At midday on Day One Hundred and Thirty-One, deep inside the dark underground vault of Station IV, Kezra Venn prepared to close the third full-depth strata profile of her life.
The air around the central stone base was cold, still. Then it charged with the metal sharpness of powdered stone. To her left, the low timbered arch of the eastern drift ran three hundred and twenty paces along the footwall of the ancient fault. To her right, the dropping stepped adit of the western drift reached three hundred and twenty paces along the hanging wall. Between the two galleries, every foot of the fractured hard black rock lens had been scraped, struck, and recorded. Every white spar-stone sheet had been triangulated from opposing angles. The eighty-pace diabase dike that anchored the northern third of the plateau had been checked as sound, solid rock.
Voss stood three paces back from the stone base. He held both tin lanterns so their overlapping light washed over the brass datum socket and the open pages of Kezra’s bonded notebook resting on the wooden instrument stand. The old miner’s face was lined with sweat and gray stone dust, his breathing slow and heavy.
“You have the eastern book,” Voss said, pointing his pick handle toward the open leaves. “And you have the western book. When you strike the master socket, do you know what the mountain will answer?”
