Geth Marr didn’t look at the water rising around his knees. He looked at the sixteen cedar cradles holding Melli Dorn’s heat-proof glass panels.
He saw the dark, damp line creeping up the unpainted cedar boards. Twenty-four inches above the quartzite floor, barely two inches below the dry horsehair and sawdust bedding where the glass plates rested. He saw Len Vey braced in the freezing vortex of Pump Number Two, his right arm driving the sounding pole into the intake grate. Meanwhile, his braced left arm was pinned uselessly to his ribs. He saw Varner Crane shivering wildly on the stone ledge, his lips blue, his teeth chattering so hard blood was seeping from a bitten lip.
He looked up at the ceiling. There, the fractured lead water chute was still disgorging a clouded eye of mountain water, forty thousand gallons every minute hammering down into the sump like a falling river.
And then Geth Marr looked at his own boots.
For forty-two years, Geth had worked the deep pits of the South Quarry. He had seen three shafts collapse under sudden crushing pressure. He had seen eighteen men drown in Level Six. Just then, the Old Council insisted on running coal cars through a flooded drift to meet an export quota for the capital. He remembered the faces of the widows waiting at the pit gates in the freezing rain, holding empty soup tins while the Survey inspectors explained that the loss of life was “an acceptable variance in…
