Gideon's Sword (67 page)

Welcome to Leed—Home of the Homestead Mine
, the billboard said along the side of the road.

Janos breezed right by it, recalculating the timeline in his head. Even if their jet got off immediately, they couldn’t have arrived before midnight. And if they didn’t get in until midnight, they had to sleep somewhere…

Making a sharp left into the parking lot of the squat sixties-era building, Janos read the signs in the neighboring storefront windows:
Out of Business… Lost Lease… Gone to Montana.
Sauls was at least right about that—Leed was definitely on its last legs. But as he parked his car and eyed the neon
Vacancy
sign out front, it was clear at least one place was still open:
the Gold House Motel
.

Janos opened his door and headed straight inside. On his left, he noticed the metal rack of tourist brochures. All of them were faded by the sun, every single one of them—except for the one entitled
The Homestead Mine.
Janos studied the rich red, white, and blue colors of the pamphlet. The sun hadn’t faded it a bit—almost as if… as if it’d just been exposed in the last hour or so.

“Hiya, there,” the woman at the front desk called out with a friendly smile. “So what can I do for you today?”

39

M
Y STOMACH LEAPS
into my chest as the cage plummets. For the first few feet, it’s no different from an elevator ride, but as we pick up speed and plunge down the shaft, my stomach sails up toward my esophagus. Jerking back and forth, the cage bangs wildly against the walls of the shaft, almost knocking us off our feet. It’s like trying to stand on a rocking rowboat as it bottoms out under you.

“Harris, tell her to slow down before—!”

The floor of the cage heaves violently to the left, and Viv loses her chance to finish the thought.

“Lean against the wall—it makes it easier!” I call out.

“What?!”
she shouts, though I can barely hear her. Between the pounding of the cage, the speed of our descent, and the rumble of the waterfall, everything’s drowned in a never-ending, screeching roar.

“Lean against the wall!”
I yell.

Taking my own advice, I lean back and fight to keep my balance as the rowboat rattles beneath me. It’s the first time I take a glance outside the cage. The safety gate may be closed, but through the grating, the subterranean
world rushes by: a blur of brown dirt… then a flash of an underground tunnel… another blur of dirt… another tunnel. Every eight seconds, a different level whizzes by. The openings to the tunnels whip by so fast, I can barely get a look—and the more I try, the more it blurs, and the dizzier I get. Cave opening after cave opening after cave opening… We’ve gotta be going forty miles an hour.

“You feel that?”
Viv calls out, pointing to her ears.

My ears pop, and I nod. I swallow hard, and they pop again, tighter than before.

It’s been over three minutes since we left, and we’re still headed down what’s easily becoming the longest elevator ride of my life. On my right, the entrances to the tunnels continue to whip by at their regular blurred pace… and then, to my surprise, they start to slow down.

“We there?” Viv asks, looking my way so her mine light shines in my face.

“I think so,” I say as I turn toward her and accidentally blind her right back. It takes a few seconds for us to realize that as long as our lights are on, the only way we can talk is by turning our heads so we’re not eye to eye. For some people in the Capitol, that comes naturally. For me, it’s like fighting blind. Every emotion starts in our eyes. And right now, Viv won’t face me.

“How we doing on air?” I ask as she looks down at her oxygen detector.

“Twenty-one percent is normal—we’re at 20.4,” she says, flipping to the instructions on the back. Her voice wobbles, but she’s doing her best to mask her fear. I check to see if her hands are shaking. She turns slightly so I can’t see them. “Says here you need sixteen percent
to breathe normally… nine percent before you go unconscious… and at six percent, you wave bye-bye.”

“But we’re at 20.4?” I say, trying to reassure her.

“We were 20.9 up top,” she shoots back.

The cage bucks to a final halt. “Stop cage?” the woman asks through the intercom.

“Stop cage,” I say, pressing the red button and wiping the slime against my tool belt.

As I take my first peek through the metal safety gate, I look up at the ceiling, and my mine light bounces off a bright orange stenciled sign dangling from two wires:
4850 Level.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Viv mumbles. “We’re only
halfway
there?”

I press the intercom button and lean toward the speaker. “Hello…?”

“What’s wrong?” the hoist operator barks back.

“We wanted to go to the eight thousa—”

“Cross the drift and you’ll see the Number Six Winze. The cage is waiting for you there.”

“What’s wrong with this one?”

“It’s fine if you wanna stop at 4850, but if you plan on going deeper, you gotta take the other.”

“I don’t remember this last time,” I say, bluffing to see if it’s changed.

“Son, unless you were here in the 1900s, there ain’t nothin’ that’s different. They got cables now that’ll hold a cage at ten thousand feet, but back then, the furthest they could go was five thousand at a time. Now, step outside, cross the drift, and tell me when you’re in.”

I tug on the safety gate, and it rolls up and out of the way. A downpour of water from the shaft forms a wet wall that partially blocks us from seeing out. Darting
straight through the waterfall and feeling the freezing water pummel my back, I dash out into the mine, where the floor, walls, and ceiling are all made of tightly packed brown dirt. No different from a cave, I tell myself, stepping ankle-deep in a puddle of mud. On both sides of the tunnel as it stretches out in front of us are another twenty feet of side-by-side benches. They’re no different from the ones up top, except for the elongated American flag that someone’s spray-painted along the entire backrest. It’s the only patch of color in this otherwise muddy-brown underworld, and as we walk past the long stretches of bench, if I close my eyes, I swear I can see the ghostly afterimages of hundreds of miners—heads hung low, elbows resting on their knees—as they wait in the dark, beaten from another day spent huddled underground.

It’s the same look my dad had on the fifteenth of every month—when he’d count up how many haircuts he’d need to make the mortgage. Mom used to scold him for refusing tips, but back then, he thought it was bad taste in a small town. When I was twelve, he gave up the shop and moved the business into the basement of our house. But he still had that look. I used to think it was regret for spending his whole day down there. It wasn’t. It was dread—the pain you feel from the thought that you have to do it again tomorrow. Entire lives spent underground. To cover it up, Dad put up posters of Ralph Kiner, Roberto Clemente, and the emerald green outfield at Forbes Field; down here, they use the red, white, and blue of the flag—and the bright yellow door of the cage that sits fifty feet dead ahead.

Crossing the drift, we plow through the mud, heading straight for the door marked
Winze No. 6.

As I enter the new cage and pull the safety gate down,
Viv scans the even tinier metal shoebox. The lower ceiling makes the coffin feel even smaller. As Viv cranes her neck downward, I can practically smell claustrophobia setting in.

“This is Number Six Hoist,” the woman announces through the intercom. “All set?”

I glance at Viv. She won’t even look up. “All set,” I say into the intercom. “Lower cage.”

“Lower cage,” she repeats as the coffin starts to rumble. We both lean back against our respective walls, prepping ourselves for the freefall. A bead of water swells on the ceiling of the cage, drops to the ground, and plinks into a small puddle. I hold my breath… Viv looks up at the noise… and the floor once again plummets from beneath us.

Next stop: eight thousand feet below the earth’s surface.

40

T
HE CAGE PLUNGES
straight down as my ears once again pop and a sharp pain corkscrews through my forehead. But as I fight for balance and try to steady myself on the vibrating wall, something tells me my instant headache isn’t just from the pressure in my ears.

“How’s our oxygen?” I call out to Viv, who’s cradling the detector in both hands and struggling to read as we’re jarred back and forth. The roaring sound is once again deafening.

“What?” she shouts back.

“How’s our oxygen?!”

She cocks her head at the question, reading something on my face.

“Why’re you suddenly worried?” she asks.

“Just tell me what the percentages are,” I insist.

She studies me again, soaking it all in. Over my shoulder, a different level in the mine flashes by every few seconds. Viv’s features sink just as fast. Her bottom lip starts to quiver. For the past five thousand–plus feet, Viv’s anchored herself to my own emotional state: the confidence that snuck us in here, the desperation that got
us on the first cage, even the stubbornness that kept us moving. But the moment she gets her first whiff of my fear—the moment she thinks my own anchor is unmoored—she’s floundering and ready to capsize.

“How’s our oxygen?” I ask again.

“Harris… I wanna go up…”

“Just give me the number, Viv.”

“But—”

“Give me the number!”

She looks down at the detector, almost lost. Her forehead’s covered in sweat. But it’s not just her: All around us, the cold breeze that whipped through the top of the shaft is long gone. At these levels, the deeper we go underground, the hotter it gets—and the more Viv starts to lose it.

“Nineteen… we’re down to nineteen,” she stutters, coughing and holding her throat. Nineteen percent is still within normal range, but it doesn’t calm her down. Her chest rises and falls in quick succession, and she staggers backward into the wall. I’m still breathing fine.

Her body starts to tremble, and not just from the movement of the cage. It’s her. The color drains from her face. Her mouth gapes open. As her shaking gets faster, she can barely stand up. A loud, empty gasp echoes from deep within her chest. The oxygen detector drops from her hand, smacking into the floor. Oh, no. If she’s hyperventilating…

The cage rumbles down the shaft at forty miles an hour. Viv looks across at me. Her eyes are wide, begging for help. “Hhhh…” Gripping her chest, she lets out a long, protracted gasp and crumples to the floor.

“Viv…!”

I leap toward her just as the cage is slammed to the
right. Off balance and knocked to the left, I crash into the wall shoulder first. A jolting pain runs down my arm. Viv’s still gasping, and the sudden jolt sends her falling forward. Sliding on my knees, I dive at her, catching her just as she’s about to hit face first.

I turn her around and cradle her body in my arms. Her helmet falls to the ground as her eyes dance wildly back and forth. She’s in full panic. “I got you, Viv… I got you…” I tell her, whispering the words over and over. Her head’s in my lap, and she’s trying to catch her breath, but the deeper we plummet, the more we feel the heat. I lick a puddle of sweat from the dimple of my top lip. It’s easily over ninety degrees down here.

“Wh-What’s happening?” Viv asks. As she looks up at me, her tears run back toward her temples and are swallowed by her hair.

“The heat’s normal… It’s just the pressure from the rocks above us… plus we’re getting closer to the earth’s core…”

“What about oxygen?” she stutters.

I turn to the detector, which is lying beside her. As my light shines across the digital screen, it goes from
19.6%…
to
19.4%

“Holding steady,” I tell her.

“You lying to me? Please don’t lie…”

This is no time to send her spiraling. “We’re gonna be fine, Viv… Just keep taking deep breaths.”

Following my own instructions, I suck in a chestful of steamy, hot air. It burns my lungs like a deep breath in a sauna. The sweat is pouring from my face, dripping off the tip of my nose.