Page 34 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

He frowns at the margin. "That's not — huh. I always took that for a fold guide."

"It's not. It's hers. She was on this map before anyone."

Alaric leans in to look, and stops moving entirely — too still, the way he gets when something underground reaches him before it reaches us. He catches himself fast and straightens. "Engine," he says, mildly. "Down the slope. Idling."

Ben's head comes up. "I don't hear an engine."

"You will."

I'm already counting it through. Three strokes and a fourth apart. Three workings any map will give you — the main adit, the upper air shaft, the haulage cut. And a fourth, set apart, that no map will. The fourth way. The one Lily said about the sons in the song.

"It's not the entrance they want," I say, and I stand, because I'm sure of it now and being sure is its own kind of standing. "Nathan's people went down the adit because it's the only door their maps gave them. But Elspeth never counted the front one. She counted the one that drains."

Ben rises with me. "Drains where?"

"There." I point east, past the cut bloodroot, to where the laurel grows in a line too straight to be wild. "Old workings flood. Every one of them needs a way to bleed the water off, low and out of sight. An ore spur, an exit nobody bothered to seal because nobody remembered it. That's where she'd put something. Not behind the obvious door. Past the one that drains."

"Hannah." Alaric's voice drops — the worry rising under it. "If you're right, that's exactly where they'll come up when the adit dead-ends on them. You'd be walking toward four armed men."

He's not wrong, and for a breath I watch him want to finish the thought, want to put himself between me and end the argument with his body. He stops himself because he remembers what we said to each other — that I get to stand in this, not behind it. His hand opens at his side.

"Then we move before they do," I say, gentle, because I understand what he just gave me.

Ben's reading something he can't fully see. "If we go off the marked workings, I'm not radioing this in. Two of you and me against four rifles, in tunnels I can't map⁠—"

"You can map this one." I crouch back to his grandfather's paper and trace the vanished spur, off the crease, to where the old man's pencil ghosted a small square. "He drew the outflow. Right here. Your granddad knew about the fourth way too." Ben stares at the square.

We gather everything and move fast. The laurel line gives onto a cut bank, and the timbers begin where the brush thins — pit props, gray and split with age, leaning out of the hillside like the ribs of something long dead. I run my light along them. On the third post, low, where a careless eye skims past, the bark's been shaved and the wood beneath scored with my grandma's symbol

"She marked the way in," I breathe.

I clear the moss above the fourth stroke with my thumb, and the wood under it is pale and raw. Somebody else scraped here, recently, and got the count wrong — cleared the three and missed the fourth. They read part of her and not the rest.

A sound carries up out of the dark below us. Metal on stone, then metal on metal — a chain, dropping somewhere deeper in.

Ben's flashlight finds the old gate twenty feet down the spur, hanging open on a sheared hasp. He goes to it, touches the bright cut edge, and his face changes.

"That's cut from the inside," he says quietly. "Somebody came up to open it."

Below us, deep in the throat of the fourth way, a lantern swings — once, slow, where no honest light should be. I switch mine off.

"Then we already know the way," I whisper. "We just have to reach it before they figure it out."

26

ALARIC

The iron gate stands open, and the fresh cuts on its hinges face the wrong way. Whoever opened the fourth route worked from below, sawing outward toward us, not in.

Hannah crouches at the lip of the shaft, her flashlight angled low, and the beam finds a thread of lantern light far down the incline — swinging, shrinking. "There," she says. "They're already past us."

"I see it." She's already half over the edge, and I've learned not to take hold of her arm when she's like this. "Ben. The grade."

Ben Holloway runs his own light across the rotted timbers. He's breathing shallow through his mouth, the dark gone personal on him. "Drops forty feet, then it levels. The old county survey called this a dead heading." He looks at me, not at the shaft. "Except somebody dug it past dead, didn't they."

"Somebody did."

I drop to my heels by the gatepost, and that's when the other smell finds me, under the cold iron and standing water of the mine. Beeswax. Char. Something colder braided through both, like the emptiness a body leaves in a room it's been gone from too long. I follow it to the post and find what no hunter would ever leave: a flat coin of black wax pressed to the wood at eye height, a single hair set into it, a bead of dried blood sealing the seam. I don't touch it.