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the heavy machinery plant in Oculys. But the redesign and
manufacturing process would take a while, and Daniel wasn’t sure that Saras
would spring for the new machines, anyway. The company had plenty of workers,
for now.
    Daniel hoped that the new scoring machines would
be completed soon. His mother didn’t. She said they’d put everyone out of a
job. Still, the comfort of removing Yynium from inside a scoring machine seemed
a good alternative to this: hundreds of workers prying and scraping it from the
rock every day. Scorers were small units, and two or three could fit in a
section of the drift—the horizontal mine tunnels that followed the Yynium
veins—at a time. They had precision ore-removal attachments that scored through
the Yynium vein and neatly popped out chunks of it into tram cars that hauled
it up and out. Scorers had climate controlled cabs with air filters. Back on
Earth, his father had never come home with Yynium dust clouding his jacket. Or
his lungs.
    Daniel didn’t know what the displaced workers
would do, but there had to be something better than this. The dry cough of
dustlung punctuated the air around him, and though most of the miners wore
Saras Company–issued masks, they still came home with the sharp taste of Yynium
in their mouths and the thick feel of it in their breath.
    And now, another strange sickness was plaguing
people in Coriol. It started with fatigue, and moved to a fever followed by
purple bruises that appeared on peoples’ stomachs, arms, necks, and faces,
spreading rapidly until they were covered with the plum-colored patches. Daniel
hadn’t seen any of the sufferers up close, but he’d passed them in the street,
and they looked miserable.
    Daniel watched Zella step onto the tram, and he
and his mother boarded a few cars behind her, flipping the pivoting seats down
as they entered. Under his boots, Daniel felt the grit from the ore the car
hauled when it wasn’t hauling people. He wouldn’t mind designing ore trams. He’d
make the seats contoured, so people were more comfortable sitting in them.
    As the tram began to move, he put an arm around
his mother, tucking her head into him, so the wind didn’t sting her eyes. He
hunched over her, squinting against the wind as the tram picked up speed, and
tried not to think of it plummeting down the slope, deeper and deeper under the
ground.
    He’d put windscreens on the cars, too. But that
got him thinking of the design problem that posed. The tram cars carried people
into and out of the mine, at the shift changes. When a tram emptied its cargo
of people, it went to be filled with Yynium ore that it would carry back up to
the surface. The cars had to be able to carry people and then be ready to carry
ore. A windscreen, even a metal one that could withstand being banged by chunks
of ore, would get in the miners’ way as they threw the ore into the cars. And
strong metal screens on each car would add too much weight to the tram as a
whole. Daniel enjoyed the puzzle of it as he rode. If he ever got the chance,
he’d design trams.
    Or even better, hovercars. There were only a few
in Coriol, besides the round-backed hovercabs, and he loved to watch them skim
by. Theo Talbot’s was the most beautiful machine he’d ever seen.
    A pang of regret filled Daniel. Last year, when
Talbot’s hovercar had come to building G, where his family lived, he’d been
outside, waiting for his father to come home and for his own shift in the mine
to start. He remembered watching Talbot unfold himself from the car and stretch
before going into the building.
    Daniel and Zella and a couple other friends, Pete
and Hadib, had gone to check out the car. He remembered walking around it,
looking in at the Earthleather seats. He remembered how Zella had taken his
hand and pulled him over to see the glowing dashboard and the multiple
drop-down screens inside. He remembered the thrill of her hand in his, and the
feeling that someday maybe he could design