“Like who? The Duke? No one’s seen him for years.”

Trey frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Are there militia? Authorities who should know, those who protect Noreela?” He opened his eyes slightly, and Alishia saw the tears. They were not only from the pain of sunlight hitting his yellowed eyes for the first time.

“You have very beautiful eyes,” she said, unable to help herself.

“I’m sorry,” Trey said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize you were a little girl.”

“I’m not! I just—”

“Sorry,” the miner said again, sitting up, holding his head in his hands and letting tears darken the ground between his knees. “But is there no one we can go to? There are hundreds of dead people down there, and the Nax will spread beneath the mountains. We have to tell the other mines. There are thousands of people living beneath these mountains alone. You know there’s a whole world down there, Alishia. The Nax can destroy it. We’ve known that forever, but forever they’ve kept quiet. Now they’ve been woken.”

“Woken by what?”

Trey grasped his knees and squeezed, as if trying to wring out the truth. “By whatever’s happening up here. Anything that wakes them up means bad times falling on us, always. Just never this bad. In the past, there was only ever one at a time . . .” He trailed off, tracing the pattern of his tears on the dry grass, as if communicating through the language of the mines as he spoke. “Sonda,” he whispered. “Mother.”

Alishia rigged a sun screen with her blanket and some broken branches from a nearby tree, and went about preparing some food. Trey remained awake and silent. Occasionally she heard a sob from him, but she left him to his mourning, traveling some way along the slope as she searched for wild potatoes.

What she had read about the Nax had always been written as myth, grand and great stories with which to frighten children or startle susceptible adults. She had never read a serious book where there was anything more than a passing reference, supposition dressed as fact, and she had always assumed that the Nax were mostly make-believe. But then, many people believed that the Violet Dogs were imaginary as well, a dread tale of invasion and slaughter dreamed up generations ago to fulfill some political or religious agenda.

“I thought the Nax were a legend,” she said quietly as she approached Trey. She dropped an armful of wild potatoes and began chopping them into a bowl with a pinch of herbs.

“They are,” he said. “They were. Everyone down there believes in them, but there’s little proof, little to tell the truth. Moments in history, but history is easily distorted. They’re our gods and our demons.”