The gully above the first staging camp was a narrow, wind-funneled fracture choked with tilted plates of dark grey rock. The slate walls rose forty feet on either side, their upper rims corniced with wind-packed snow that looked like frozen wave crests ready to break.
Voss stopped at the base of a tilted rock shelf that angled twenty degrees across the chute, its surface glazed with black verglas where a meltwater seep had frozen hard in the shadow. He jammed his pry-bar into a lateral joint. He tested the stone, then turned to look back down at Kezra.
“I still don’t like it,” the miner said, his breath coming in white, ragged puffs. “Erasing that clearing down there. In the deep galleries, if you open an air-door or timber a crosscut, you keep the passage open behind you. If the roof starts talking or the gas comes up, you have a hole to crawl into. That clearing had four walls, good air, and an eight-pace baked flint-rock floor. Why not leave it in the book as an escape?”
Yseld uncoiled forty feet of braided hemp rope from her pack and tossed the bitter end across to Voss. She pulled the coils through her fingers with a practiced, rhythmic flick, inspecting the sheath for internal knots or frost-cracked hemp fibers.
