As a guard prodded Eddie with a baton jab to the kidneys, he realized she was a slave ship, loaded with workers to replace the ones who’d died or were so weak they could no longer rise from their bunks no matter how hard they were beaten. How many hundreds or thousands had already perished, he wondered, only to be replaced with a steady supply of hopeful immigrants thinking they’d bought their one chance at freedom?

“That is how I was brought here,” Tang, one of his roommates, remarked as they trudged up the slick hillside. Tang was the one who’d said he’d been here for four months already. His body was stick thin, and Eddie could clearly see his breastbone and rib cage through his torn shirt. He was twenty-seven years old but looked sixty. “We were loaded onto an old ship, and then it was swallowed up inside an even bigger ship like that one. If you can imagine, the journey here was worse than the work they force us to do.”

By the time they’d filled their buckets for the journey down to the sluice boxes, a rust-coated ship was slowly emerging from the belly of the drydock, and workers were throwing large bundles off its deck.

“Bodies,” Tang said. “I was forced to do that. We had to dump over the corpses of those who didn’t survive the journey.”

“How many?”

“A hundred, perhaps more. I myself had to dump the bodies of my two cousins and my best friend.”

Tang didn’t slow his pace, but Eddie could tell the memory was taking its toll. “So they will beach the boat and use it to house more workers?”

“First they will pile rocks around it and cover it with nets so it can’t be seen from the air.”

“What about the water? This whole operation is exposed to the sea.”

Tang shook his head. “Other than the two fishing boats, I haven’t seen any other ships since I arrived. I think we are too far from anywhere for ships to pass close by.”

They had just reached the sluice boxes when Eddie suddenly fell flat on his back as though a rug had been yanked out from under him. Stunned, he looked around to see hundreds of others had also fallen. That was when he felt the ground shaking.

Even as he realized it was an earthquake, the shaking subsided, but a deep roar continued to echo like distant thunder.

He got to his feet, wiping the worst of the clinging mud from his tattered clothes. His attention and soon that of every person at the mine was drawn upward toward the central-most mountain peak that dominated the workings. Steam and dark ash gushed from near its peak in an ever-expanding cloud that would soon blot out the sun. Lightning crackled around the summit like Saint Elmo’s fire.