by E. C. Blake
It looked to Mara like the unMasked were being fed into the maw of some giant underground mechanism, and her stomach clenched in fear. It clenched again when they reached the bottom of the stairs and she saw exactly how that mechanism worked.
A worker, a grim-looking man with a patch over one eye, stepped onto the platform that appeared at the top. It descended as the other platform rose: but as the stroke ended and the platform he was on started to ascend, the one-eyed worker stepped to another farther down the other beam, which was on its downward stroke. And presumably he continued stepping from platform to platform until he reached wherever he was going in the shaft . . .
...however far underground that might be.
A girl only two or three years older than Mara, face blank and set, stepped onto the top platform and began her own journey into the depths.
Mara shuddered. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t go down there. She couldn’t!
But, it seemed, she would have to.
More than just the beams with their alternating wooden platforms descended into the shaft, one half of which was completely open. A rope hung down into the darkness from somewhere high overhead, and looking up, Mara saw that it was wrapped around a windlass. As she watched, two burly unMasked men began cranking it, the rope rising steadily. From their strained expressions, she gathered something very heavy was on the other end of the rope that began rising from the depths, bits of colored cloth tied around it at regular intervals.
Overseeing all of this from a tall desk were two unMasked men, though their faces were so hard and set they might as well have been Masked. “New worker,” the Watcher called up to them, hands heavy on Mara’s shoulders. “Name’s Mara.”
The two unMasked peered down at her. Vivid pink scars crisscrossed their cheeks and foreheads. “Skinny,” said one. “Nice and skinny.” He gave Mara a nasty grin lacking more than a few teeth. “Your timing’s perfect, girl. We’ve been needing someone skinny ever since the roof fell in on Shimma.” His grin grew even nastier. “If you find any of her bits, be sure to send them up.” He looked down, scribbled something on a piece of paper, and reached it down to her. “You’re going all the way to the bottom. Give this to the shift supervisor. He’ll be the first person you see.”
The Watcher took her over to the reciprocating platforms just as a huge iron bucket full of black rock rose from the shaft on the end of the rope. Mara didn’t bother to follow its ascent, presumably to the windlass far above. She had eyes only for the endlessly appearing and disappearing platforms. The wood of each was stained with what looked suspiciously like blood. She saw that there were handholds on the beams, though the workers mostly ignored them. “You see how it works?” said the Watcher.
“Ye–yes,” Mara said, through a throat so suddenly dry and tight she could hardly speak.
“Don’t fall into the gap between the platforms,” the Watcher said indifferently. “It makes a hell of a mess and jams up the mechanism.”
He put out a hand to stop the next worker in line from stepping onto the platform. Mara’s eyes caught the startled gaze of Katia, who gave her a weak smile. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s easy, really.”
“Shut up, you!” The Watcher gave Katia a shove that made her stagger back into the older woman behind her, who cursed and pushed her back again. The Watcher turned back to Mara. “You’re holding things up. Go.”
Mara saw the platform rising in front of her. Terror coursing through her, she stepped onto it, and gripped the handhold. She sank into the shaft. The platform descended a few feet and slowed just as a platform on the other beam rose to meet it. She stepped convulsively over the three-foot gap, teetered, grabbed the next handhold . . . and descended.
The journey seemed to take forever. Lanterns hung on the beam every four platforms or so, but at times she had to step from one platform to the next as much by feel as by sight. Rock walls, damp and glistening, rose around her. Horizontal tunnels appeared. At each one, an older unMasked man or woman stood, clipboard in hand. They watched her pass with dull, disinterested gazes. The shift supervisors, she supposed . . . but still the shaft descended.
An eternity later she at last she reached the bottom, the reciprocating beams ending below her in a pit where another horizontal beam joined them together, seesawing. She stepped off onto solid stone, and found her legs so shaky she stumbled and fell against the damp wall.
A young man with a horribly scarred face squinted at her. “Who are you?”
Mara fumbled for her pocket and pulled out the crumpled piece of paper the trustee had given her. The young man opened it up, perused it, and grunted. “Good,” he said. “We’ve been short-handed.”
Ever since the roof fell in on Shimma, Mara thought sickly.
Someone else stepped off the platform behind her. She turned, and relief flooded her at the sight of Katia’s pale face. She wouldn’t be alone down here after all.
“Good,” the supervisor said again. “Katia, take Mara into six. She’s your new partner.”
Feeling more hopeful, Mara gave Katia a weak smile, but this time Katia did not return it. “This way,” she said, her voice, like her expression, tight and strained.
Katia led her into a narrow tunnel, only two arm-spans wide, but turned at once through a rough-hewn arch to the right into a large, crudely shaped chamber. Wicker baskets were stacked along one wall; sharpened steel rods, picks, metal wedges, and hammers were arranged on shelves on another, along with candle lanterns and water flasks. “Take one of everything,” Katia said, suiting actions to words. The baskets had leather straps into which she shoved her arms, making the basket into an awkward backpack. Mara copied her. The wicker bounced lightly on her back as she continued to move around the room. She tried to imagine carrying it, full of rock, through underground tunnels. Would she even be able to move?
Leather loops on the outside of the baskets held the hammers, wedges, and water flasks. That left Mara’s hands free to carry a candle lantern in one hand and a steel rod in the other. Thus laden, she followed Katia back out into the main tunnel, and then deeper into the mine.
Side tunnels branched off at intervals. Mara saw nothing but blackness down any of them, though the distant ringing of steel on stone spoke of someone at work. The air, warmer than she’d expected, was so muggy that sweat soaked her clothes before they’d traveled a hundred yards. Wooden beams and posts propped up the roof. Mara was uneasily aware of the enormous weight of rock hanging above their heads. The timbers, wet and dark, beams sagging, posts cracked, hardly seemed adequate to support it. “Did you know Shimma?” Mara said to Katia’s back, as the other girl led her deeper and deeper into the mine.
“She arrived in the same wagon as me,” Katia said without looking back. “We were partnered. I was at the shaft with a basket of ore when the cave-in happened.” She jerked her head. “Up here, on the right.”
They passed another side tunnel. Katia didn’t look down it, but Mara did. Tons of fallen rock, splintered timbers jutting out like the broken fangs of some slain, giant beast, blocked the tunnel just at the edge of the light. “Did anyone . . . try to dig her out?”
“No,” Katia said. “Nobody cared. Even if she survived the cave-in, she’s dead now. That was a month ago.”
Mara pictured a girl like herself, trapped in darkness, screaming, tearing at the stone with her fingernails, growing weaker and weaker until, finally . . .
She swallowed hard and said nothing more.
They trudged on another hundred feet. The ceiling got lower and lower, until they had to bend almost double. Mara couldn’t imagine a grown man making it this far. And then, horrifyingly, the tunnel narrowed again, to a hole they would have to enter on hands and knees. “In there?” Mara said, her voice quavering.
“In there,” Katia said grimly. For the first time she turned around and looked at Mara. Her face, pale
in the light of their candle lanterns, looked far older than her fifteen or so years: she looked, Mara thought, like an old woman. “Welcome to hell.”
She slipped her arms out of the straps of the basket and attached the candle lantern to a hook Mara had seen but hadn’t understood the purpose of until then. Then, still clutching the iron bar in one hand, shoving the basket ahead of her with the other, she got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel. Mara took a deep breath that did nothing to steady her shaking hands, took off her own basket, attached the candle lantern, pushed it into the tunnel after Katia, and followed.
FOURTEEN
Blood, Sweat, and Fears
EVEN ON HER HANDS AND KNEES, even without the basket on her back, the tunnel was so low Mara cracked her head twice on supporting timbers she failed to see in the flickering light of the lanterns, what little made it past the bulk of the basket in front of her. As well, it was incredibly awkward crawling with the steel bar in one hand: she bashed her knuckles on the stone with every sliding movement forward.
She gulped great ragged gasps of breath that roared in her ears but seemed to do nothing to fill her lungs, as though there were a shortage of air. Maybe there is, she thought, panic edging her thoughts. Maybe we’ll suffocate. She’d heard of such things happening in mines. But she’d also heard that in bad air candles would dim or die, and although she could only catch glimpses of its light, her lantern seemed to be burning normally.
It’s not a lack of air, she told herself. It’s fear. Terror.
Horror, if it came to that; horror at being where she was, hundreds of feet underground, tons of rock pressing in on every side; horror at being a prisoner of the Watchers, unMasked and hence not even a real person. She had become a shadow, and like a shadow, she might vanish at any instant. A shrug of the earth, the tiniest twitch, and a million tons of rock would squash her like an ant beneath the boot heel of a careless passerby on the cobblestones of Tamita.
Would they even tell her parents?
Her heart pounded in her ears, and a scream built in her throat. But just when she thought she couldn’t bear it any longer, the tunnel widened. It still wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, but it was at least wide enough she could crawl up alongside Katia, and high enough she could kneel. “That was awful,” she said, her voice thin and breathless in her ears. Blood from her battered knuckles covered the shaking hand she lifted to wipe sweat from her face.
Katia started to say something, then broke into a fit of coughing. She covered her mouth with her hand; when she took it away, Mara saw blood at the corner of her lips. “It gets worse,” she said hoarsely when she had caught her breath. “Now we have to work.”
Mara looked at the rock face. “What do we do?”
Katia pulled her arms free of her basket’s straps. “We have to produce six baskets of ore by the end of the shift.”
“Six?” Mara looked at the Katia’s basket. “That’s . . .”
“Impossible?” Katia shook her head. “You can’t think like that. You can’t. If you don’t make your quota, you get sent to the Watchers. For entertainment.”
Mara felt sick. “You mean . . . ?”
“Yeah,” Katia said. “I mean.”
“Have you . . . ?”
“Not yet,” Katia said. “Shimma and I always managed to make quota. And when I was on my own, they took me off quota. But now I have you. And that means the quota is back in effect. And that means . . .” She let the sentence trail off, but it didn’t take a mind reader to finish it.
“That means we’d better get to work,” Mara said. She took a deep breath and shrugged her own basket off her back. “All right. Show me.”
Katia showed her: how to pound the steel rod into the rock, splitting it; how to drive the metal wedge into the crack with the hammer and pound on it until pieces broke off the rock face; how to gather the chunks of stone into the basket. Mara, drenched with sweat, reached for her water bottle almost at once, but Katia stopped her. “That’s all the water you get,” she said. “All day. You have to make it last.”
“What about food?” Mara said.
“You didn’t bring any?”
Mara shook her head. “I didn’t even get breakfast,” she said.
“You have to save some of your breakfast for your lunch,” Katia said. “I’ll share today. But only this once.”
Mara nodded, abashed, and got back to work.
The ringing of steel on stone deafened her, the hammer seemed almost too heavy to lift, the flying chips threatened her eyesight, the dust choked her. She remembered the drop of blood at the corner of Katia’s mouth. From breathing rock dust, she thought. Day after day after day.
She resolved to find some way to cover her nose and mouth before the next day’s work. But even thinking that, “next day’s work,” made her feel weak. How could she do this day after day? How would she survive?
Would she?
The Warden’s offer hung in the back of her mind, a ray of light in a dark future. All she had to do was . . .
...betray the people who rescued me. Betray my friends.
No! She clenched her jaw and redoubled her efforts.
When at last they had filled a basket of ore, Katia looked at her lantern, and shook her head. “Too slow.”
Mara glanced at the flickering candle and for the first time saw the dark lines on it to mark the passage of time. “I’ll get faster,” she promised, but in fact she’d slowed considerably since starting.
Katia said nothing; just hung her lantern on the basket of ore, shoved the basket into the tunnel, then crawled in after it. Mara got down on her hands and knees and followed.
Back at the shaft, an older boy, maybe seventeen, waited. The shift supervisor was leaning out into the empty space to the right of the constantly moving man-engine, staring up into the darkness. The boy glanced at them, his scarred, pimply face contemptuous. “You’ll never make quota,” he said, his tone maliciously amused. “Gonna be a party in the Watchers’ barracks tonight. Wish I could be there.”
But the shift supervisor, without looking down, said, “They’re not on quota. Not for a week. Not until the new girl’s settled in.”
“What?” The boy’s face slumped into a pout. It didn’t improve his looks. “Why should they get a break?”
“Because the Warden says so,” the shift supervisor snapped. He looked at Mara, then. “And he told me to tell you that,” he added. “You think about that, girl. He’s giving you a few days’ grace because he wants something from you. If I were you, I’d give it to him.” He looked back up. “Here comes the bucket.”
Katia said nothing then, but as they made their way back down the tunnel with a new, empty basket, while behind them the rock they’d delivered rattled into the iron bucket that would take it to the surface, she glanced at Mara. “The Warden wants something from you?”
“Not that,” Mara said uncomfortably. “He thinks I must know something else about the attack on the wagon. Something I haven’t told him.”
“And do you?” Katia said.
For an instant, Mara wanted to tell her everything: about the rescue by the unMasked Army, about the Secret City, about the plan to have her make counterfeit Masks; wanted to offer Katia hope, hope that the unMasked Army might one day appear at the gates of the camp and free all the unMasked tortured and toiling within it.
Instead she bit her lip, and said nothing. It’s no kindness to give false hope, she told herself, and that was part of the reason: but another was that she already knew, or at least sensed, that in this place, you could never be certain whom you could trust. Katia might seem like a friend now, but if Mara told her the truth, then Katia would have the information the Warden wanted, and Katia wouldn’t be human if she weren’t sorely tempted to sell it to the Warden to buy her own escape from these hellish depths.
Depths
that are killing her, Mara thought, as Katia burst into another fit of coughing. That will kill me, too, if I can’t get out of here.
Would the unMasked Army appear at the gates of the camp? They had rescued her once, when they had never rescued anyone before. Was she important enough to them for them to risk revealing their existence with a rescue? The Warden, despite his suspicions, might eventually be convinced that the wagon had been attacked by one of the small bands of rogue unMasked already known to roam the Wild. But he’d never believe—and more importantly, the Autarch would never believe—that an all-out attack on the camp itself was the work of mere bandits. The Autarch would know then that an organized force opposed to his reign hid somewhere in the Wilderness. How long could the Secret City remain Secret if the Autarch bent all his resources to finding it?
Am I important enough for them to risk that? Mara asked herself.
She was deathly afraid that the answer was no.
Once she and Katia had crawled back to the rock face, Mara straightened and stretched. She glared at the black stone wall. “There’s nothing here that looks like it contains metal,” she complained. “What exactly are we mining, anyway?”
Katia shook her head. “No one knows,” she said. “We’ve all wondered, believe me. If it were precious metal or even gems, there’d be a crusher and maybe a smelter in the camp. But there isn’t.”
