Chapter 6: The Widow's Hands

I ran.

My ribs hadn't finished healing, and my palm was on fire, and I ran anyway.

The old adit was a stone mouth in the hillside above the town, half hidden by brambles.

Forty years ago, men had walked the silver out of it in baskets.

Now the town's children crawled in to dig for scraps of old iron to sell.

By the time I got there, a crowd stood at the mouth, and dust was still drifting out of it.

Six men were on their knees in the entrance, pulling stones out with their hands.

A woman was screaming a child's name into the dark.

From somewhere far back in the rock, a small voice answered her.

I knelt and looked up at the roof of the passage.

It was shale, gray and layered, and I had seen roofs like it every day for twenty years.

A long crack ran across it above the men's heads.

Grit was trickling out of the crack in a thin, steady stream.

"Get out," I said. "All of you, out of the entrance. Now."

One of them looked up at me with his face white with dust.

"My boys are in there!"

"And the roof over your head is moving. Look at the crack."

He looked.

The grit fell into his eyes.

"Out," I said again, and I grabbed his collar and pulled.

Gerd took another man by the belt, and the rest scrambled after us.

We were three steps clear when the slab came down.

It was the size of a table, and it hit the floor of the passage where they had been kneeling and broke in two.

Dust rolled out over all of us.

When it cleared, the crowd was staring at me.

I had never seen that look on their faces before.

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