The underground air smelled of sulfur, damp slate, and scorched skin, thick enough to leave a bitter grease on the roof of Arda Dorn’s mouth.
She stood with her boots planted firmly across the iron haulage rails, her left gauntlet resting on the brass pommel of her officer’s broadsword, her right hand holding the tin service lantern at shoulder height. Behind her, the six men of her watch squad—boys from the border parishes she had drilled through three wet autumns until they could form an echelon in their sleep—stood in dead silence, their spear points lowered toward the gravel.
Not a single soldier looked at Sella Rusk’s round ash shield.
Every pair of eyes in Dorn’s squad was fastened to the hands of the twelve miners huddled in the shadows of the dry seam.
Young Tam was crying without a sound, his shoulders shaking beneath his torn wool shirt as he held his palms out before his chest like two raw pieces of meat. The skin was burned black in a perfect circle two inches wide, the blistered edges leaking pale yellow serum over his wrists. Beside him, Jarn leaned against the timber prop with his grey beard pressed to his chest, his knuckles stiffened into claws by the electrical discharge that had fused ten silver tokens into slag on the basalt plinth.
