halfway up and a man’s fingers wriggled their way out of the soil, grasping at air. I forced the dirt to reveal him until he was uncovered to his waist. He slumped forward and I didn’t stop to slap the dust from his lungs or offer my hand. There were so many others.

I heard shouts of “Here! Here!” and the thwack of shovels slicing the dirt. All those people swallowed up in the landslide somehow reaching for the surface.

But I tracked on, my legs screaming, up, up. Until the summit was reached, the ground a concave. Sunken atop whatever maze existed below.

I sunk to the ground, my hands to the earth. Closed my eyes.

“Get the horses! The barrows!” a voice shouted—Patrick’s. He was running for the pit entrance, half destroyed as it was. He wound rope around his waist and secured it tightly. Scottie followed, donning a strange hat with a burning filament in its front. He passed one to Patrick.

“Wait,” I said. Was I shouting? “WAIT!”

Patrick turned, his expression firm. “Stay here.”

“I can help,” I said, nearly tripping on my skirt. “I’m going with you.”

“ No ,” he heaved, adjusting the lamp on his head. The look he gave me was stricken. “You will stay right fuckin’ here. You hear me?”

“Are you mad, Pat? She’s an earth Charmer !” Scottie blustered, his voice rising over the din of the rest.

“Your brother’s down there,” I said forcefully. “I can get him out.”

“We’ve got minutes, Pat!” Scottie shouted, his face ruddy, spittle flying. “Minutes!”

Patrick only eyed me a second longer. Then he squared his chin. A veil came over him. “You stay behind me,” he said, the words bitten out through the cage of his teeth. “If I tell you to go back, you go back.”

“Let’s go,” I gritted out. “We’re wasting time.”

“COME ON!” Scottie begged, pulling on Patrick’s shoulder. “Now, boss! The horses’ll pull you back.”

Patrick closed his eyes and shook his head.

He spoke while winding the same length of rope around my middle and tying it tightly.

“There’s two shafts; sometimes they can withstand a collapse.

If we’re lucky, some of the boys will’ve made it back inside the one nearest. We need to crawl to the pulleys, find the cables and bring ’em out. The horses will pull ’em up.”

“How many?”

“Twenty-five, give or take,” he said, and it sounded like a knife was twisting inside his chest. He gave me one last strained look. “Protect yourself. Please. ”

I nodded.

Scottie fed in the rope we were tethered to as we ducked beneath the splintered rafters. Patrick hurried ahead of me with his head bowed. The earth slanted violently downward.

The ceiling had crumbled, leaving little room to move in. Within a few feet, Patrick was on his haunches. I felt the groans in the walls, smelt the freshly aerated earth. “I smell gas.”

“If you feel yourself getting dizzy, tell me,” Patrick panted. “I’ll get you out.” His hands felt along the ceiling, the sides, the ground. His headlamp blinked off and on. “We crawl from here.”

“I can widen it,” I said.

“There’s a seam beneath us. It might not be safe.”

“You just watched me stop a hundred thousand tons of earth from flattening your parish, Patrick. I know what I’m doing.”

“One small disturbance, and it all comes down on top of us!” he rasped. “You won’t be able to charm us out if you can’t breathe.”

“We don’t have time to crawl, Patrick!” My breathing felt labored, the gas finding me already. “Move out of the way.”

“If we get this wrong, they die. You die.”

“ Trust me , Patrick,” I begged, exasperated.

He gave me a look of wild desperation and cursed. “All right,” he panted. He flattened himself against the wall and grabbed my wrist. “All right.” He helped me forward until my shoulder was pressed to his chest, as close to the hole as I could get.

I realized that he was shaking badly, that he was terrified. Beneath his breath, it seemed he was praying. There was no time for reassurances. Somewhere beneath us, ninety fathoms below, men waited in the earth.

I carved away at the walls, pushed the ceiling up, gently, carefully.

I listened for the moans of the earth, for any telltale splits.

But it all melded away at the bid of my mind, until it was wide enough to walk through at a crouch.

Patrick let me lead him down, down, holding the loop of rope at the small of my back.

We hurried through, two mice in a maze. Slipping, panting, growing more and more woozy with each small descent.

Finally, Patrick’s headlamp caught the glint of steel—the shaft, mostly barricaded in clay.

My mind pulled at it with waning strength, the earth slower to move now.

Patrick took to it with his hands, clawing clods of it away with manic determination until the void could be seen, still there, its frame holding.

Echoing up from the depths, I thought I heard a soft plea. Help , it said, and evaporated quickly.

Patrick fished the cables hanging from the pulleys. He unwound them from their anchor point, fingers fumbling. “Carry these out to Scottie,” he huffed, his chest heaving. “Be as quick as you can.”

“What of you?”

“The gate jams in a collapse,” he said. “I need to be here to let them out.”

“It should be me who stays,” I panted. It seemed there wasn’t enough oxygen. “If the ceiling falls, I can charm it.”

He shook his head, sweat trickling over his jaw. “If you think I can leave you here—”

“Patrick,” I spat, grabbing his shirt in one fist. “I can do this. I promise I’ll come back.” And perhaps he saw the blaze in my eyes, felt the idium pulsing through me. “There’s no time. Go .”

And though it seemed to tear at every fiber of his being, he swallowed, nodded.

He grabbed the cables in his hand. Gripped my neck in the other.

And his lips met mine for one fervent moment.

And then they were gone. He ripped the strange lighted hat from his head and put it on my own.

“I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said gruffly.

“So you’d better fuckin’ come out, Nina. Promise me. Now. ”

I blustered. “I… I promise.”

And then he disappeared into the gloom.

And I crouched in the dark and waited, my heart thrown from one wall to the next.

There was little time to recover. It didn’t take long for the cables to become taut, stretched to capacity. I flattened myself against the outer wall and waited the interminable wait for them to move.

What seemed like a millennia later, the pulleys screeched, the cable within forced over its wheels.

It moved in painful increments, the void filling with an awful grating sound, the clanks of steel and the groan of timber reaching me.

But the lift was rising. The wheels spun in their mechanisms. The cable sped by, the clanking grew closer and closer.

And then I could feel it beneath my feet, something heavy rising from the belly of the world, forced from its middle. The lift ground to a halt when it hit the ceiling and the cable couldn’t pull it any further.

Dizzy, I scrambled to the lift’s doors. I pulled on the steel lever that clamped the gate shut. Moans within, shouts. I threw all the weight I had onto the lever, and inch by inch, it moved. A crack appeared, widened. Twenty, thirty fingers fed through the gap, prying the gates apart.

And then Gunner spilled out, landing on his knees, coughing violently. Blood seeped from his eyebrow, into his beard, already black with soot.

Behind him, twenty or so men appeared in the weak glow of my lamplight. Some held up by others, some slumped to the floor with their back against the walls. All of them gasping for breath, blackened by the earth, visible only by the stark reflections of their eyes.

“He sent the Charmer in?” Gunner panted, his voice nothing more than a scratch. But he smiled up at me, spitting a gob of soot to the ground. “Figures.”

I swayed, seeing two of him. “This Charmer is going to get you out,” I told him. “Unless you’d rather stay?”

He exhaled and it might have been a laugh. He accepted the hand I offered to stand on shaking legs.

I glanced over his shoulder, to the men behind him. “Can they walk?”

“They’ll fuckin’ crawl if they must,” he rasped. “Lead the way.”

I kept my hands to the walls as I ascended again, looking over my shoulder constantly to the train of miners following. The unconscious men were carried on backs, the conscious dragged their feet and sucked breath through hollowed cheeks.

I thought of things my father said when I was a child, about air temperature and gas in the head and lead feet that wouldn’t move when commanded.

That’s what the tunnels do , he’d told me.

They make it so you can’t run, can’t see right.

When you realize it, it’s already too late.

I hastened, feeling my brain slosh to one side. I couldn’t get enough oxygen.

“Easy, there,” Gunner said at my back. “One foot in front of the other, girl. It’s just a bit of gas.”

I nodded, though it distorted my vision, sent fragments of picture into a moving kaleidoscope. I fell down and felt no pain, just hands pulling me upright again.

Men moaned. The walls sung a dirge. The tunnel extended on and on, its length somehow doubling, then tripling.

“Almost there,” I said aloud.

And then, in a cage swinging from the hand of a miner, a canary gave its last warbling titter and became silent.

“Stop,” Gunner said, his hand grasping my shoulder. My lamplight fell onto his stricken face, his slackening mouth. It made a ghost of him.

Then, from deep in the earth there was a catastrophic shudder. It rippled first from somewhere deep below, then through my fingertips, the soles of my feet. In my mind, a billion separate and connected sparks sputtered.

“Gas!” one man yelled.

“A blast!” another heaved.

“GO!” Gunner growled, shoving me forward with all the strength his arms allowed, and I was pitched headfirst into the gloom ahead, the walls around us trembling.

Rafts of dirt fell from the ceiling, clodding the path, filling it with rock. I blasted each blockade backward, again, again. The walls held so long as my hands glanced them, then collapsed soon after. Twice I heard the bellow of a man struck. The shouts of the others to keep moving. Keep moving.

Too heavy. It was too heavy. If it all fell at once, I wouldn’t be able to lift it away.

And then, ahead, there was a light. It permeated the dust and the falling rock.

And Gunner pushed at my back, screamed “RUN!” into my ear, and the walls descended and crumbled all around.

But I pressed my back to the wall, my palms to the ceiling, and I let him pass me by. I counted the men who barreled through, and held the hill atop us, refusing to let it cave in. Just a few more men , I told myself. Nine. Ten. Eleven men. Stay standing, Nina.

But the mind can only hold so much, and I lost count of the bodies that collided with mine as they passed, lost sight as the grit poured into my eyes, and inch by inch, my mind slackened. There was simply too much.

So I let it go, and I bolted for that shrinking light ahead. I felt rock slamming into my back, my calves, piercing my skin, and I let it all crumble in my wake. I forced my muddied eyes to stay open and begged my legs to carry me out into the air.