Hunger Makes the Wolf

by Alex Wells

  Alone, with only the sound of wind whistling past her helmet and the hum of wheels on sand, she let the sadness and rage at seeing Phil shot in the back and abandoned to burn black on the sand well up inside her. It made her eye sting, but no more than that. Maybe because she hadn’t seen him for anything but business in three years – though whose fault had that been, with her too ashamed to look anyone in the eye after what had happened with the preacher’s boy?

  Or maybe she just didn’t have it in her to cry any more.

  She hadn’t seen Irina or Mag at all these past three years. First she’d been fighting just to convince herself she deserved to live, then to convince the others she still had a place among the Wolves. And by the time she was allowed back into Rouse, she’d found she was still torn up and angry at Mag for betraying her to Old Nick, even though she knew now it had needed to be done. No other way had been possible, but that didn’t make it hurt any less when your best friend, your sister, turned on you. But she knew also that she owed it to Mag and to her mother to bring this message in person. Some small, horrible part of her was a little glad to have this excuse to see them again, to maybe wring a drop of something positive from a tragedy.

  Maybe she’d forgive them.

  Maybe they’d forgive her.

  Except this chance to reach back to the pretty parts of her past had come at the cost of a good man’s life, the only truly good man she’d ever known.

  It wasn’t worth it.

  Chapter Two

  Then

  * * *

  The accident, the second in two weeks, started as a rumble in the ground, indistinguishable from normal blasting down in the mines. Only no blasting had been announced by the pit boss, and the sirens hadn’t sounded the two-minute warning.

  And the rumble continued, building. Windows and dishes rattled; pictures fell from walls.

  Men and women hurried from their houses, turning their eyes toward the high mine shaft. Dust poured from it like the black rocks had become a smokestack.

  Phil stood in the street with a napkin still tucked into his collar, a half-eaten sausage and cheese klobasnek in his hand. He’d taken the early lunch today, trading his normal spot with another crew leader so the man could leave work a little early and celebrate his anniversary with his wife. He watched the dust pouring from the mineshaft, his face gone grim and pale and his stomach gone hollow around his lunch, but made no move toward the mine, not yet.

  Until a cave-in had finished, there was nothing to be done but wait.

  Mag rushed from their house, took the napkin and half-eaten roll from him, handed him his hardhat. As Phil slipped the helmet on, its sweatband gone stiff and crackly with salt, the rumbling stopped.

  Every able-bodied man and woman ran for the mines.

  Even with sweat and fear thick in the air, the crowd was orderly. Everyone had a job for cave-ins and accidents, and disturbing that order would only claim more lives. First aid kits were grabbed, reinforced emergency pneumatic struts and timbers hauled up to the mine entrance, rope laid and belayed.

  Phil was an experienced rope man, nimble and quick like a monkey despite his girth. He was the first in, his headlamp lighting automatically in the darkness. As he clipped on a harness, someone else handed him an oxygen mask and tank, and a lamp with a live flame and a special chimney that was far more reliable at detecting deadly gases on this world than any newer technology the freshest immigrants tended to brag about.

  He looped six more ropes and harnesses through his belt and set off down into the dark. Behind him there was no shouting, just grim words and the jangling of harnesses, the shuffling of ropes as more rescuers got ready.

  The main tunnels were still intact, but he noted warped and cracking timbers as he went deeper and marked them with hasty splashes of luminescent paint. The few places reinforcement plates had been melded on, corrosion turned the bright steel black, and pressure had the members warped and twisted. He moved slowly and cautiously, listening always for the sound of more cracking, the sign that another cave-in was imminent. Dust was thick in the air, first white, then gray, then black.

  At the bottom of the main shaft the dust took on a strange quality, glittering in the air like tiny blue sparks. He checked the lantern; the flame flickered in a strange way he’d never seen before. Not wanting to take chances, he pulled on his oxygen mask, and then took a small emergency light from one of the packs at his belt. He twisted the light to connect the battery and spiked it into the wall, leaving it there as a blinking red warning.

  He peered down the branching paths of the secondary shafts, each cut to follow a separate vein of ore – Perida Type One, Skana, Norline Type Two, ores that had no off-world equivalent that any miner had ever discovered, with names that had no meaning beyond a suggestion of how best to break the rock. All were still active, but instinct turned him toward the newest. That was where the most activity had been, and where the other accident had happened a little over a week before: a wall collapsing to reveal a new vein that had the company men all but soiling themselves with glee. Something about purity, reactivity, a brittleness to it that also spelled danger.

  Only a hundred feet into that shaft there was a shattered timber, warped shards of it half buried in rock. He held his breath, turning off his oxygen for a moment so he could just listen.

  Sobbing. There was sobbing, coming from below the timber.

  He crouched down, peering into the darkness under the timber. “Can ya hear me?” he whispered.

  The sobbing hitched, stumbled to a halt. A hand black with dirt thrust out from the rocks. He could make out the tattered remnants of a jacket, what might have been blue, and a filthy shirt cuff beneath; this was one of the company observers. “Help me,” the man whispered, breath rattling.

  “Got more coming, you just hold on,” Phil said. No matter how he felt about TransRift, every man buried alive in a mine was his brother at that moment. He’d survived two collapses himself, and still woke with nightmares. “You know if anyone else is close behind you?” Carefully, he began to clear little rocks a few at time, testing each before moving it. The smallest thing could set off another chain reaction if he was too hasty.

  “No. They were… still down at the vein. Found something big. Super told me to run it up… to the surface.”

  More to keep him talking than anything else – talk had a way of calming a man, particularly when it was work talk – Phil asked, “What kind of big thing?”

  “Important. Real important. Got to get it to the lab.” The man snorted, sniffled, then gasped. “It’s in my coat pocket. Get it to the lab. Promise me.”

  “Promise I will. What’s your name, friend?”

  The man didn’t answer. Phil tried again, then felt his wrist, searching for the flutter of a pulse. There was nothing. Even knowing that it was a corpse on the other side, he continued his painstaking task. Two more from the rescue crew joined him, and they started digging in earnest, unearthing the ruin of the man. His head was bloody, face obscured by a self-rescuer, not that the little air reservoir had been able to help him at all. One side of his chest was crushed, presumably from the roof collapsing. It was impossible to tell if he was young or old, what color he was, anything. Phil hauled the body out to the main shaft, carefully avoiding men carrying timbers. At the surface, he felt through the man’s jacket pockets, remembering his promise. All he found was a little burlap bag, the sort company men used for assay samples – nothing that unusual. He didn’t bother to open it, just stuffed it in his own pocket to deal with later.

  The nameless company man wasn’t the last corpse they hauled out from the cave-in.

  They worked for hours, painstakingly digging and reinforcing as they went. They unearthed more dead men, miner after miner, and Phil took his turn at the grim work of escorting the corpses to the surface where their spouses and children waited to try to identify them. Some wailed, but the worst were the silent ones; Phil wished he could simply stay under the groun
d, do the work. It would hurt less.

  Muffled shouts of excitement heralded them breaking through to an air pocket. Three people – two miners and the other company man – had huddled together in a little pyramid of space made by fallen timbers. They were all three unconscious, but alive, pulses faint but there. Phil carried out one of the miners, a young woman with dragonflies tattooed on both her arms. As soon as they broke into the afternoon sunlight, medics took her from him. A man, presumably her husband, screamed her name, “Martessa!”

  Those were the only survivors. It was impossible to know if they would recover, how badly they were hurt. Phil stayed with the crews until they were certain that no one else lived, and then the rest of the recovery effort was given over to the next shift, to finish reinforcing the shaft so work could resume. TransRift accepted no work stoppages for less than catastrophic reasons, and they had quotas to fill if they didn’t want their pay docked.

  Phil left most of his gear with the replacement crew. His headlamp made a circle of light that led him back to his house in the darkness; all power in the town had been diverted to the mine, to run the few simple machines they could get working underground with electromagnetic shielding on full. He’d heard the pit boss complaining about the expense of repairing the machinery after even limited use, but getting the mine back online again outweighed that cost. That was the reason sweat and muscle dug the shafts, and most of the conveyers were powered by teams of oxen. Blood and sweat was cheaper than electricity and shielding and the maintenance on finicky mining equipment that worked just fine on every planet but this one. None of the miners complained about that fact; it meant they had steady if dangerous work that fed their families.

  Mag and Irina both waited up for him even though they, too, were exhausted. They hadn’t gone down into the mine, but they had helped keep the rescuers fed and watered, had helped the newly minted widows and widowers deal with the corpses of their loved ones, and had helped with first aid as well from the look of the stains on their skirts and sleeves. Mag took Phil’s clothes to be washed – he needed them for tomorrow since he had only one safety jacket – while Irina assisted him into the bath, scrubbed his back for him and washed his hair.

  When he insisted he could handle dressing himself, Irina went to fix them all something to eat before they crawled into bed. Phil always felt too heartsick to eat after an accident, but knew his stomach would be howling as soon as he clapped eyes on any food.

  Mag waited at the bottom of the stairs as he came down. “Papa?”

  “Hm?” When had she gotten so big? She was a solid girl, his Mag, a workhorse, as plump as he and Irina had been able to manage. She kept her dark brown hair in a long braid, a short fringe hanging over her earnest, hazel eyes and snub nose.

  “I found this in your jacket.” Mag held up the dirty little burlap bag. “What is it?”

  “Sample bag, I think.” Phil took it from her and opened the drawstring at the top, then spilled the contents onto both his hand and Mag’s: shining blue crystals, ranging from the size of a penny down to little more than dust, half perfect crystal faces and half broken shards.

  Mag let out a little wondering sigh at the sight of all that sparkle, her breath stirring the dust. “What is it? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I haven’t either. Guess they found this at the end of the new shaft. One of the company men had it; said it was important, needed to go to the labs. Here, best put it all back.”

  “Most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a while…” Mag said. She tipped her hand; most of the crystals slid back into the bag, but the small ones clung to the fresh cuts and scrapes that decorated her palm and fingers, souvenirs of a hard day’s labor. She scraped the dust off with her fingernails.

  Phil had seen sample bags before, had seen new grades of ore picked out by company men sent back to the lab for processing. After Mag and Irina had gone to bed, he sat up thinking, rolling the little burlap bag in his hands.

  Tiny sample bags like this carried more than scraps of rock. If what they contained was good news for TransRift, there’d be new shafts to be cut and higher quotas from them, more company men pushing for faster work and demanding longer hours and more miners to do it. If there were offworlders coming in soon, they’d get swallowed up into the mine right quick. But if that weren’t enough bodies to meet the work demand, there’d be mandatory overtime, and even regular townsfolk pressed into service in the mine. He’d seen it before in Walsen, almost thirty years ago. Seen people who’d never been in a shaft brought in to work with paychecks held captive until they complied, had seen the sickness and accidents and deaths that followed. The mine hungered for able bodies and spat out everything it chewed up.

  He had never seen a sample, a vein like this. With the company man – must have been a geologist, he supposed, but all the management types dressed alike – so bleeding sure that it was important that he spent his last breath on it, Phil had no doubt it would be cause for fresh shafts and longer hours at the least. Already, the pit boss pushed them too hard; two accidents in two weeks, a third not a month before. He didn’t want to see Mag being finally brought down into the mines with the siren call of overtime wages. She’d been speaking about it lately, making jokes about not being useful for anything else, how she needed to start earning her keep. She was his daughter, blood, bone, and soul; if she put her mind to something, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. And even if he could keep her out of the voluntary work call, if production fell behind things could get involuntary in a breathless hurry.

  He’d told the company man that he’d hand the bag over, but it’d been comfort for a dying man. TransRift never kept its promises to the miners unless it suited; he didn’t feel even a twinge at welching on one to them, for a few days at least.

  Phil climbed down into his cellar and opened up a nearly empty flour barrel. It had a false bottom and he dug out several stacks of flexible plastic bills, a box of chits. He’d been saving to get the three of them passage on a ship off world, but there didn’t seem to be more time to spend on waiting. Mag would have to just go ahead of them. He didn’t want to see his daughter get worked to death in the mines, or die in a cave-in, and he knew from speaking with representatives from Blessid that life was really no easier nor safer in the farming towns.

  He stacked the money on the kitchen table, and then spilled the little blue crystals from their burlap sack again, stirring them around on the wood with one blunt finger. It was hypnotizing, the way the light glittered on their surface, all spark and fire.

  Like the spark and fire he’d seen dancing across his own brother’s hands on occasion over the last thirty years, and that scared him more than anything else. He wasn’t supposed to know about that, and pretended he didn’t whenever anyone breathed a word about witchiness. Bad enough that Nick – though he hadn’t been Nick then – had been blacklisted so many years ago. He wanted no more stain on their family that would draw the eye of the company men, always so alert for their contamination and disease and criminal hazards. But he knew also that Nick had wanted him to see that fire. Maybe so he’d know his little brother had gone and really hecked his life up, maybe because Nick wanted to see if there was one person in the world he couldn’t scare the hell out of. You never knew with Nick.

  Phil scooped the crystals back into the bag, coming to a second decision; he needed to show this to Nick, and see if he’d know what it might be, what it might do to the town if they started hauling the stuff to the surface. Nick knew a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to know. And if Nick wanted to bring his pet Bone Collector in, well, all the better since the man was strangeness embodied. Just thinking about him sent a cold shiver down Phil’s back.

  Keeping the sample bag hidden would be easy enough; no one knew he had it. Probably safest of all to keep it with him, where it wouldn’t be found by Irina or a nosy houseguest. If there was trouble, the blame should fall only on him and not on his family. He could wait until he had a day of
f and meet up quiet-like with Nick.

  “Papa?”

  He looked over his shoulder. Mag blinked sleepily, face pale in the light of dawn. “Go back to bed, Mag. You worked hard today. You can sleep in.”

  Mag sat down at the table, eyes straying over the sample bag. Phil tucked it into his coat pocket when it looked like she might reach for it. “Did you even go to sleep?”

  “Not yet. I had some thinking to do.”

  She turned her attention to the money that also sat on the table. “What’s all this for?”

  “Passage off world. If I read the schedule right, there should be a ship by the end of the week. I want to send you away on it.”

  Her face went dead white. “Papa, no…”

  “I want something better for you than this,” Phil said. “Don’t argue with me, Mag. And don’t be too scared about it. There’s almost enough money for a second fare. I’ll work harder, take some extra shifts, to get a third. Your mother and I should be able to follow you in a year, maybe two. So think of yourself as the advance party. You got to find yourself some good work, get a place prepared for us.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to go.”

  “This ain’t no place for honest folk, Mag. Not with cave-ins and the blacklist always hangin’ over our heads. Your Uncle Nick is what he is ’cause he was blacklisted, you know that?” Phil reached out, put his hands over hers.