CANDLETOWN COMPANY’S MERULA COLLIERY served the Grackle, Cowbird, and Bobolink Mines. Miles and miles of underground galleries interconnected these mines, with five pits of access, all sealed since the disaster.
Eventually, after another dizzying, thigh-burning, lung-wheezing, eternal climb—during which Desdemona contemplated eating her metal bouquet, Farklewhit’s hat, the dogs, and herself—the anthracite stair leveled out into a tunnel shored up by wooden beams. Two rusted metal tracks led away from what became, as soon as it ceased being a stairway through worlds, a solid rock wall.
The moment her foot touched the metal rail, Desdemona’s furs sagged off her skin. She tested her tails. Not a single wag. They hung limply off her belted coat, no longer a part of her. Salmon-gold ribbons of a ragged taffeta hem flapped around her ankles.
She was home.
Before she could wail at the loss, even the light from Farklewhit’s hat winked out, taking her vision with it.
No night-sight now. Only darkness.
The air was close. This far underground, the climate was tropical but stuffy. The pack of hounds, however, seemed indifferent to air quality, their eager shapes trotting past her when she hesitated, their paws making no noise in the debris-filled tunnels. Trembling, sore, sweltering, Desdemona picked her way after them, following the rails by tentative touch, with only her breathing to bear her company, until, gradually, the silence began to murmur and seethe. Darkness split into dancing shadows. Somewhere nearby—just up ahead—there were lights. They were moving her way. No human voices yet reached her straining ears (she was, alas, down to a single, dull pair now), but the urgent activity of breath whistled down the shaft: the rhythmic, mechanical inhalations and exhalations of oxygen rebreathing apparatuses. And footsteps: plodding, diligent, deliberate.
The dogs had vanished around a bend. Desdemona hastily stopped on the tracks and drew back against a wall. Tucking the bouquet Chaz had given her under her arm, she shook out Farklewhit’s cap and quickly flipped it inside out, jamming it over her head. She had seen him do this trick her first time at the Mirradarra Doorway to effect a quick disappearance and only hoped it would work for her. The last thing she wanted was to explain to a party of rescue workers how the socialite daughter of H.H. Mannering, Candletown Company heiress, the Anthracite Princess herself, came to be in the depths of Merula Colliery with the sole survivors of the underground explosion. Who just happened to be dogs. If they were still dogs.
The hat sort of melted around her face, stink-first, and Desdemona felt herself disappear. She leaned into that fetor-of-Farklewhit blackness, closing her eyes as a feeling of intense comfort washed over her. It wasn’t the whole world going black, she knew—only herself in it—as if she and Farklewhit were alone together in Bana the Bone Kingdom on an errand of great importance, with only a pink apron between their nakedness. Feeling safer now, steadier, Desdemona plunged ahead around the bend—right into the milling midst of miners and rescue workers.
The latter were sometimes called “frogmen” because of their equipment, which was based on that of combat divers. In fact, the monstrous hodgepodge of their apparatuses lent them more a chimerical aspect than amphibious, with their pig-snouted rebreathers, the camel humps of their great backpacks, their rubber-skinned suits, and their goggle eyes. In contrast, the miners looked like they had stepped full-formed out of Merula’s dusty womb. They were tense and nervous, faces black with coal dust, eyes like carbide lamps. They said almost nothing but allowed themselves to be patched and palpitated, swabbed, and bandaged. The rescue workers, communicating mostly through hand gestures, offered them sandwiches.
Refusing the food, one of the miners said in a soft, crackly voice that he thought maybe they’d been eating all right, out of the lunch pails of their dead pals, but they’d drunk the last of their water last night and could use a swig?
The rescue workers’ response was a swift deluge of canteens, then just as efficiently, they ushered the bewildered miners up the same shaft whence they had come. Invisible Desdemona slunk in their wake, one arm full of gold and silver branches, the other piled with the sandwiches the miners had let fall, all of which she single-mindedly consumed long before they reached the surface.
Then, sunlight—like a blow to the head.
The world became the negative of a photograph. White silhouettes against a black background. This impression faded slowly into color and substance, and soon the static roar of radio silence splintered into many noises all jabbering at once.
Desdemona shielded her eyes and humped up her stinking furs all about her for protection. She knew she was invisible, that she was safe from the pops and clicks of the cameras, the journalists yelling questions to the rescue team, the police whistles, the cries of bereaved friends and families converging on the survivors. Even so, she wished herself back in the mines. Better yet, in the labyrinthine midnight caverns two worlds below . . .
It took her a few more minutes of recalibration before she noticed the protestors marching around the colliery, their numbers swelling by the minute as word of the rescue spread throughout Seafall. There were strikers from different labor unions—the Mine Workers, the Iron Knights, the Leressan Teamsters, the United Locomotive Engineers. There was her former lover Salissay, side by side with Lu “The Pit Bull” Dimaguiba, Salissay’s auntie and union steward to the ULE. She stood chatting with Mrs. Mannering and Mrs. Alderwood, who both wore very large hats and carried even larger signs that read: RETREAT LATER! RESCUE NOW!
Other fashionably dressed women, of the sort Chaz called “Tracy’s hyenas,” all wearing similar hats and carrying similar signs, faced off against the Candletown Company Coal Enforcers, H.H.’s private security squad, whose ranks were joined by the sheriff of Seafall’s citizen posse. The deputies were armed with rifles, billy clubs, and riot shields. The female philanthropists had custom shoes and tailored suits and surnames of note, and if these were not enough—which was always a grim possibility—the heft of their handbags and the steel tips of their umbrellas gave warning that they were more than ready to hit back.
Usually such an astonishingly photogenic confrontation would attract the attention of the press. But today, nothing less exciting than a fusillade could drag their lenses away from the rescue team emerging from the pithead, survivors in tow. The rescuers shouted for order, for space. The crowd ignored them, swamping the miners with blankets, lifting them in their arms, bearing them away to waiting ambulances.
Desdemona stumbled after, pausing only once when she passed Salissay in her signature black-and-white-checkered coat, scribbling furiously in her notebook while taking a headcount of the survivors.
“Twenty-one,” she was shouting excitedly. “Twenty-one recovered! Does anyone know their names? Their names?”
The number disturbed Desdemona for some reason. She tried to think. It wasn’t the right number. She was so tired she couldn’t remember what the right number should be. The hulk of her furs weighed on her. The bulk of a dozen dry-scarfed sandwiches sat edgily in her belly. Her bare feet were blistered and cracked.
Pushing past her aunt Audrey, who had joined her well-coiffed comrades in jeering at H.H.’s bullyboys, Desdemona clambered into the bed of one of the rescue trucks. She squeezed between a pile of body suits and a stack of oxygen tanks, settled back, and was asleep before the engine coughed to life.