The mountain didn’t merely crack. It groaned like an ancient iron kettle splitting down its belly seam under thousands of sea-weights of steam.
Two thousand feet above Sector Nine, in the central haulage drift of Sector Four, the main earth-shaking fault line finally yielded to twenty years of reckless, unreinforced digging. For decades, the overseers had systematically stripped the supporting granite pillars to meet the insatiable flux quotas demanded by the Upper Sect. That left hundreds of thousands of tons of hanging bedrock suspended over empty air by rotting timber props and prayer.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan were sprinting up the service ladder from Sector Nine. Just then, the first blast wave hit.
The shift between the mining sectors was violent and disorienting. The choking sixty-degree sulfur steam of the deep trench gave way suddenly to the freezing draft of the middle drifts. Cold water drops froze instantly into sharp needles of rime on Lin Tao’s eyelashes and scorched collarbone. Beneath his rough hemp tunic, the spider-silk splint held his fractured collar bone in rigid, unbending immobility. But the violent jarring of every wooden ladder rung sent sharp tremors of white-hot agony through his ribs.
Beside him, Tie Shan climbed with rhythmic, monstrous power, his scarred shoulders bunched under the weight of his twelve-pound iron pry-bar.
Then, the mountain shuddered.
The shaking began as a deep, nauseating thrum in the soles of their boots. A low, deep hum of four point two cycles per second that caused the stale slurry in the gutters to dance in violent sharp-angled ripples. High in the rock arches, the stone-hard hardwood props began to squeal, their tightly packed fibers screaming as earth-shaking shear twisted them along their grain.
In the central drift of Sector Four, eighty miners of the second and third shifts were hauling ore carts toward the main elevator overhead frame. The air was filled with the rhythmic squeal of rusted iron axles, the hollow clatter of wooden shovels. The grunts of exhausted, half-starved men desperate to finish their twelve-hour rotation.
Without warning, the ceiling blew up.
With a bone-shaking roar that blew out every oil lamp in the sector, a fifty-ton monolith of dark metamorphic granite detached from the hanging wall. It didn’t tumble or slide. It dropped vertically like a headsman’s axe across the central haulage intersection.
Forty feet of stone-hard hardwood wooden props shattered in a split second. It snapped heavy twelve-inch oak crossbeams as if they were dry pine kindling.
The bone-shaking impact threw eighty men wildly off their feet. The blast wave ripped through the narrow hall, blasting men into the drainage ditches, overturning heavy iron carts, and filling the air with a blinding, iron-hard curtain of crushed limestone powder dust.
Miners lay tangled in the darkness, coughing up mouthfuls of dry rock flour, shrieking in blind panic as pebbles and sharp gravel rained down from the shattered ceiling arches.
“My leg! The timber has pinned my leg!” a young laborer screamed into the dust, his voice cracking with hysteria as he thrashed beneath a splintered crossbeam.
“The way is shut! The mountain has dropped its tooth!” another man cried out, his voice echoing in wild despair.
Old Man Geng crawled through the blinding dust on his hands and knees. His clouded eye-milky eyes wept thick tears of black mud. He reached out with trembling, scarred fingers. He felt the cold, impassable face of the fallen monolith.
The fifty-ton granite slab filled the entire tunnel from wall to wall, six feet thick and twelve feet high. It was wedged between the bedrock walls with thousands of pounds of crushing force per square inch, sealed tight by its own huge mass.
Behind it lay the eighty men of the working shifts. Ahead of it lay the only ventilating drift leading to the elevator shaft, the fresh air chimney pipes, and the surface world.
Through his left eye, Lin Tao surveyed the disaster from the threshold of the lower ladder landing:
Eighty-two living carbon organisms trapped in a sealed stone volume of less than two thousand cubic meters.
In four hours and twelve minutes, the oxygen concentration would drop below ten percent. The carbon dioxide saturation would induce severe breathing acidosis, confusion, convulsions, and permanent brain death. Long before the miners suffocated, the toxic methane seeping from the lower floor fissures would displace the leftover breathable air. That turned the haulage drift into a mass grave.
Lin Tao drew a slow, shallow breath, tasting the limestone powder coating the roof of his mouth. Beside him, Tie Shan stepped forward, his heavy iron pry-bar lowered, his broad jaw set in rigid silence.
Far up the upright air-flow chimney, the sound of heavy iron machinery echoed through the rock.
A junior overseer’s voice, amplified by a brass speaking-tube from the upper gatehouse, drifted down through the air vents:
“Attention Sector Four! A major earth-shaking fault has snapped! By order of Acting Senior Overseer Hu, the lower emergency portcullises are being dropped to preserve the air-flow of the Upper Sect! The lower drift is unsafe!”
The sound of iron teeth grinding against granite echoed down the shaft.
The three-inch solid-iron emergency drop-gate slammed into its granite tracks with a terrifying, final crash.
Overseer Hu had not merely abandoned them. He had locked the tomb from the outside to ensure that none of the miners could escape to testify about his embezzlement, his collapsed ledgers, or the assassination contract signed with his copper seal. Hu was burying the evidence beneath fifty tons of stone and eighty corpses.
Old Man Geng slumped against the fallen granite slab, beating the stone with his withered fists until his knuckles bled.
“We’re dead,” the old smith cried, his voice breaking into a dry, dusty rattle that echoed against the ceiling. “Hu has sealed the iron gate. The mountain has swallowed us whole, and the overseers will write us off as broken tools.”
The eighty miners huddled in the dark, their ragged, scared breathing sounding like the rustle of dry leaves in an abandoned tomb. Several of the younger boys curled into balls in the mud, sobbing quietly, waiting for the dark to choke them.
Lin Tao stepped past the weeping men, his boots crunching steadily over sharp granite gravel.
He reached into his belt and drew the four-inch land-mapper metal pen. He felt the cold steel bite into his callused palm. His eyes were clear, steady, and devoid of the blind hysteria that gripped the rest of the tunnel.
“Conserve your breath,” Lin Tao said, his voice quiet, calm, and cutting through the panic like an iron chisel. “The mountain has closed one mouth. We’ll find another.”