When they reached the cavern floor they met a group of people milling around the mayors’ militia cave. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen—Trey suspected that the crossbow shots he’d heard earlier marked their fate—but still these people seemed to think that safety existed here.

“We have to get out!” Trey said. He recognized a couple of fellow miners from his shift and smiled at them in the poor light. He touched them as he spoke, pleaded, cajoled, his touch a familiar form of communication that made up for facial expression whenever the miners talked in the pitch black. “This place is finished, we can never beat the Nax, we have to leave and go topside until it’s safe again.”

“Why topside?” one of the miners, Grant, asked. He did not use touch as he spoke, a sign that he was angry or terrified, or perhaps both. “Why can’t we go into the tunnels and hide this out?” A few of the others mumbled in confused agreement.

“The militiamen are dead by now,” Trey said. “The Nax may not have fed for centuries. And they know this underground even better than us.” He looked around nervously, expecting at any second to feel the surge of displaced air tickle the hairs on his neck as a Nax swept in through the cave air.

“I doubt that.” Grant turned his back on Trey and his mother and spoke to the others. “We can go into the current working and wait in there. I know it like the touch of my own hand; there are tunnels and crevasses where we can hide. These fledge demons will be sated soon enough. As Trey said, the militiamen will be dead by now. The Nax can feed on them.”

“They’ll continue their slaughter,” Trey said. “It’s not only food they woke for, it’s something else as well. Something that’s driven them to fury.”

“What makes you an expert on the fledge demons?” a woman asked.

Trey looked at the group for a few seconds, wondering whether they would apportion blame. He realized that he barely cared. Wanting to remain down here was foolish, and if they blamed him for what was happening that made them even more so.

“I sensed them waking,” Trey said. “I was on a fledge trip. I went farther than I should have, found a Nax and withdrew quickly, but I knew that it wasn’t the only one waking. They never hunt in groups. They exist alone. That’s why I know there’s something wrong. I think there’s something going on topside that has enraged them and—”

“And you want to go there?” Grant said, spinning around.

“Trey . . .” his mother whispered, afraid.

There was a series of screams from across the cavern, accompanied by several loud thuds. They did not last for long.