McCuen had noticed it too. He checked his Spohr badge. When he looked up, his eyes were wide.
“You okay?” Li asked.
He nodded, but his face was pale and sweat-slicked and his eyes burned feverishly.
“Go back down,” she told him.
He shook his head.
“Just do it. Want to get yourself killed? I’ll meet you in ten.”
She watched him down the steep climb and onto flatter ground. Then she asked herself if what she was about to do was a good idea.
The passage ran steadily uphill, and whitedamp would collect at the top of the chamber. By the time she found Cartwright, the air would be bad enough to kill an unaltered human. Her very presence would advertise what she was as surely as if she’d written it across her coveralls. But if he was up there, he was the same. And why would another construct betray her?
She took off her badge and set it on the floor of the tunnel. She left her headlamp and helmet beside the badge, switched off her internal recorder, and shifted her optics to infrared. She couldn’t turn off her black box, but if and when they cracked it open she’d have more terminal things to worry about than whether some Corps tech knew she wasn’t just quarter-bred.
The smell of violets got stronger. Soon she was traveling through a lethal cocktail of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Her internals launched wave after wave of scrubbers into her bloodstream, fighting off suffocation. Finally she began to hear the steady clinking of a rock hammer. Cartwright was up there. Alone. Without ventilation or oxygen. Prospecting for condensates in a deadly haze of whitedamp. She shook herself like someone waking from a bad dream and crawled forward into the choking darkness.
She came on him unexpectedly—but then unexpectedly was how you always came on people in this bootlegger’s world of narrow passages and flickering lamp beams. He was undercutting the seam, carving out a space for the cut coal and crystal to drop into. He had undercut the vast hanging weight of the coal so deeply that only his legs were still out in the open chamber. Yellow I-profile virusteel chocks propped up the now-unsupported face, and as he worked he pushed the freshly cut coal back out past them so that it piled up like a monstrous black molehill. When he’d made his undercut, he’d pull out the chocks and wedge-drop the coal from the top. Dropping a coal face without explosives was hard slow dangerous work, but it was worth it if the strike was rich enough. And this one was rich; the exposed face of the Bose-Einstein bed flared white-hot on infrared, like half-buried diamonds.
Cartwright didn’t hear her arrive; his hammer must have covered any noise she’d made. She watched him, catching her breath. After a moment he stopped hammering, and she could hear him breathing, wheezing a little. When he spoke, she thought he was talking to himself.
“Hello, Caitlyn,” he said. “Or whatever you’re calling yourself now.”
She froze, heart pounding.
She’d feared this moment, dreaded it. But she hadn’t expected it to come like this. Had he seen her? Heard her? How did he know her?
Cartwright slid out from under the face, coveralls rucking up over skinny shins. He’d stripped to the waist. Coal scars ran so thick over his back and shoulders that they looked like a contour map of the mountains whose roots he’d spent his life dismantling.
“How long has it been, Katie? Eighteen years? Twenty?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cartwright just tilted his head curiously, looking like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. “You still have your mother’s voice,” he said. “Though they say you’ve forgotten her. Are they right? Have you? Never mind. Let me get a look at you.”
He put his hands to her face, and Li realized at the touch of skin on skin what had been nagging her throughout this conversation: there was no light. Cartwright had been working in total darkness, without a lamp or infra goggles.
He was blind.
His fingers walked over her nose and lips, into her eye sockets. “You’ve changed your face,” he said. “But you’re Gil’s daughter. Mirce told them you’d died, but I knew. They would have told me. They keep their secrets, of course. But something like that they’d have told me.”
“Who would have told you?”
“The saints, Katie. Her saints. Don’t tell me you’ve stopped praying to Her. You mustn’t do that, Katie. She needs our prayers. She lives by them. And She answers them.”
Li glanced down, saw the cold fire of the silver crucifix hanging on the priest’s scarred chest. A strangled cry echoed against the rock, and she realized that it came from her own throat.
Cartwright kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve come to ask me about the fire, haven’t you?”
Li swallowed, scraped her thoughts together. “What caused it, Cartwright?”
“Sharifi.”
“How? What was she after? What did she want you to do for her?”
“What witches always do; strike crystal.”
“But Sharifi had the company witch,” she said.
“Ah, but she didn’t trust the company witch, did she? Not at first. She only brought her in for the dirty work.”
“You mean the work in the Trinidad. But what was the witch doing there if they’d already found the condensa—the crystal?”
“She still needed someone to sing them for her, didn’t she? She still needed to talk to them. She still needed to run her damn tests. I wouldn’t do it for her. And she didn’t want a priest anyway.” His face twisted. “She wasn’t a believing woman.”
“I don’t understand. What wouldn’t you do for her?”
“Haas’s work,” Cartwright answered. “Devil’s work.”
“But she changed her mind, didn’t she?” Li asked, seized by a trembling conviction that Cartwright knew, that he’d always known, that he was somehow at the center of it all. “Or someone changed it for her. What happened before the fire? Why did Sharifi destroy her data? What was she afraid of?”
“Of the fires of Hell,” Cartwright said, crossing himself. “Of Her just punishments.”
Li heard a noise in the darkness, closer than any noise should be, and realized that she was trembling violently, that it was the soft clink of the zipper tab at her throat she was hearing, the rustle of her own clothes against skin and rock.
“You should visit your mother,” Cartwright said. “It’s not good to neglect her.”
“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, Cartwright.”
“That’s not what your father says.”
A memory welled up from her gut like an underground river. She stopped it, corked it, slammed every door in her mind on it. “My father’s dead,” she said harshly. “And I came here for information, not church talk.”
“You came for the same reason we all come,” Cartwright said. “She called you.”
Li cleared her throat, choking on coal dust. “Did Sharifi’s project have union approval?”
“I’m Her man,” Cartwright said. “Not the union’s man.”
“Don’t feed me that line.” She held up her right hand in the gesture of the faded, peeling Christ Triumphant that had reigned over the Saturday night masses of her half-remembered childhood. “You’re two fingers of the same hand. I remember that much.”
“Then you remember enough to answer your question yourself. Haven’t you been there? They told me you swam in it.”
“The glory hole,” Li whispered, remembering the gleaming walls and fractal vaults of Sharifi’s secret chamber. “It’s a chapel. You found her a chapel.”