"We need your help," I said, once the door had shut behind us and the bar had dropped back into place. "Not for me. For two people we found up at that mine. One of them's in a bad way, Ilse. Worse than anything I know how to fix."
Something in her face went very still, the specific stillness of a woman braced for a question she'd been dreading for years and had finally stopped hoping she'd never have to answer.
"Ash grey," she said. Not a question.
"You've seen it before," Savage said.
Ilse was quiet a long moment, and then she set the knife down on the counter beside her with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and looked at both of us with something that had gone a great deal older than it had been thirty seconds earlier.
"I've done more than seen it," she said. "Sit down, the both of you, quiet as you can manage. There's a great deal I should have told you three nights ago and didn't, because I wasn't sure yet whether I trusted you to do anything useful with it. I think I trust you now. Lord knows nobody else in this valley's ever earned it faster."
She made tea nobody drank and talked instead, low and steady, glancing at the shuttered window every so often like the words themselves might be loud enough to carry through the wood.
"My sister Norah kept a farmstead three valleys east of here, past the old logging road nobody uses anymore since the company put in the rail spur," Ilse said. "She died going on six years back now, fever, nothing to do with any of this, and I couldn't bring myself to sell the place after, so it's sat empty since. Mostly empty." She wrapped both hands around her own cup without drinking from it. "The first time I found someone the mine had spat back out half changed, wandering the tree line above town like they didn't know their own name anymore, I didn't know what else to do with them but take them somewhere nobody official would come looking. Norah's place. I've done it four times since. Three of them are still out there, quiet, mostly harmless, waiting on something none of us know how to give them. The fourth didn't make it more than a season."
"Four people," Savage said, quiet. "In a town this size. And nobody ever noticed."
"Nobody official ever looks hard for people this town's already decided to forget," Ilse said, and there was no self-pity in it, just a plain, tired accounting. "That's the whole reason the company can run what it runs up there. A place learns to stop counting its own losses eventually, if the alternative is admitting how many of them there've been."
"Will you take Merit and the man with her," I asked. "Please. We can't keep them out on that ridge much longer, and we can't take them where we're going next."
Ilse studied me a moment, and something behind her tired eyes did a slow, careful sum, weighing whatever risk this represented against whatever debt she apparently felt she owed a boy with his father's chin.
"I'll take them," she said. "I'll need help getting them there without half the valley seeing four strangers and two ash-grey shapes walking the logging road in broad daylight, but I'll take them, and I'll do right by them same as I have the others."
"We'll bring them tonight," Savage said. "After dark, same as we came in. Namey and Luxy are minding them now, up along the ridge."
"Good." Ilse stood, some of the old brisk practicality returning to her posture now that the plan had a shape to it. "There's one more thing you should know before you go back up that hill, and I debated on whether to hand it to you at all, because it's not fully mine to hand over." She hesitated, hands flat on the counter. "There's a man works the mine as foreman. Josef Croft. Been there longer than Threnody has, worked for the company that came before them too, and the one before that if you go back far enough. He's the one who's tipped me off, quiet, every time the mine's spat someone back out half changed. Wouldn't have found any of the four without him."
"Why would a company foreman risk his own position helping people like that," I asked.
Ilse's mouth pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Because his own boy works down there too, in the sorting sheds mostly, and Josef's spent fifteen years watching what that place does to people and hating every hour of it, and warning me quiet is the only rebellion a man in his position can afford without losing the one thing he's actually got left to protect. I'd not tell you his name at all except that you're clearly walking straight toward whatever's actually running that operation, and a man like Josef might end up being worth more to you than you'd guess from the outside."
"Does he know we're the ones who emptied those cages," Savage asked.
"Not from me," Ilse said. "But that mountain doesn't keep secrets long from the men who work inside it, and I'd guess he's already put the pieces together same as anyone with two eyes and half a reason to be watching close would have."
We left before the town's few early risers were properly up and moving, Ilse's promise to meet us at the ridge that evening sitting steadier in my chest than almost anything else had since Highhollow first came into view, and the walk back up felt shorter for having something like an actual plan attached to the end of it.
We were perhaps a quarter mile from the lean-to, the tree line thinning out toward the clearing where we'd left the others, when a shape stepped out from behind a stand of pine directly onto the path ahead of us, hands raised open and empty, a heavyset man in mine coveralls with a face gone grey with something that wasn't ash and wasn't corruption, just plain, ordinary fear worn thin by too many hours of carrying it alone.