Len Vey raised his copper-hooded lantern. His right hand turned the sky-slit collar until the narrow slit widened into a sharp, sharp-angled beam of olive light that pierced thirty paces of floating rock flour and sulfur dust.
The light sliced across the final row of iron cots, lighting up the far southwestern corner of the bunkhouse where the tongue-and-groove pine flooring met the rough limestone bedrock of the mountain.
Bed 19 was not empty.
Sitting on the collapsed straw ticking. Her back was pressed against the whitewashed stonework wall, was a small figure dressed in a giant gray woolen smock that reached past her ankles. Her knees were drawn up tight beneath her chin, her thin, bare arms wrapped securely around her shins. Her feet were bare, the soles pale and smooth as lard, resting motionless on the rusted iron slats of the frame.
Her hair was jet-black, cut straight across the nape of her neck in the severe, utilitarian fashion of town orphanage apprentices. What stopped Len’s breath was that her hair and her gray wool smock were fully clean. Entirely free of the gray dust, cobwebs, and crushed lime flour that coated every other surface in the sealed chamber. After twenty years in an airless vault, there was not a speck of mold on the hem of her garment.
