Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Cartwright didn’t hear her arrive; his hammer must have covered any noise she’d made. She watched him, catching her breath. After a moment he stopped hammering, and she could hear him breathing, wheezing a little. When he spoke, she thought he was talking to himself.

“Hello, Caitlyn,” he said. “Or whatever you’re calling yourself now.”

She froze, heart pounding.

She’d feared this moment, dreaded it. But she hadn’t expected it to come like this. Had he seen her? Heard her? How did he know her?

Cartwright slid out from under the face, coveralls rucking up over skinny shins. He’d stripped to the waist. Coal scars ran so thick over his back and shoulders that they looked like a contour map of the mountains whose roots he’d spent his life dismantling.

“How long has it been, Katie? Eighteen years? Twenty?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cartwright just tilted his head curiously, looking like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. “You still have your mother’s voice,” he said. “Though they say you’ve forgotten her. Are they right? Have you? Never mind. Let me get a look at you.”

He put his hands to her face, and Li realized at the touch of skin on skin what had been nagging her throughout this conversation: there was no light. Cartwright had been working in total darkness, without a lamp or infra goggles.

He was blind.

His fingers walked over her nose and lips, into her eye sockets. “You’ve changed your face,” he said. “But you’re Gil’s daughter. Mirce told them you’d died, but I knew. They would have told me. They keep their secrets, of course. But something like that they’d have told me.”

“Who would have told you?”

“The saints, Katie. Her saints. Don’t tell me you’ve stopped praying to Her. You mustn’t do that, Katie. She needs our prayers. She lives by them. And She answers them.”

Li glanced down, saw the cold fire of the silver crucifix hanging on the priest’s scarred chest. A strangled cry echoed against the rock, and she realized that it came from her own throat.

Cartwright kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve come to ask me about the fire, haven’t you?”

Li swallowed, scraped her thoughts together. “What caused it, Cartwright?”

“Sharifi.”

“How? What was she after? What did she want you to do for her?”

“What witches always do; strike crystal.”

“But Sharifi had the company witch,” she said.

“Ah, but she didn’t trust the company witch, did she? Not at first. She only brought her in for the dirty work.”

“You mean the work in the Trinidad. But what was the witch doing there if they’d already found the condensa—the crystal?”

“She still needed someone to sing them for her, didn’t she? She still needed to talk to them. She still needed to run her damn tests. I wouldn’t do it for her. And she didn’t want a priest anyway.” His face twisted. “She wasn’t a believing woman.”

“I don’t understand. What wouldn’t you do for her?”

“Haas’s work,” Cartwright answered. “Devil’s work.”

“But she changed her mind, didn’t she?” Li asked, seized by a trembling conviction that Cartwright knew, that he’d always known, that he was somehow at the center of it all. “Or someone changed it for her. What happened before the fire? Why did Sharifi destroy her data? What was she afraid of?”

“Of the fires of Hell,” Cartwright said, crossing himself. “Of Her just punishments.”

Li heard a noise in the darkness, closer than any noise should be, and realized that she was trembling violently, that it was the soft clink of the zipper tab at her throat she was hearing, the rustle of her own clothes against skin and rock.

“You should visit your mother,” Cartwright said. “It’s not good to neglect her.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, Cartwright.”

“That’s not what your father says.”

A memory welled up from her gut like an underground river. She stopped it, corked it, slammed every door in her mind on it. “My father’s dead,” she said harshly. “And I came here for information, not church talk.”

“You came for the same reason we all come,” Cartwright said. “She called you.”

Li cleared her throat, choking on coal dust. “Did Sharifi’s project have union approval?”

“I’m Her man,” Cartwright said. “Not the union’s man.”

“Don’t feed me that line.” She held up her right hand in the gesture of the faded, peeling Christ Triumphant that had reigned over the Saturday night masses of her half-remembered childhood. “You’re two fingers of the same hand. I remember that much.”

“Then you remember enough to answer your question yourself. Haven’t you been there? They told me you swam in it.”

“The glory hole,” Li whispered, remembering the gleaming walls and fractal vaults of Sharifi’s secret chamber. “It’s a chapel. You found her a chapel.”

“My mother took me to the last chapel in her arms, down a bootlegger’s shaft,” Cartwright said. “AMC dug that one up and sold it off-planet. Like they always do.” He smiled, and it seemed to Li that his blind eyes were staring through her at a bright light she couldn’t see. “But not this time. This time we were ready.”

“Did Sharifi know what she’d found, Cartwright?”

“She knew as much as a nonbeliever could know.”

“She knew as much as you decided to tell her, you mean. You used her. You used her to find it, to dig it, to keep the company from cutting. And you got her killed over it.”

“I didn’t do anything, Katie. Whatever Sharifi found, she came here looking for it. We all walk all Her paths. No choice can change that. Nothing that happens isn’t meant to happen.”

“Was it worth it, Cartwright? How long will it take Haas to get a nonunion crew down there? A week? Two? That’s all the time you have your precious glory hole for. And how many people died for it?”

“No one dies, Katie.” Cartwright was doing something to the condensates around them. Li felt them pressing in on her, shorting out her internals, smothering her. “The wave is more than the sum of its paths.”

“I remember.” She was trembling, her breath coming tight and angry. “I remember what you did to my father. I remember.”

“He’s here, Katie. Don’t you want to talk to him? All you have to do is believe in Her. She lost Her only Son. She knows your sorrow, even if you’ve forgotten it. She can forgive you.”

Whatever he said next, Li didn’t hear it. She was already running, scrambling down the steep slope, tearing the cloth of her uniform and the skin of her palms on the sharp rocks.

She ran blind, her internals a wash of useless static. She stumbled over something in the dark, patted it until she recognized the angles of her Davy lamp. It had gone out. She lit it by feel with trembling fingers, strapped it on, and just sat staring at the walls for thirty seconds.

McCuen was waiting in the gangway, looking far better than he had the last time she’d seen him. “You okay?” he asked.

Li remembered her torn hands and clothes, wondered what her face looked like. “I’m fine. I just fell, that’s all.”

He gave her a strange look. “Did you talk to him?”

“Couldn’t get up there. No air.” She pulled on her rebreather, jammed the mouthpiece between her lips, glad of how it masked and muffled her voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sharifi’s hand was warm, her handshake firm and professional.

“Major,” she said, smiling. “Welcome.”

“Nice to meet you,” Li said, wondering what corporate database McCuen had hacked to find this goldmine.