Ninety-one.
I had counted at the last bell and I would count again at this one. I did it the way I did everything now: without moving my lips, without moving my head, with my eyes half-lidded and my back flat against the bedrock.
Three things kept a body alive down here. Don't be first. Don't be last. Don't be seen counting.
We all wore the same garmenta heavy, itch-burlap sack that smelled of old sweat and coal dust.
The bell went.
We formed up the way we always formed up. Amala came down out of the upper bunks and took her spot where the whip-line started. She did it every single bell, and she had never once said a word about it. I had never been able to decide whether that made her the bravest person in the mountain or just the most tired.
Her hair grew the way her people's did, crowned with living saffron-flowers. Small orange petals burst continuously from her braids; she had stopped trying to pluck them free around the ninth week.
Her amber eyes flicked toward the shadow of the back bunks.
"Pip's not up," she said.
"I know."
"Jim"
"I know."
Pip was ten, but a heavy sleeper, and down here, sleeping past the bell was a death sentence. He had been late once back in the spring, and the overseers had broken his wrist for it and left it to set crooked. Ever since, the fear of being late kept him frozen in his blankets, terrified to even face the aisle.
Old Ed was already in place at the wall, doing what Edward did, which was lean. Thirty years in a mine, twelve of them in Rosalie, and the coal had got so far into him that his skin had gone a permanent bruised slate, the dust sitting under the surface in a thousand small blue scars where cuts had closed over it. He'd been broken a long time before I arrived.
He talked, though. To me, mostly, in the dark, in a flat mumble you had to lean in to hear.
"Feel that?" he said now.
"Feel what?"
"Exactly." Ed put two fingers flat against the bedrock. "Heavy boots. Dozens of 'em. Rushing through the upper shafts where no miners ought to be." He spat dark coal dust onto the floor. "Something ain't right up top, boy."
Further along the wall, in the deepest shadow the chamber had, Izêm sat with his back against the stone and his forearms across his knees, and the marks on him were moving.
Nobody knew what he was. Like almost every other child in the lower shafts, he'd come in on a prison draft out of Zenith and he had offered no more than his name in eight months. His skin was dark, and over it ran pattern lines that drifted and curled across his throat and arms like moving ink.
"He's early," Izêm said, to nobody.
And Seriva, who was the only adult in the chamber anyone would have followed anywhere, went on doing her rounds, checking on the smaller kids at the end of the line; she always did that just before the overseers came in.
At the end of the row was Soren. Unlike the rest of the children, Soren didn't come from Zenithnobody knew what distant, forgotten realm he hailed from. He had been a ghost of bone and tendon for so long that I sometimes forgot to include him in the count.
Toby stood apart, up near the mouth of the guard corridor where the torchlight reached, smoothing down the front of his tunic over and over as though he could flatten the itch out of it. He was watching the guard quarters.
Milo stood with his arms loose at his sides, facing the empty aisle where the overseers would walk, and he was smiling.
He had been like that for six weeks. He did not answer his name. He did not flinch at the whip or reach for food, and the sector medics had stopped bandaging what he did to himself between bells because he just pulled the dressings off. His broken mind was the result of a cruel trade: he had repeatedly exchanged the Overseer's nightshade-smoke rewards for food to give to the other starving children. When the Overseer found out, they had beaten him so brutally that something inside him had snapped, leaving him emptied, with a strange, permanent smile stretched across his face.
I looked at him for a second longer than was safe.
Ninety-one.
Then the haze of nightshade smoke thickenedthe sweet, highly addictive luxury smoke the Overseer doled out as a reward to keep the miners compliantand the torches at the corridor mouth doubled. The tithe began.
The Overseer came down the aisle in wine-coloured silk, flanked by his enforcers.
That was the obscenity of him, and it never got any less obscene: the master of Rosalie's lower shafts wore flowing silk over polished leather, and his skin caught the torchlight because he oiled it. The oil was scented, and when he passed you, the smell of him was bergamot and warm cedar.
He walked slowly, hands loose, looking into faces. He had a good face. That was the other obscenity. He was perhaps forty, clean-shaven, with the mild, attentive, slightly sorrowful expression of a scholar.
"Children," said The Overseer.
The word landed in that chamber like a stone in a well.
"You are cold."
Nobody answered.
"You are hungry. Your hands are open and bleeding, and you would give anything for one hour of fire and one bowl of something hot." He turned as he walked, taking us all in, and his voice was not loud; the cave did the work for him, rolling it off the ribbed stone. "And up in the estate tonight, Lord Diamante himself lies on feather beds wanting nothing at all. Who is full? Who is warm?"
He stopped. He spread his hands.
"Which of you would trade?"
Not a sound. He nodded slowly, as though we had all spoken at once and said something that moved him.
"Not one," he said. "Good. Because a man who wants nothing is nothing. He is a stopped clock. He is a dead thing that has not yet been told." The Overseer began to walk again. "The scholars of Zenith wrote down a list, long ago, of the things they were most afraid of, and they called it a list of sins, and at the head of it they put the Wanting. Lust, they wrote. The appetite. The reaching. They were frightened of it because they had seen what it does to a soul that is merely comfortable." He smiled. "They were cowards with good handwriting."
Ed's fingers were still flat on the stone. I heard him breathe out through his nose, very slowly.
"Your bleeding hands are not a punishment," The Overseer said. "They are the offering. Every ache in you is a prayer that your body is saying without your permission. To suffer for this mountain is to be heard." He drew the word out. "How many of them, up there in the light, are heard?"
Milo, at the head of Row One, made a small sound of pure happiness.
The Overseer rested his hand on Milo's head for a moment as he passed, the way you'd pet a dog, and moved on.
And stopped in front of Pip.
Pip looked eight, because everything down here looked two years younger than it was until quite suddenly it looked forty. He was drowning inside a tunic cut for someone twice his size, the neck hole so wide it had slid off one shoulder. His left wrist was swollen to the thickness of his forearm and set crooked at the jointthe permanent souvenir from the last time he'd slept through the morning bell.
His knees were knocking. I could hear them.
"Sector Four," The Overseer read. "Row Two. Short by two baskets."
"Please." Pip's voice came out as nothing. He tried again. "Please, High Master. The seam went to slate. There's no coal in it, there's just slate! I hit it all shift, I"
"I believe you," The Overseer said gently.
Pip stopped. Something terrible happened in his face: hope.
"I believe you entirely, child." The Overseer crouched, silk pooling in the muck, so that they were eye to eye. "The seam is slate. Of course it is. And yet the baskets are short." He tipped his head.
Pip's mouth opened.
"Your flesh resists," The Overseer said. He stood, turned away, and made a small motion with two fingers, signaling his men.
I moved before I decided to.
That was the thing I came back to, afterwards, over and over down in the dark. Fourteen months of don't-be-first, and my body simply overruled me. I was out of the line, across the aisle, and down on my knees in the filth with my arms around Pip before the guard's arm had finished coming up. I got my broad back between the mace and the boy, folded myself down over him, and put one hand flat over Pip's exposed ear.
The mace came down across my shoulder blade.
There is a sound bone makes when it does not break: a deep, dull knock that goes up through the neck and into the roots of the teeth. My vision went white at the edges and stayed white for a count of three. I did not make a noise. That mattered. I had worked out a long time ago that the noise was what they were buying.
The enforcer shifted his grip and drove a heavy boot in under my ribs twice, methodically, the way you'd kick a stuck cart wheel.
I held on.
"Pity," said The Overseer from somewhere above and to the left. He sounded genuinely curious. "Softness. In my house."
The whip opened my back through the burlap in a line from my right shoulder to my left hip. The sacking split. So did the skin under it. I locked every muscle I had, kept my body rigid, and kept my hand over the boy's ear because The Overseer had started laughing. It was a warm, delighted, avuncular laugh, the laugh of a man watching a child take its first steps, and Pip was ten years old and did not need that sound in his head for the rest of his life.
Three more. I counted them. Counting was what I had.
Then the silk moved away, the torchlight went with it, the chalk squeaked once on the slate as a guard adjusted a number, and the tithe went on down Row Three.
I let go by degrees.
Pip was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering, both arms clamped around my neck, the ruined wrist pressed between us. I got a thumb under the boy's chin and wiped the mud off his face with the ball of it, slowly, the way you'd clean a plate.
"Hey. Hey." My own voice came out wrecked; there was blood in the back of my throat, and I swallowed it. "Quiet now, Pip. Look at me. That's it."
"He's g-going to"
"No, he isn't." I got him up onto the bunk. "I've got you. You hear me? I've got you."
Behind me, Amala arrived with a strip of wet cloth she'd gotten from somewhere. She started on my back without asking, hissed once through her teeth at what she found, and said in a voice pitched for exactly one listener:
"That was stupid."
"Yes."
"Do it again next bell and I'll hold your coat."
Amala knelt by the bunk with her hands full of saffron petals she had plucked from her own hair, pressing them one by one into the swelling around Pip's wrist. They were cool against his skin, a simple comfort in the dark, though they held no magic. Her jaw was tight enough to creak.
"Don't," I said, watching her free hand drift to the hidden iron spike at her waist.
"I said nothing."
"You were about to."
"I was about to say nothing," Amala said, "which is what I say every bell, and one day I am going to run out of it."
Along the wall, Izêm's marks had stopped moving. They had gone stilldead still, all of them frozen mid-curl across his collarbone. Izêm was looking straight up at the vaulted ceiling with his head cocked, listening to the heavy thud of iron boots echoing through the rock above.
And Edward, two feet from my ear, had gone the colour of ash under the coal dust.
"Boy," he whispered. "Put your hand back on the rock."
I did.
The vibration was unmistakable nownot the steady rhythm of miners working, but the heavy, march-step tremor of dozens of combatants descending the upper tunnels.
CHAPTER 2
The sulfur smoke came first.
It poured down the main ventilation shaft in thick, greasy billows, drowning out the sweet scent of the Overseer's bergamot oil in a matter of seconds. It tasted of pitch and scorched copper, so dense it made your eyes bleed water before you even saw the flare of the torches.
Then came the purple robes.
They swept out of the upper drift in a wall of dark silk, moving fast and low. They didn't shout. They didn't demand a surrender. They simply fanned out across the mud with long, curved blades, cutting through the Overseer's enforcers before the guards could even clear their scabbards.
"RUN!" I screamed.
The word tore my throat raw, but nobody heard it. The gallery exploded into a stampede. Ninety-one kids in identical grey burlap sacks broke rank at once, scattering in ninety-one different directions like ants when a heel comes down on the hill.
I clamped my right arm around Pip, hooking him hard against my hip, and threw my left hand against Amala's shoulder, shoving her toward the side drifts. "Get to the sump! Amala, go!"
Across the chamber, the floor turned into a slaughterhouse.
The Overseer fought back. He had been an Iron-Rank adventurer twenty years ago, long before Lord Diamante bought his contract and handed him the lower shafts of Rosalie, and you could see the old muscle memory in him. He parried a down-sweep, stepped inside a cultist's guard, and laid the man open from gut to throat. But he was fighting silk and iron with a decorative sidearm, dressed in flowing robes that caught on the rock. Three cultists closed in from his blind side, took his legs out, and brought him down hard into the muck. They disarmed him with two swift blows, slammed iron shackles around his wrists, and hauled him to his knees, bleeding and silk-torn, but breathing.
I turned to push Pip toward the rusted hatch of the drainage vent, but the air in front of us went dark.
A broad, soot-blackened shadow stepped straight out of the sulfur smoke. He wore torn purple silk over boiled leather, and his hands were wrapped around the wooden shaft of an iron-bound mace. He didn't say a word. He just drew the mace back with both arms and swung it across the narrow aisle.
I moved before I had time to think about it. Fourteen months of don't-be-first, and my body simply overruled me.
I threw myself across Pip, turning my back to the steel, folding my frame over the ten-year-old so my broad shoulders took the gap.
CRACK.
The sound didn't come from the air. It came from inside my own skulla deep, wet, dull snapping of green sticks as my chest collapsed inward. The force lifted both of us off our feet, slamming me backward into the granite wall. The air left my lungs in a spray of dark, frothing blood that coated my chin and collar.
My knees gave out. I hit the flagstones, curled on my side, unable to draw breath, the world flickering white and black at the edges.
The cult enforcer stepped over Pip, raised the mace high with both hands, and lined the iron spike up with the side of my head.
"Wait!"
Another cultist caught the enforcer's arm, shoving him back. "The Leader wants the master register! Keep this one breathingwe need him to find the logbook!"
My mind was gone, but the animal in me was still awake. The animal didn't care about Pip, or Amala, or the logbook. The animal just wanted to hide.
There was an eighteen-inch drainage crevice at the base of the bedrock where the water ran off into the deep sump. While the two cultists bickered over the mace, I dug my fingers into the mud and dragged my shattered chest sideways. I forced my head into the dark gap, scraping my skin raw against the ragged stone.
A hand snagged my bare ankle. I kicked violently with my good leg, leaving my worn leather boot in the cultist's grip, and slid headfirst down the wet stone slope into the pitch-black crawlspace.
I was gone. Separated from Pip. Separated from Amala. Separated from everyone.
The floor of the crevice was old water-work, smooth as a throat, canted down at thirty degrees. I slid until the slope leveled out, then I lay there in the suffocating dark, listening to the wet, bubbling rattle inside my own lungs. Every small twitch of my diaphragm ground broken ribs together like crushed gravel.
One hand forward, I thought. One hand forward.
I dragged myself three feet through the grit. Then two. My vision was completely dark now, the air cold and mineral against my face. I knew what dying felt like; I had watched thirty kids do it since the winter draft. You stopped feeling your feet first, then your knees, then your hands went cold.
Four hundred inches under the mountain. Alone.
I collapsed onto my side, my cheek pressed against the bare floor of the rock, waiting for the last light to go out.
Then the stone vibrated.
It wasn't a sound. It didn't come through my ears. It came up through the granite, through my jawbone, straight into the center of my chest. A low, slow, rhythmic pulselike a giant heart beating once every five seconds somewhere miles below the unmined coal.
With the pulse came a feeling. A deep, heavy pulling at the marrow of my bones. It felt like standing at the edge of a high cliff and feeling the air tug at your tunic. It had no words, but the weight of it was absolute.
Come.
I forced my bleeding fingers to close around a lip of granite. I pulled my weight forward an inch. Then another.
I was three feet from the mouth of whatever deep chamber lay at the end of the crawlspace when the darkness behind me tore open.
Heavy, iron-gloved hands slammed down on my calves.
Rough fingers snagged the collar of my tunic, yanking me backward out of the crevice so fast my chin smashed against the stone lip. I was dragged up the incline on my stomach, blood smearing the water-work, and dumped onto the cold flagstones of the main gallery.
Torchlight flared yellow and brutal in my eyes.
Three purple-robed cultists stood over me. One of them dropped a knee onto my shattered chestI screamed, but it came out as a wet, voiceless gaspand yanked my head back by the hair, pressing a four-inch iron blade flat against my throat.
"Where is the master register?" he snarled. "Where is the logbook?"
I coughed, dark blood spattering across his leather bracers. That was the first time I had heard of it. I knew the book existedthe heavy leather register the Overseer kept locked in his desk, listing every single slave, convert, criminal, and shift tally in Rosalie. I understood right then why they hadn't butchered us where we lay: without that book, they had a mountain full of ninety-one anonymous children in identical grey sacks, and no way to know who belonged to Lord Diamante, who was a skilled miner, or who was worth a ransom.
"I don't... know," I wheezed through the red froth in my teeth.
He stared down at me for a long second, trying to see if I was lying, then spit on my face and shoved my head down into the mud. "Bind him. Throw him with the rest."
They dragged me across the central floor by my arms, my useless legs trailing behind me, and dumped me against the rock wall alongside a dozen other bound prisoners.
Old Ed was there, his face covered in slate dust and drying blood. The Overseer was ten feet away, bound in heavy iron chains, his wine-colored silk ripped to shreds, his mild scholar's face pale and bruised.
I leaned my good shoulder hard into Ed's side. "Ed," I whispered, my voice rattling like dry leaves. "Where are... the others?"
Ed didn't turn his head. He spoke in that flat, ash-dry mumble he used when the whip was near. "Amala got through," he muttered. "Soren had the rusted hatch open before the pitch-oil blew. He took Pip and Seriva and four of the little ones into the old drainage cut. The upper roof caved in behind 'em. They're locked out in the upper drifts, but they're breathing."
"The book?"
"Nobody knows," Ed said softly. "The guard took a spear through the guts near the clerk's office. The book was gone before the cultists got there. They've searched every pocket in Sector Four."
Ed lifted his chin slightly, pointing toward the center of the vault. "Look."
The cultists had stopped searching.
Under the orders of a man in deep velvet robes, a dozen beaten, terrified miners were being forced to haul heavy blocks of raw granite from the slag heaps. They stacked them in the middle of the chamber, right under the iron braziers, building a crude, jagged altar four feet high.
When the last stone was set, the Cult Leader stepped into the circle of torchfire.
He didn't look at the Overseer. He didn't look at me. He turned his eyes slowly toward the front row of the captives, where Milo stood.
Milo hadn't run during the stampede. He hadn't hidden. He stood right where he always stood, his arms loose at his sides, his broken mind completely detached from the screaming, his mouth stretched in that empty, permanent smile.
"Bring the emptied one," the Cult Leader said.
Milo didn't fight. When two cultists grabbed his elbows, he stepped forward lightly, walking up the rough granite steps of the new altar like a boy balancing along a fence rail. He turned, laid his back against the cold stone, and looked straight up into the sulfur smoke hovering at the ceiling.
The Cult Leader drew a broad, double-edged sacrificial blade from his belt. The steel caught the red glow of the braziers. He held it high with both hands, his velvet sleeves falling back to reveal arms painted in dark, curling symbols.
"Offer it!" the Cult Leader shouted, his voice echoing off the high stone vaults. "Let the Sin take this mountain! Let it eat what it is owed!"
The cultists around the altar fell to their knees, chanting in a rapid, rhythmic tongue that sounded like stones grinding together in a mill.
I lay in the mud, my chest burning like pitch-oil, Ed's shoulder pressed against mine, and watched through a haze of blood as the blade came down.