Chapter 5: Ten Minutes

The slab sat on his arms for nine minutes, and he knew it was nine because the Prop told him.

It was not a sound or a number.

The hold wore down in him, and at the ninth minute the burn in his shoulders turned into something that wanted to let go.

[Stamina: 9 of 100.]

Da-hae came back out of the dark at a run with both lamps in her fists and the wardens behind her.

She did not stop to ask how he was.

She stopped in front of the slab, and her eyes went over it.

She said, "The south rib has taken a third of it. Put your right foot forward. Now your left hand a handbreadth up."

He did it, and it was easier, though he could not have said why.

"There is a knuckle in the coal there," she said.

"If you stand on the line the weight runs, you're holding a leaning wall, not a falling one."

"Another half minute and it sits on its own."

She counted it aloud, steadily, with her fingers moving against her thigh.

At thirty, the slab settled with a small dry sound, and nothing else happened.

He took his hands off the rib.

His palms were raw and slick, and his arms hung from his shoulders.

"That's what [Plumb] is for," Da-hae said, though he had not asked.

Then, without any change of face, she went down on one knee next to him and pushed a mint tin into his hand.

They walked back through the dark with all eight lamps, the crawlers retreating and closing in again at every step.

The older warden put his pane of air in front of the last rush and sat down on the black floor at the cage, shaking.

"Eleven years doing this," he said to nobody, "and I've never come out feeling like I'd been carried."

They rode up in silence.

At the top, the wardens signed Da-hae's form with unsteady hands and went to sit in their truck.

She stayed in the lamp house with the broken gauge on the counter between them.

The glass was split from edge to edge, and the needle was pinned at the end of its dial.

"The record," Seok-hyun said.

"Surge index zero, duration sixty-three minutes, no casualties." She was writing on the form as she spoke. "Instrument failure at the far wall."

"That's not what happened."

"No," she said, and kept writing.

He watched her do it.

She had the neat, stubborn handwriting of someone who had never falsified a line in her life.

When she finished, she set the pen down and looked at the gauge.

"My brother was a raider," she said. "Jeongseon, March 2024."

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