Edda was the first person through the breach. That was because her wiry, five-foot frame could slip through the ragged gap between the displaced granite blocks before the drilling gang cleared the upper top door beam.
Her right hand held the copper-hooded lamp, its olive flame turned low to conserve the treated rapeseed oil. Meanwhile, her shattered, braced left hand was pinned securely against her belly inside the bib of her heavy leather apron. Every movement sent a hot, sickening throb through her broken middle and ring fingers, the bone ends grinding together under the linen wraps. But she refused to wait in the drift with Jarek. She had worked Tier Four for eight seasons. If there was an unmapped void opening behind her working face, she wanted to see the roof before anyone else swung a pick.
She dropped through the jagged granite opening, her boots landing eighteen inches down onto a floor that produced no stone-dust clatter.
It wasn’t limestone bedrock. It was tongue-and-groove white pine flooring, laid in six-inch planks that had cured in the dry, stuffy air for twenty years. The boards were covered in an unbroken, quarter-inch carpet of fine gray dust that puffed upward around her ankles, creaking beneath her weight with the dry, hollow groan of an abandoned chapel floor.
