What the fuck is happening?” Bennie’s eyes were huge as she held her breath. She could feel something under her hand, something that shifted, like a snake shedding its skin, like a dog with too much scruff under a fist. It held a wild violence, and she wanted to pull her hand away. She knew it was an untamable force.
“Listen,” Motheater murmured, and Bennie thought she sounded like someone in rapture, a girl whispering to her lover in bed. The milky scent of pine needles, damp and warm, rose up around them, and Bennie felt the power here, the strength of an unyielding faith.
“Listen,” Motheater said again. Bennie looked up at her, at the ecstasy there, like some Gentileschi painting in black and light. Motheater closed her eyes and leaned forward, resting her head against Bennie’s shoulder, and Bennie flushed at the closeness. She was about to say something to the witch, and then, as if she were being dragged in an undertow, Bennie slipped down, into the stone.
It was dark and cold, but there was movement, more than she would have expected from a ridgeline that had settled millions of years ago. She almost felt trapped, but she could still feel her knees against the ground and Motheater’s mouth near her neck. She wasn’t trapped; she was in the mountain.
Motheater drove them down, and Bennie felt the roots of the trees brushing against her back, breaking over the surface of the ground, their systems driving deeper into the stone. Stretching out, prying deeper. She could feel their momentum, curious and cautious, growing slow enough to split shale and granite, keeping themselves attached to the mountain and tearing it apart.
“What is this?”
“This is the mountain.”
Motheater shifted them away from the noisy trees who never stopped talking to each other like creaking doors. She moved them farther along the mountain’s range, sliding down the hills and valleys of the stacked bedrock, leaning into the heat and fury, finding those small fissures.
There was something else here, a steadiness that was different from the rest of the mountain. Motheater paused, curious. Even Bennie could feel it was different-not-different. Another lodestone driven into the land.
Then they came upon Kire. Bennie held her breath, and the mountain was still. She let it out, and there was a shift. Motheater had buried them so deep that there was no difference between the three of them, held under the stone, breathing together. Imagine thinking that simply because it wasn’t visible meant it wasn’t constantly shifting, in the smallest, most incremental of movements. Bennie leaned into Motheater.
Again, and this time Bennie could recognize it for what it was, Kire breathed under their hands. Not with flesh and lungs, and not with air, but with the steadiness of a creature at rest, the nonzero movement of all things. It was the ebb of a tide, the wane of the moon, the revolution of the world, ready to break apart if Motheater just gave it the smallest nudge in the right direction. The witch had been right all along.
Bennie could distantly feel the cores and shafts that White Rock had opened up in the side of the mountain. No . . . not just White Rock. All the companies going back to Halberd Ore and Mineral. Kire was helpless under the machines that dug into it. A learned helpless. It only seemed fragile now because it had been waiting, bearing its hurt over three hundred years. Had Motheater kept it down? Had she subdued the slouching beast?
Bennie wanted to look deeper, wanted to find the heat of the mountain, the coal catamount that curled here, that old, dark thing. But Motheater’s hand gripped hers tighter, and they retreated slowly out of the mountain, the witch leading her away from the great stone.
When they came up, the taste of mineral and moss still on Bennie’s tongue, the air around them had settled, and the trees leaned into them, drawn to the power.
Motheater shifted and sat back, her eyes closed.
Bennie stared at Motheater, still holding her hand. Bennie was furious, suddenly, angry and hurt. The pain that radiated out of Kire was immense, a history of violence written on its body in a way that Bennie understood. A generational pain it had borne over the past three hundred years.
The witch leaning on her seemed tired, shoulders slumped, strange, not-bruises around her neck and wrists. How many snakes were imprinted on her now? One for each curse? Would Motheater let Bennie see them? Bennie licked her lips and tried not to think about why she wanted that.
“All right,” Bennie muttered, heart racing. “I’m willing to admit the mountain might be alive.”
Motheater grinned at her, squeezing her hand. She stood up slowly, like she was in pain. “Been a long time since I did that. Connected.”
“You love it,” Bennie said. “The mountain, here, this place. You love it.”
Motheater nodded. “I was supposed to protect it.”
The mountain or Kiron? Bennie kept herself from getting angry, from asking why Motheater couldn’t protect the miners, too. Was only the mountain worthy of being loved? Was taking the only kind of love Motheater recognized?
The witch pulled her hand away from Bennie’s to rub at her face. Bennie felt that, too—the bone-tired ache of being near something so old. As Motheater had led them through the world, they hadn’t missed the shafts like wounds, the mountains like Huckleberry that were missing tops, the strip-mined range to the south. An empty drum against the mountains’ cacophony of life.
“We been mining this mountain for years,” Motheater said, with a clarity that changed her tone. She was less modern again, something a little more highland. “This whole damned area.”
“You remembering now?” Bennie asked.
“Slow, like a sill,” Motheater murmured. “I remember the smell of sulfur and zinc in the morning during spring and summer; the heat from the rock blew it across the mountain.”
Bennie took her hand again and squeezed. The witch looked up at her. She smiled a little, and Motheater’s eyes turned from something somber to something a little softer, kinder. The creases around her mouth smoothed. She was still all angles, but she didn’t seem so sharp.
“There used to be pressure holes we drilled,” Motheater said, turning slightly, pointing over to the eastern part of the mountain. “They dripped muddy sludge, dark like blood out of a beast.”
Bennie looked at her and wondered if she was still in the mountain that trapped her memories like dead roots. She set her stick against the ground and stood up, pulling Motheater up along with her, holding her hand tightly.
“They’re digging too close to Kire’s heart.” Motheater let go of Bennie’s hand, and Bennie immediately wanted to grab it again. She wanted to feel Motheater’s fingers as she spoke. Motheater paused, and then spoke with the surety of a Cassandra. “I ain’t with it. Kire’s waking up.”
“You were in its heart.”
“Aye,” Motheater muttered, frowning. Her words were venom. “Trapped, intent.”
Bennie knew that anger, that horror. She felt it, too, surrounding her—something of Motheater’s cunning still clinging on like an empty cicada shell. The mountain was waking up. It was real now, it was as familiar as Motheater’s hand in hers, it was looming, a presence in the back of her head that she couldn’t shake off. Bennie glanced at her feet, unsure of where to plant her next steps. Her mind raced. If it was waking up, what the fuck did it want?
Motheater broke her spiraling thoughts. “We’re close,” Motheater said, heading along the memory of a trail. “I want what my father tried to hide from me.”
Bennie watched her go, then looked down at her feet again. She remembered that feeling of breathing, the bigness of it, the impossibility. What would a creature like Kire do, awake, aware, and understanding?
Bennie set her jaw, fixed her cap, and gripped her walking stick, following Motheater. Under her feet, she felt the mountain shift again, the only sign of disturbance the shaking of branches, a soft crack like a sigh in the distance.