I sit down at one of the picnic tables where Rita is knitting a scarf. I watch her for a spell, watch the way her eyes habitually move from her needles to the tunnel a few yards away.

“You get my dress?” she asks without looking at me.

“Yes, and the other things you asked for. I also got some food. Not much though. There’s water, too.”

A young girl, perhaps fifteen, moves past our table and makes her way to the decorated tunnel mouth. Rita and I both watch as she crouches, and slides her hand into the gap. She seems to be feeling something in that chute, something that appears to greet her touch in a pleasing way. For a moment it looks as though the girl is about to enter the void, but she ultimately lacks the required conviction. She shuffles back to her mattress at the far end of the tract and lies down.

“Have there been any changes?” I ask Rita.

“Define ‘changes.’”

“Anyone else gone in…or maybe come back out…there?”

“Don’t be stupid.” She puts her needles back in her canvas bag along with her yarn. I study her as she carries the silver hairbrush and the handheld mirror into the pod and adds them to the shrine. As she exits the shrine, she refuses to look at me.

“I’m going to try on my dress,” she says, as if daring me to object.

She is on her way to change in one of the old miners’ shower stalls—there is no running water here, but the mouldy plastic curtains that partition the stalls at least offer privacy—when the ground begins to quake.

This tremor is longer than all previous ones, more forceful. Immediately people begin to murmur, in prayer or in vexation or simply in fear. The rocking ultimately subsides. A wave of relief passes over the people of the tract.

A moment later, there is another tremor.

*

Few become true pit-canaries. While the townsfolk dwell Below, there is another level, another extreme that only the most devout have courage or madness enough to explore.

Beyond the tract, where the mattresses and bags are strewn, stretches another tunnel. It is stiflingly tight and perilously ragged. It must have been bored by something cruder than even the crudest manmade tool. Only those who have dared to squeeze through that aperture earn the stigma of pit-canary because, like their namesake, those birds go beyond, into certain peril, into a kind of underground Event Horizon.

As to what forged that tunnel, I could add my theory to the dozens that have been posited, but what would such a thing prove? The tunnel is somehow connected to the emerald light. This I believe. I also believe that both this cryptic tunnel and the emerald light are the products of something even greater and stranger than both those two things combined.