After a full day of walking, Lex was at the end of his strength. He was starving, freezing. In the distance, he saw what he had been hearing for some time—a boy, straining with all his might, pushing a cart loaded with rocks uphill. Not quite believing his eyes, Lex rose from the ground. After a while, the filthy boy came to a stop in front of him. He set the brakes and caught his breath. He looked like he could barely be a teenager, his face blackened with soot and dust. Shaking his head in disappointment, the boy muttered.
"Why don't they ever send down a girl for once?"
"What?" Lex blinked in confusion.
"I said, why don't they ever send down a girl for once?"
"What the hell does that mean?" Lex asked.
"It means it's always guys they send down here. And I'm sick of it. We need some real girls down here," the boy replied, his frustration evident.
Lex studied the kid. "How long you been down here?" he asked.
The boy shrugged. "My whole life. Was born down here," he said. "Name's Cas, by the way."
Lex introduced himself. Then he asked, "Got any water on you? I'm dying of thirst."
Cas rummaged through the rocks in his cart and pulled out a battered metal canteen, handing it over. "Don’t drink too much, I still got a long way to go."
Lex took a big gulp, then sighed with relief. "You have to push that thing all the way up?"
"Yup, and ride it all the way back down. But that's the fun part. I just hop on the cart, and whoosh, down I go."
"What's in it?"
Cas glanced at the heavy stones. "That's all ore. Gold, silver, some platinum. We’re supposed to bring them anything that looks valuable, and in return, we get food rations and water. But sometimes, we find stuff like this—hold on."
Cas dug through the pile of rocks for a moment before pulling out a roughly triangular stone. "See that little piece in the rock? It’s gotta be some kind of unknown alloy or somethin'. Maybe that’s what they’re really looking for in this mountain."
"What they're really looking for?"
Cas shrugged. "We don’t really know. But there’s talk that there are things down here you won’t find anywhere else on the moon. It’d explain why they built this massive underground mine out here in the middle of nowhere and kept it a secret from the other prisoners."
Lex raised an eyebrow, taking the rock from Cas and examining the metal under the dim light of a hanging bulb. It had a silver shine to it.
"Could be gallium," he said.
"Could be something totally different, though. Maybe some unknown alloy or whatever."
"Does it melt in your hand?"
"Not in mine," Cas replied, wiggling his fingers, stiff from the cold.
Lex handed the stone back. "I’m gonna keep looking for that door. Any idea how far it is?"
"Yeah, I came from that way. Go down another two or three miles. It’ll be on the left. That’s where our camp is. But you better keep quiet; everyone’s still sleeping. It’s in the middle of the night."
The exiles were split into work groups. Lex’s group had about thirty men, ranging from young to old. Some had been down here so long that the tracking devices behind their ears had died. The fact that the company didn’t bother replacing the batteries was proof enough—they weren’t worried about anyone escaping. There was no way out of exile, no way out of this goddamn mountain.
At their first shared breakfast, the men told Lex they’d had to kill someone a couple of days ago because he’d lost his mind down here. Lex didn’t doubt it. They told the story casually, without any sense of drama or excitement. On that first morning, they shared all sorts of grim tales, not to scare him, but more to pass time. Because down here, grim stories were their life, and they needed something to talk about.
After his first day of work, Lex could barely make it to his bunk. The prisoners slept on metal cots chained to the walls, some with no mattresses at all. Lex was wrapped up to his ears in a ragged, hole-filled blanket, like some half-decayed cocoon, lying on a creaky iron frame. He passed out from sheer exhaustion. But when he woke, his arms were numb, his neck stiff from the awkward sleeping position, and every muscle in his body ached from the unfamiliar labor.
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The night was only five hours long. He could barely get out of bed. The other men laughed at him—the newbie easy prey. He forced himself up but had to skip breakfast, having woken up a few minutes too late. Someone else had already eaten his meager ration. When he tried to confront the guy, five men beat him down at once. Lesson learned. He dragged himself to the mines with an empty stomach and a swollen jaw, joining the others in the pit.
******
They didn’t have a calendar or a clock. All they had was an old alarm, and it would ring loudly whenever a new cycle started—a new day, their day. They slept for just six hours before the bell rang for the first time, and then they worked for sixteen straight. Often, by the third of their seemingly endless days, they had mined enough silver to trade for a bit of food and the bare essentials to survive. No one counted the days anymore; no one knew how long they’d been down here. Lex felt like it had been an eternity, especially after the pain in his bones faded, and the nightmare had become just another part of life. He no longer thought about the LEVIATHAN or what life on Cetos V might be like, but he still wore Tayus’s welding goggles around his neck. When someone asked what they meant, he’d say that within those goggles lived the dream of his friend, a dream that now lived inside him too. If they pressed him about what that dream was, he’d simply say it didn’t matter—because a dream was just a dream, not reality.
******
The mine shaft was two hundred meters below their sleeping quarters, and the only way down was through a cargo lift. The shaft was long and wide, with the low ceiling supported by rows of towering steel beams. Old mining lamps flickered on the ground, casting the men’s shadows across the rocky walls. In the sulfur-yellow glow, they swung their pickaxes in a steady rhythm. Sparks flew with every strike. The relentless clanging of metal against stone made Lex feel like he was on the verge of losing his mind. He picked up a chunk of rock from the ground, spat on it, and wiped it with his sleeve. A milky white crystal shimmered beneath the dirt. It was calcite, he was sure, but just to test it, he scratched it with an old copper coin, then tossed it carelessly onto the growing pile of rubble in the cart. He barely paused, wiping his dirty face with his dirty linen shirt, before going back to the mindless grind of one day bleeding into the next. Weeks passed. Months. Maybe even years.
******
At the last ore exchange, they’d received old leather caps to stop them from constantly bashing their heads against the low-hanging beams, getting split-open skulls, or dying from infections. Beneath one of the thirty caps, Lex’s greasy, shoulder-length hair hung down. Dust-covered sweat trickled past his temples, and his scraggly beard hid a face that had grown much older and more gaunt than it had been in the crater settlement. The days of sitting in the B17 with Mori and Tayus, drinking, felt like a lifetime ago. He’d give anything for just one sip of that awful miner's piss.
After a short break on yet another day, Lex put his leather cap back on and pushed the full cart toward the rubble heap—an old, unused tunnel. He still barely thought about the LEVIATHAN, and didn’t even think about his dream that had nearly come true. He tried to avoid thinking about Tayus and his girlfriend, Mori. Really, he just tried not to think about anything, especially not about the here and now.
He dumped the rubble.
******
At some point, the group had to bury their oldest member. Some said he’d been in exile his entire life and had lived to be 43 or maybe even older, but Lex didn’t believe that. Not down here. That just wasn’t possible.
The man had collapsed while working, dead before he hit the ground. They loaded him into the cart and took him to the nearby burial cave—a fifty-square-meter cavern filled with bodies encased in concrete. They poured cement over the dead to keep them from rotting and stinking up the place. The floor was paved with corpses, their faces frozen in stone. Lex walked over the hard, lifeless expressions and set the body of the old man in a corner. No prayers were said, no goodbyes given. Silently, they mixed the cement and poured it over the stiff, naked body. The unexpected death was the only break in the monotony Lex had experienced since he’d been down here. After that, everything went back to the same routine—a day just like the one before, and the one before that, all equally bleak, equally hopeless.
******
During one lunch break, he ate a protein bar and replaced the worn-out head of his pickaxe. He tossed the dull iron head into a bucket with the others, strapped a fresh one to the handle, then ate his second bar before continuing to hammer away at the rock walls. That evening, while the others got to sleep, it was his turn to sharpen the tools. Four buckets full of dull iron. He slipped on Tayus’s welding goggles and, with sparks flying everywhere, started sharpening the pickaxe heads once again.
******
Weeks later, in a desperate attempt to avoid starving—they hadn’t found anything valuable to trade for food—the group decided to expand the mine shaft. Lex carried the drill while another man lugged the explosives crate. They made their way to the western end of the tunnel, where Lex drilled sixteen holes into the rock, measuring each depth with an iron rod. The other guy followed, slipping a stick of dynamite into each hole, pushing them all the way to the back with the same rod. As he stripped the insulation from the ends of the detonator wires and twisted them together, Lex checked for any signs of methane or other explosive gases. He held the open mining lamp close to each hole and every tiny crack in the wall.
"All clear," he finally said.
They took cover behind a bend in the tunnel to avoid flying debris. The man knelt down and pressed the detonator handle with both hands. The blast came almost immediately, a blinding flash around the corner. Rocks pelted the opposite wall, and a shower of small stones rained down on Lex, who had plugged his fingers into his ears and kept his mouth open, just like the man had instructed him. Moments later, a swirling cloud of dust filled the tunnel.
"Smooth," the man said.
Through the thick dust, Lex could just make out the faint glow of two dim lights where their mining lamps stood. "Yeah, seems like it."
But they were completely wrong.
They barely had time to realize something was off before the ground beneath their feet started to shake, and everything around them began to collapse.
In the next heartbeat, Lex felt weightless.
Falling.
Screaming.