“Sure, we could do that. You pick up one of those spools, and let me know how it goes,” Huey suggested wryly.

Rector bent over and tried to lift one.

“Heavier than they look, huh?”

“And then some,” Rector muttered. “It’s good wire, though. We shouldn’t leave it.”

“You want to throw it out a window?” Houjin offered. “That one over there—the grate’s mostly off it, and it’s facing the wall. If we chuck a couple of spools out, maybe we can roll them down to the mining carts.” But the grate wasn’t as loose as it looked, and the spools wouldn’t have fit, regardless. The boys abandoned that plan. “Never mind. Let’s just swipe some of the dynamite, and see if there’s anything else worth taking. Anything that might slow them down.”

Rector didn’t know what bits of the chemistry set and distillery were more useful than others, so he contented himself with the crates of dynamite, which he opened—very carefully—using the edge of his ax. Deploying the weapon as a pry bar, he popped the lids one at a time and swiped a couple of strays from each. He stuffed them into his satchel and tried to forget that he was carrying enough explosives to launch himself to the moon.

A muffled clank reached his ears from down below. Rector sat up straight. “Huey, did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Shh!” he ordered.

The clanking came again, in a steady patter that implied footsteps.

Houjin abandoned whatever it was he’d been doing and dashed quickly back and forth between the two exits in the floor at opposite ends of the circular room. These exits were not offset with rails; they were nothing more than rectangular holes indicating stairs below.

“I can’t tell which way he’s coming!” Houjin said. His eyes were wide behind the mask, and Rector was pretty sure his own eyes matched. But they couldn’t panic. “Listen hard—we’ll figure it out, and pick the other way. Just one guy?”

“I think so…?” The acoustics were all lies, all bounces and bangs as the metal interior cast the sounds up against the roof. “But I can’t tell,” Rector admitted.

“Me either.”

“Shit, he’s almost—”

As the man came closer to the top, the clatter of his ascent became clearer and clearer, but by the time the boys had picked a stairway, it was too late. A round, masked head popped up at the top of the stairs, swiveling back and forth as it rose.

The head stopped. The eyes within the mask saw the boys, who were frozen together, grabbing at each other in a tangle of fear.