“I’m saving my mother,” Trey said. “Anyone who wants to come with us, you’re welcome.”

Trey and his mother left on their own.

“They’re just afraid, Trey,” she said as they hurried past deserted caves and skirted the Church. “This is all they’re used to. It isn’t Grant’s way to be like that, he didn’t mean it.”

“He’s going to get them all killed.”

They continued in silence, passing by one of the mayors’ pillars, glancing up but seeing no sign of life on the balconies overhead. Each time they met someone Trey said, To the caves. Sometimes the miners would follow for a while before doubt took them and they slowed, trailing off, perhaps waiting for someone in authority to tell them what to do and where to go, not this lad wielding a disc-sword like a boy playing at war.

Trey tried to close off his mind to those sensations thrown off the Nax like sweat flicking from a fighting man’s skin. But at the same time he listened for the sense of pursuit, a hint of the chase as a Nax zeroed on them. It never came. Whatever had noticed him as he squeezed the moss had obviously found something else to warrant its attentions.

As they reached the opposite side of the cavern—the place where the entrance to the current working sat like an open throat a few steps up the cavern wall—there was very little light by which to see. Trey moved from memory, holding his mother’s hand and guiding her along. His ears were perfectly attuned to echo, distance and proximity, so each footfall told him just where he was. He grumbled in his throat here and there to launch a low, deep sound to echo back, and when he found a space in that echo he knew that the cave entrance was before them.

He leaned back and brushed his hand across his mother’s cheek, stroking his fingertips across her lips in a sightless smile. “We’re here,” he whispered.