“If that worked we would have done it already,” Li Minsheng said. “The blast will be large enough to fill the tunnels with toxic gas and dust that won’t disperse for a long time, impeding further work in the tunnels.”

The ground fire’s advance was faster than anticipated. The construction group decided to detonate with only two blast zones in place, and ordered all personnel evacuated from the shaft as quickly as possible. It was near dark. They were standing around a chart in a production building not far off from the entrance, considering how to detonate at the shortest possible distance using a spur tunnel, when Li Minsheng suddenly said, “Listen!”

A deep rumble was coming from somewhere below ground, as if the earth were belching. A few seconds later they heard it again.

“Methane explosions. The fire has reached the mine,” Aygul said nervously.

“Wasn’t it supposed to still be farther away?”

No one answered. Liu Xin’s ground rats had been used up, and with the only sensing techniques now at their disposal it was difficult to precisely determine the fire’s position and speed.

“Evacuate at once!”

Li Minsheng snatched up his radio, but no matter how he shouted, there was no answer.

“Before I came up, Chief Zhang was worried he’d smash a radio while working,” a miner from the demolition squad told him. “So he put them with the detonation wires. There are a dozen drills working simultaneously down there. It’s pretty loud!”

Li Minsheng jumped up and dashed out of the building without even grabbing a helmet. He called a tram, then headed down the shaft at top speed. The moment the tram vanished into the shaft entrance, Liu Xin could see Li Minsheng waving at him, and there was a smile on his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.

The ground belched a few more times, but then silence descended.

“Did that series of explosions consume all of the methane in the mine?” Liu Xin asked an engineer standing beside him, who looked back at him in wonder.

“Consume it all? You’ve got to be kidding. It will just release more methane from the seam.”

A sky-spitting thunder rolled, as if the Earth itself were exploding under their feet. The mouth of the mine was engulfed in flames. The blast lifted Liu Xin up into the air, and the world spun madly about him. A mess of stones and crossties were thrown by the blast, and he saw a tramcar hurtle out of the flames, spit out of the entrance like an apple core. He landed heavily on the ground as rock rained down on him, and it felt as if each was coated in blood. He heard more deep rumbles, the sound of the explosives detonating in the mine. Before he lost consciousness, he saw the fire at the entrance disappear, replaced by thick clouds of smoke….

ONE YEAR LATER