“They know the roof’s hung up,” Daahl told Li when one skittered into the room, panicked, and ran over her foot before it found its way back out. “There’s a big fall coming. I wouldn’t stay down there any longer than you have to.” He glanced at her, his pale eyes flashing blue as a Davy lamp’s flame in whitedamp. “I wouldn’t go down at all, frankly.”
They were at the strikers’ de facto command center in the Pit 2 headframe. It had taken Li and Bella a long, hard day and much of a night to get there, traveling through the tunnels beneath the birthlabs.
Cohen had ridden Li all through that long night journey—if ridden was the right word for it. He heard every thought, felt every twinge and misstep. And she felt him, knew him, all but was him. Finally she understood Cohen’s habitual confusion of pronouns. I, you, we. Yours. Mine. None of those words meant what she was used to them meaning. And none of them meant the same thing for more than a breath or two.
There were still borders between them, even now that the intraface was fully up. There were doors and walls, some of them solid enough to keep him out—or, more often, to keep her out of him. But no line of separation stayed put long enough for her to set a mark on it and say, Here I end, here he begins. In the end the walls only reminded her of how tangled up in him she was, how impossible it was to think or feel or even breathe without brushing up against him.
The headframe had changed since Li’s last visit. Strikers crowded the creaking corridors. Someone had brought in a truckload of mattresses and microlaminate blankets, and people were bedding down in the halls and changing rooms, even cooking on home-built methane stoves. Everyone was moving too fast, talking too loud, their voices pitched a little high for comfort. Li knew the mood. She’d seen it in students, navvies, line workers. It was the feel of any ragtag amateur army waiting for the riot troops to move in. But of course, she’d always seen it from the other side of the lines.
She pushed that thought away and stepped to the window. Someone had parked a mine truck outside so that its undercarriage partially shielded the window. She scanned the horizon between the truck’s wheels. The night was dark except for a scattering of cloud-strafed stars. The flat plain of the coalfield stretched away for miles, broken only by mountainous tailings piles and the rust-gnawed bones of mining machines. The place was chaos on infrared. The tailings piles were smoldering, as always. The junked vehicles and empty oil barrels still threw the sun’s heat back into the air hours after nightfall. But Li didn’t need infrared to see where the troops were; her eyes instinctively sought out each rim and hollow that could hide a soldier, snapped into focus every time firelight reflected off a sniper’s optical sight. Please God, she thought, just get me underground before I have to decide whether or not I’m willing to shoot at those kids.
“When will they move in?” she asked Daahl as Ramirez and Mirce Perkins walked in.
Daahl turned to them. “Any word?”
“Nothing new,” Ramirez said. Mirce didn’t answer at all, except for a curt shake of her head.
“We think we’ve got another day or two,” Daahl said.
“What happens if they move in while we’re underground?”
Mirce shrugged. “If they come, they come. And our biggest problems underground are going to be air and time, not ground troops.”
She rolled out a map and traced their path on it. Daahl’s guide would get them into the Trinidad, then split off into the back tunnels toward a vertical borehole that didn’t show up on the AMC maps. With a little scaling, the hole should be clean enough for someone at the top to lower fresh oxy canisters as long as there was a man at the bottom with a guide rope. When the live field run was complete, Li and Bella would make their way back to the oxygen dump, and Daahl’s men would haul them to the surface.
Li listened to Mirce with half her mind and traced the route on the maps with the other. It was doable. Eminently doable. She’d taken dicier gambles more than once. The only question this time was whether the mine was going to let them get away with it.
“You just get yourselves back to the drop,” Mirce concluded. “Once we rendezvous there we’ll evaluate the situation, and I’ll either get you out through the main gangway or up into the hills through the bootlegger tunnels.”
“You?” Li stared at her. “You’re not going. You can’t go.”
“Of course I am,” Mirce said. “I’m the best.”
Li looked toward Daahl, but before she could speak she heard a sound that raised her hackles and sent Daahl and Mirce diving toward the window. Rifle shots. And the shots came from this side of the line.
Li stepped up behind Daahl and Mirce and tried to see out the window herself. Hopeless. All she could see was movement, out across the flat plain in the twisting fire-shot shadows. Then the movement turned into a shape, the shape into a man. A man walking, holding a white flag.
“Tell them not to shoot!” Daahl snapped, and Ramirez took off out the door, running.
“Christ,” Li muttered. “That guy’s taking his life in his hands.”
“More than just his life,” Daahl said.
They waited. Ramirez reappeared in the doorway.
“We know who it is,” he said. “A militia officer seconded to Station Security. Shantytown kid too, I guess. Brian McCuen.”
Li caught her breath.
“Now why the hell would they send Brian?” Daahl asked slowly, quietly.
“Because,” Mirce said, her eyes as cold as the night side of a dead space station, “they think we won’t kill him.”
The miners outside, and maybe a few of the ones inside, got to McCuen before Li could. By the time she finally saw him, one eye was threatening to puff shut and he looked more than a little tattered around the edges.
“Are you crazy?” she said.
He just gave her a lost-puppy-dog look. “I need to talk to you alone.”
Li glanced at Daahl standing just behind her, at Mirce slouching in the open door.
“We’ll give you ten minutes,” Daahl said.
Mirce said nothing, just detached herself from the doorframe as Daahl went by and pulled the door shut behind her. Li sure as hell hoped she’d never stared at any Syndicate prisoners the way Mirce stared at McCuen.
“I haven’t told them anything,” McCuen said when they were alone, “except that I had to talk to you.”
“Well, you’re talking to me. What have you got to say for yourself?”
He just kept staring at her, trust, fear, suspicion chasing across his boyish face.
“Who sent you, Brian?”
His eyes evaded hers for a moment. “Don’t you know?”
“Haas?”
He glanced around the room hesitantly, searching the ramshackle walls for surveillance plants. Then he mouthed a single, silent syllable: Nguyen.
Don’t trust him, Cohen breathed into her backbrain. Not if he comes from Helen.
Li brushed the thought aside. She couldn’t afford not to trust Brian. Not if it might mean Nguyen had decided to slip her a much-needed ace under the table.
She pulled up a chair, sat down, and bent her head toward him so he could keep whispering at her. The room wasn’t bugged as far as she knew. And if it was bugged, then Mirce, for one, wasn’t going to waste much time beating whatever McCuen had whispered to her out of him. But if he wanted to play secret agent, let him. What harm could it do?
“She knows everything,” he told her, so close she could feel his breath in her ear. “I sent her the tape from airport security and she worked out the whole thing. Who’s holding you. Why. What Korchow wants from you.”