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All the people who’d gone under the mud came back up. Four came up dead.

Their bodies were with their families, in their kitchens or laid out on their beds, the grievers sobbing, whispering prayers on their knees on the sides of corpses.

But only four this night. Only four, when it ought to have been a hundred, perhaps two. A crew of trapped miners, a school, and a row of housing before that raging landslide.

It was midnight before Patrick persuaded his tired body up those stairs.

He’d had the good sense to wash, redress before he went to find her.

He felt he could never again stand the stench of wet earth.

He’d scrubbed and scrubbed until every particle was lifted from his skin, nails, hair, and still, he felt gritty with it.

Sam was asleep in his chair, and Patrick passed him by like a phantom, his feet dragging, his heart pounding. The door was unlocked. He pushed it inward.

Nina was curled up in sleep. Moonbeams found her through the window and left squares of light on the blankets. She breathed softly, her parted lips so achingly perfect it made his stomach tighten.

He closed the door silently, and she didn’t stir.

Patrick laid himself beside her, the shape of his body mimicking hers. He thought he could waste away hours looking at her. This close, he could trace the ridge of her cheekbone, touch the small scar on her jaw, be awed by all the finer pieces of the picture.

She blinked away dreams, and he was grateful to have her hazel eyes now, too. It was quite a relief to drown in them. “Ask me again if I trust you,” he whispered, burying the fingers of one hand into the light curls behind her ear.

He could hear her swallow. “Do you trust me?”

“There’s no one I trust more,” he said.

And when she finally settled against his chest, he held her, and it was the easiest thing in the world to do. Even as she shook with the day’s dealings. Even when she finally broke apart under the tremendous enormity of all those lives and all that darkness.

“Thank you,” Patrick told her, again and again, until his eyes closed and her shuddering slowed. “Shhh. I’ll keep you safe.”

And then he slept. He slept like a man who’d never seen the winding snake of a tunnel, who had never felt the darkness as a vise, pressing in from all sides, pulverizing bones to dust.