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Pendarvis.
    “I want a copy,” he said as he handed it back.
    She nodded coolly. “Stop in after the first core, and I’ll see that it’s waiting for you.”
    “Thanks.”
    She was glad to put some distance between them, but she made a point of not hurrying back behind her desk. She found a key inside the little netted purse she’d earlier thrown on the desktop, and used it to open the kneehole drawer. From it she took another key, and used that one to unlock a large steel safe behind her chair. Distracted again by the bustle, Connor didn’t notice what she was rummaging around in the safe for until she turned and held out two one-pound notes to him.
    When she smiled at him with her mouth but not her eyes, he knew she’d seen what he should’ve hidden: that he hated this, that even though it was part of the game, he could hardly bring himself to reach out for the money she was offering him across her desk.
    But he took it, his advance or “subsist,” and stuffed it in his pocket without looking at it. “You’ll want a receipt,” he said tonelessly.
    “That’s not necessary.”
    “You trust me to repay you?”
    “I wouldn’t say that.” The humorless smile widened. “I’ll keep it back from your first month’s wage.”
    He probably deserved that. He stuck his miner’s hat on his head and started to leave.
    “Find Mr. Andrewson and tell him I’ve hired you,” she instructed, absently running one hand along the top of her leather chair. “The tutman you’ll be working with is Tranter Fox. I think he’s at the seventy level today; the mine captain will take you down to him.”
    “Yes.” He’d be damned if he’d call her
ma’am.
    After a pause, she said in a softer voice, “Tranter’s a Cornishman, like you. Everyone likes him. I hope you’ll— I should think you’d— I don’t know why you wouldn’t get along.”
    It was the first kind thing she’d said to him. A hint of a smile hovered at the corners of her lips. She was backing off a bit from the hostility with which they’d begun—wishing him well. He ought to smile back, meet her halfway. That would be practical. Expedient.
    But pride was still his downfall, and he was still smarting from the insult of her disillusionment. The dismay in her voice when she’d said, “You’re a
miner
?” Two days ago he’d been a man, and she’d treated him like one; today he was a
miner
, and so far beneath her she didn’t want to stand next to him.
    Instead of smiling, he touched his helmet in an insolent salute and walked out.
    ***
    Clinging to the sides of a clay-caked ladder, sweating, eyes smarting, descending and descending and descending, Connor remembered why he hated mines. It wasn’t the heat, oppressive at thirty fathoms, nearly intolerable at seventy. It wasn’t the constant dampness or the dirt and mud and rubble, or the pitch-blackness, or the confinement for hours a day in places no roomier than a coffin. It wasn’t even the relentless, body-breaking labor that progressed so slowly and yielded so little.
    What he hated about mining was the shameful waste it made of a man’s life. Over his head, the whole world “at grass” went about the business of fighting wars or making children, selling shoes, harvesting fields, painting pictures, reading newspapers, dancing, debating, laughing, weeping—and always oblivious to the subterranean sweatshop underfoot, the ceaseless industry of men picking and hammering, breaking and blasting, tutworking and tributing, and dying young so that there could be pennies and teakettles and trinkets for the vital, unaware souls above.
    It was no life for a man, no life even for an animal. Looking around at the murky blackness, diffused only by the pale glimmer of candles miners stuck to their hats with bits of clay, Connor thought they might as well be worms—glowworms, glowing yellow instead of green, burrowing holes in the stone and slag at the rate of an inch a day, crawling and winding,