“Thomas is better” is all he says. And: “We’ll have to think about where we want to go next.”

They are sitting on the floor, in a storeroom beyond the main hideaway, where they can talk without disturbing Thomas’s sleep. Their hips and shoulders are touching, get in each other’s way. It would be more comfortable if she threw an arm around his shoulder, leaned her head into his neck. She is about to, when he speaks again.

“You have changed,” he says, “down here.”

“Have I? How?”

He does not have to think about the answer: “You’re happy here.”

“I was happy before.”

“No, you weren’t. You thought of happiness as a kind of Smoke.”

It isn’t until later — after she’s gotten up and walked away in a huff — that she realises Charlie is right. And that he’s worried.

Worried she’ll change back in the light.

ф

She takes the thought for a walk, back to the edge of the lovers’ cave, still empty but for that laboured, slurping whistle peculiar to the space. The breath of the mine. When she reenters the sickroom some time later, it too seems emptied of people. Before she can confirm her intuition, she hears Thomas’s voice cut the quiet with his whisper.

He is not talking to her.

“Well, go on then,” he says. “After all, I owe you my life.”

There is no answer, only a sound, soft and spongy. It is followed by a giggle, then the sound of flat feet running out the door. Lizzy. At once Livia realises she’s been witness to a kiss. She does something then she has not done in all the time she has been in the room: light a lamp. Her hands are unaccustomed to it. When she finally manages to put match to wick, she sees that Thomas has sat up, hunching forward on the bunk bed. A bandage still covers his head, but it is a simple wrapping rather than the thick layers he was swaddled in before. His face is sunken, haggard; the features overlarge, as though pasted on. It makes it hard to tell a smile from a smirk.

“Listening in, Miss Naylor? How naughty of you.”

She grows angry at once: a trickle of Smoke seeping from her nostrils. Down here, she lacks the will to drown it in meekness.

“You are a cad, Mr. Argyle.”

He shrugs at that, blinks into the lamplight, raises his chin, for her to better see him.

“And tell me — have I grown very ugly?”

She locates her scorn, finds it like a garment she hasn’t worn since summer. It belongs to the world of light.

“No need to worry. The scar will make you look tough. Like a dog that’s had a good scrap. Half the ear missing. All the boys will love it.”

“Oh,” he says, “I wasn’t really thinking of the boys.”