“Neh, I’m too old for that.” He halted in the darkest part midway between two shafts. “Eihi! We’ve got debris here.”

She swore under her breath, thrilled by discomfiting fear. As she bent to shovel at the tiny hills of debris heaped along the floor, he probed the ceiling for a breach. A grain spat onto her neck, followed by a hissing spill that got under her tunic, crawling along her spine.

“Seems like nothing,” he said, “just a bit of loose—”

The sound crackled like a body turning over on a bed of pebbles. Mas grabbed at her.

“Move!”

She bent for the buckets, but he yanked harder as, in a downpour, loose material rained down. She ran with head bent under the low ceiling. A soft rumble expanded behind her and a cloud of dust nipped at her heels.

And faded.

Mas jogged on a ways farther, then halted to spit debris out of his mouth.

“Shouldn’t we keep moving?”

“Neh, this is well packed, we dug this section ourselves if you recall.”

Her neck was clammy, and her hands were hot. “I’ll like to get out.”

“Cursed fools were supposed to reinforce that area. Don’t know what they’re thinking not to have done it yet.”

“Can we get out?” She was starting to shake.

“Eh, sure.” As they walked mouth-ward, he chatted on like nothing had happened. “Listen, what I said before? About starting up my own house? I’ll need a wife. You interested?”

She licked grit from her lips and thought about slapping him upside the back of the head. She was strong enough that it would really hurt him. “Eh, that’s a kindness, Mas. I’m not interested, thanks.”

“Well, then, what with there being no Devouring temple to visit, if you had a thought about a bit of sharing?”

Maybe a month’s hard labor had mellowed her. Maybe it was knowing he had likely saved her life back there. Maybe it was just that the stone-lined mouth loomed before them, sun bright beyond the dim confines of the underground conduit down which water would someday flow to irrigate fields. As they ducked out through the stone-framed mouth of the conduit and blinked in the hard sunlight, she managed a polite reply.

“I appreciate you asking, but I don’t want to get in trouble with the Qin.”

Mas scratched dust from his scant beard. He looked across the flat depression that would become a reservoir and toward the higher practice ground where four black-clad Qin soldiers were forming up the trainees—men just off shift—into ranks. “Neh, I suppose I don’t neither. They’re hard, that’s for sure. If fair. They don’t overcharge us for sleeping space and food, like some masters do. Water’s steep, though.”

She tried in vain to slap dust off her tunic and kilted-up trousers, but she was coated in the sandy grit that passed for soil in these parts. Mas led her over to the supervisor’s pavilion, and they got a hearing from the overseer, O’eki. The big man—an outlander—listened to Mas’s detailed recounting with the resignation of a man who hears this every day.