The people come to the upper level in shifts. For most of them this is as near to the surface as they’re willing to go, despite the dangers to their health. Strategically installed fans spin constantly, both here and deeper Below. They do their best to draw the methane out of the tunnels and to coax fresh air down from the surface. But they have been rotting down here since Dunford Inc. shut down production, and I remember Dad saying that even when those fans were new it was always a risk spending too much time “under the crust.”

“One of the drivers will be up shortly,” the mother calls once she sees me climbing into a cart. I turn back and look stonily at them, at their wan faces smeared with soot, the clothing that hangs loose and grubby upon their malnourished frames. They are like a faded photo of some anonymous Dust Bowl family in a history book.

“Never mind,” I say, releasing the brake. The ancient wheels squeak, and the cart begins to roll toward the greater descent.

Down I go, down, staring numbly at the roughly textured tunnel. I begin to imagine the juts and pockets as being some strange and tedious grammar in Braille, some record of a world that had existed below ours for unknowable years, their entire secret history spelled out here in angled carbon.

These walls are veined with thick cables that feed power to the vent fans and to the garlands of uncovered light bulbs. To my eye these strung lights have all the impact of a few fireflies straining to illuminate a canyon.

The cart reaches the final swoop of the track and I ease up the handbrake to soften the final thud that always comes when the track ends. The carts are inexorably fed into a pent-in platform constructed out of lumber grown soft from too many years in the methane-reeking chambers.

There has yet to be any theft or pillaging down here, but I do my best to conceal the sack of groceries all the same. The converts here have commented about how this profound fellowship and egalitarianism is somehow a sign of renewal, of change. I think it is only because things haven’t yet gotten desperate enough. They’ll start scavenging and rending sooner or later. It’s simply a question of time.

The only proper shelter at this level is the rescue chamber that the miners once relied upon in case of a collapse or other accident. It is a pod where one could hole up until help arrived. Now, with its oxygen tanks long drained, its food devoured, and its water guzzled, the chamber serves as a curious spirit house, a shrine that the people have embellished with mementos of those whose spirits they claim have been glimpsed beyond the emerald light, or with fetishes meant to represent things unfamiliar but still experienced.