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I hadn't wanted to. That, more than anything else about the night, felt like the part worth noticing.

Halver's hand found my back again, slow and steady, and this time I let my eyes close before his hand had even finished the first pass.

Chapter Twenty-One: Not Buried

Corian

The mine swallowed sound the way water swallowed light. Twenty paces past the entrance, the sound of the world above us, wind moving through scrub grass, the horses shifting where we'd left them tethered, a bird complaining somewhere, had gone entirely. What replaced it was smaller and closer. Boots on stone. Breath. The occasional drip of water finding its way down through rock that had no business being wet this deep.

Overseer Voss's survey map sat folded inside my pocket. According to it, we stood in the newest section of the Greymantle workings, cut less than five years ago, feeding out from the third collapse site. Where the missing miner had last been seen before the ceiling came down behind him.

The crystal lanterns threw a steady, colorless light that made everything look slightly wrong, shadows falling at angles that didn't quite match where a body actually stood. I'd worked underground exactly twice before this, both times briefly, and neither time had prepared me for how quickly the mind started inventing movement at the edge of that light. Alex kept glancing toward the walls more than the actual investigation required.

"Ceiling's lower ahead," Halver said, ducking under a support beam that hadn't been sized for a man his height. "Another thirty paces and I won't be able to stand straight for the rest of this stretch."

"Then don't," I said. "Shift."

He didn't argue. Years of commanding this squad had taught me exactly which orders Halver needed explained and which ones he simply trusted, and this fell solidly into the second category. He stripped down fast and without ceremony, folding his clothes into a rough bundle against the wall rather than leaving them scattered, and the change came over him the moment the last layer was off, quick and practiced, shoulders narrowing, limbs shortening, until a badger stood where a man had been a moment earlier, low and solid and built for exactly this kind of tunnel. Alex scooped the bundle up without being asked and slung it over one shoulder along with his own pack, a small, unremarkable courtesy that had stopped needing comment. Jade dropped to a crouch in front of him immediately.

"Don't," I said, already knowing it wouldn't help.

She booped him anyway, one finger pressed flat against his nose the same way she had the very first time she'd seen him in his Veylith form. There was less surprise in it these days. Just something she did now because she wanted to and nobody in this squad found a reason to remark on it anymore.

Halver went entirely still, the way he always did, caught somewhere between offended and helpless against it.

"We're working," I said.

"I'm aware."

"Then work."

She stood, entirely unrepentant, and Alex made a small sound behind me that he wisely swallowed before it turned into a laugh loud enough to carry down the tunnel. I let it go. Two days underground ahead of us, chasing a story that already smelled wrong in more ways than one. If a moment of softness bought the squad an easier morning, I wasn't going to stop it, and whatever had settled between the two of them somewhere on the road wasn't mine to comment on either. I'd noticed it the same way everyone had. None of us had said anything, and none of us needed to.

Halver moved out ahead of us, nose low, body close enough to the ground that his passage barely disturbed the dust.

We worked the third collapse site first, the way any proper investigation demanded, closest to the surface and freshest in everyone's memory. The rubble had been cleared enough to pass through, timber shoring driven in hastily by Greymantle's own crew in the days after, but the collapse itself told a story before anyone said a word about it.

Jade crouched at the collapse's edge, one hand resting flat against a support beam that had sheared clean rather than splintered.

"This isn't right," she said.

"Explain."

"Wood under crushing pressure splinters along the grain. This sheared straight across, almost like something cut partway through it first and let the weight finish the job." She traced the clean edge with one finger, careful not to press.

"I'd want a proper look with better light before I call it certain. But it doesn't look right."

Alex crouched on the opposite side of the beam, turning his own lantern to catch the cut from another angle.

"She's not wrong. That's too even for a snap. Even a bad one."

We spent the better part of the morning mapping the collapse itself, distances, angles, the spread of debris against what a genuine ceiling failure should have produced. None of it, taken alone, proved anything. Taken together, it built a picture I didn't like.

Neither did the rest of it, once we started looking properly.

Halver found the first boot print an hour later, in a stretch of soft clay near a side vein that hadn't seen recent traffic according to Voss's map. He didn't bother shifting back to point it out. Nykos's voice carried it instead, flat and a half beat delayed, the particular cadence he fell into whenever he was relaying someone else's thoughts rather than speaking his own. It had become second nature to say Halver's words out loud now so Jade could understand.

"That's not a miner's boot," Nykos said, relaying Halver's words.