The first sixty feet of the upright chimney were an ordeal of physical friction. The draft rushed upward past Tomas’s ears with a constant, hollow roar. It carried the bitter soot of decades into their eyes and nostrils. The iron climbing spikes were so cold they burned the skin of bare palms like hot coals.
Tomas climbed rung by rung, his iron-spurred boots finding the narrow granite footholds beneath each iron spike. On his back, the seventy-five-pound burden of Dennis Cole’s slate tablets pressed heavily into his lower-back spine, shifting with every upward reach.
At eighty feet above the drift floor, the physical toll of sixteen years of starvation struck the children.
Twelve-year-old Toby, the smallest of the splitters, began to sob. His thin arms were shaking wildly, his fingers cramping into rigid claws on the iron rung. “I can’t... I can’t hold on... My fingers won’t close...”
“Keep your boots against the rock, Toby!” Sile’s deep voice rumbled from five rungs above him. His heavy hand reached down to brace the boy’s waist belt. “Don’t look at your hands! Push with your heels!”
Before Toby could find purchase, Jem Vance’s foot slipped on a greasy patch of wet coal soot. Jem gasped, his body peeling backward from the ladder into empty upright space.
