I wasn’t sure why it helped so much, but I was thankful that he was helping me through this. He made me feel like I wasn’t so alone, even though I was. It was only me and the drones on Apollyon.

“You’re alive, and that’s all that matters. You don’t need a full load. You just have to last long enough. I want you to be very sure before you swing that pickaxe again, okay? Don’t let him rush you.”

I sighed.

“Okay,” Declan said. “Okay. That’s better. Sighing counts. Take another breath. Deep inhale.”

I did as he asked, but my hand still shook as I grasped another crystal. It had two “1” marks on it. Each a different color. Two different miners had tested it before me and marked it as volatile. I hated testing ones that already had marks on them. Those were the most painful.

Ice it all to hell.

I brought the hammer end down on it. The tone must’ve been out of my hearing range because I didn’t hear anything, but it made my ears pop painfully anyway. The tool slipped from my hand, and I lowered my head and tried to breathe through the pain.

“You okay?” I barely heard Declan’s voice over the ringing in my head.

I pressed my hands over my ears and yawned, trying to equalize the pressure. “Mark that one as superhot.”

“What about the rest in that cluster?” Carl asked.

Who cares about the rest of the fucking cluster? I wanted to shout it at him. But I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to keep up the appearance that I was doing this job.

All of the crystals in the cluster had marks on them. It was safe to say that they’d all be volatile, but I knew the control room didn’t give a shit about that.

It took me a second to shove my fear far enough inside me to get my hand to work again. I picked up my tool from the ground, reached out to a crystal, and hit it with the hammer end.

I couldn’t hear that one either, but my back molars throbbed. “Volatile.”

Carl hadn’t said anything about pain when testing crystals, but I couldn’t bring it up now. I didn’t want to look weak in front of Jason and his tribe of jerks. Especially when I wasn’t sure if this was an Aunare-only thing.

It took me a good twenty minutes to finish hitting the rest in the bunch, earning myself a hell of a headache. I made sure to mark each one, but by the end of it, my breath was coming out in quick pants.

When I was done, I squatted down, hanging my head between my knees, waiting for the pain to go away, but it didn’t.