Spring didn't arrive. Winter just got bored and walked off without telling anyone. The drip in the mine lost its glass edge and turned lazy. We cut two new height marks into the support post and pretended that meant we were winning. Kado tied another knot into his crutch. Quiet changed nothing. He doesn't change until the world forces him.
We named the new crawl Throat because it swallowed light. The older crawl we called Spine because you had to keep one to get through it without crying. The last was Lung. It breathed wrong. Every time wind pushed above, Lung inhaled. Every time the wind calmed, Lung forgot how to exhale. We would fix it if we could. We would pretend we had if we couldn't.
In the morning, we made paste. Bone ash, salt, oil. I crushed it with the flat of my knife until it turned into a gray smear that smelled like burned soup and cheap metal. The jar gave us the last of it with a sound like a throat clearing. Enough for three spirals. Maybe four if I lied about thickness.
"Three," Kado said. He was a wall today. No smile. No joke. "You, the vent, and the ledger hall. Pick the order."
"Vent first," I said. "If they sweep the pipe, we all die. Ledger last."
Quiet tapped the floor. He pointed to his chest. Then to mine. Then he made a small circle with his fingers and pinched it tight. Small spirals. Tight lines. He wanted precision, not courage. Courage gets you killed with prettier words.
We crawled into Throat on elbows and curses. The lamplight refused to follow us so we used tins with slits punched through and set small wicks in grease. It made a sickly halo that clung to the stone and left our faces out in the cold on purpose. I painted the spiral over the vent ring while Quiet held the tin and Kado held my belt so if I slipped I'd only break my pride.
The trick is to draw the spiral off-center and never let your finger pause. If you pause, scent pools. If you keep moving, it smears. My mother's hands had shaken. Mine didn't. They wanted to, but I bullied them with memory.
"Circle," Kado said softly.
I circled the thin line with paste and dotted three small triangles into the corners where the ring bolt met stone. Triangles welcome attention. The right kind. The kind you can predict and waste. Quiet nodded once, the kind of approval that should have felt like a blanket and instead felt like a dare to keep not failing.
We crawled back. I painted my own chest. Paste was cold. It bit. I drew slower than I wanted to. A spiral is a promise. If you lie, the stone hears it. I didn't look at Kado while I drew. I didn't need to. I could feel him trying not to remember the night the masks made a triangle out of our street.
Ledger hall last. I knelt before the wall that holds our rules and debts. The tallies looked too thin today. Four kills. One promise mark. No broken lines yet. The stone felt heavier than yesterday. Not loud. Just listening.
"Small spiral under the tallies," Kado said. "Not on them. We don't smear the dead. We smear the smell."
I did as told. The paste left a dull shine. The smell crawled up my nose and set up a camp. Quiet watched with his hands still and his eyes full. He hates this. He loves this. He wants us alive more than he wants to make a pretty picture.
After, we sat with our backs to the wall until breath returned. That is our prayer when there is still enough air to waste on prayer. Kado rubbed his leg. The scar puckers tugged at each other. The mine complained about nothing in particular.
"Tap-code," Kado said. "We've been lazy. Three taps for watch. Two for move. One for stop. That's for idiots. We're advanced idiots now."
Quiet grinned without teeth. He crouched and scratched a grid into the dirt with his blade. Three by three. He tapped it with the tip and then touched the pipe. He showed me numbers with his hand, then letters with missing vowels. No A. No E. No I. No O. No U. He made me copy. He made me get it wrong. He made me get it right. Code is a language that forgives nobody and keeps secrets even when you're crying.
We worked until the lamp said it had better things to do. Then we set chimes. Hair-thin wire across Throat and Spine. Tiny bone beads that would kiss each other if a body pushed past. We call them chimes. They don't sing. They pray.
After, we went hunting for not-food. Nails. Wire. Cloth. A mirror shard. Anything that might turn a bad day into a slower death. The wind was strong. Our window. We slipped out along the ditch and kept our eyes thin.
The market wasn't awake yet. Just a woman boiling water over sticks like she expected soup to arrive if she stared hard enough. A night merchant's dead-drop jar sat half-buried near a culvert. It had a stone lid with a spiral etched so faint I thought my eyes were lying. Quiet tapped my wrist. He lifted the lid like he was disarming a person and pulled out a scrap of leather and two clay tokens stamped with circles and a notch. The leather was a map of nothing. A line. A dot. A cross. Or a warning. Or a joke.
On the inside of the lid, scratched small: DON'T TRUST TRIANGLES.
"Someone with a sense of humor," Kado said. He didn't smile. "Or someone who thinks we have time to decipher their riddles. Take the tokens. Leave a fishhook and a wire loop. We are poor. We tip anyway."
We did. Quiet tucked one token into his scarf and slid the other into the crease of the ledger book we don't have. Kado kept the leather. He always keeps the complicated things until they stop being complicated or stop being useful. He is rude to both kinds.
We hit two fallen houses. One gave us a pot with a dent so honest even Teeth Smile would respect it. The other gave us a mirror back plate that wasn't glass. Polished tin. Dull as a coin left in a mouth. We could use it to bounce light into Lung or into a liar's eyes. Kado found a fistful of iron nails under a floorboard and laughed without humor. Iron makes paste better. Iron is a friend that rusts while you sleep.
A levy pair drifted near the lane. We drifted the other way. The boys had learned not to walk where chimes live. I liked that about them. They were educable. It meant we could teach them fear at a distance.
We made it back to the mine without stories. That is the only good way back.
Quiet went to check the vent. He moves like a thought you don't admit you had. I set the mirrored tin on a stack of stones to send the lamp light deeper into Lung. The light went where I told it and refused to touch anything else. Light has a personality. It likes cliffhangers.
Kado set the tokens on the crate and looked at them the way you look at teeth you find in dirt. "We need an economy," he said. "We need rules for trade before trade writes rules for us."
"We have ash tokens," I said.
"Ash tokens buy soup," he said. "Not loyalty. Not silence. We need something that buys silence. Or we start burying secrets where we can't find them again."
Quiet tapped twice on the crate. He pointed to the ledger wall, then to his chest, then made a small square with his fingers. Boxes. Rations. He wanted ration marks we could stamp into clay. He wanted a way to give and count food that didn't feel like theft on holy days.
"Later," Kado said. "When we are twenty instead of three. When the vents don't wheeze."
We ate. The soup had a personality today. It admitted it was water with apologies. I salted it anyway because Kado likes pretending salt turns lies into truth.
While we ate, the mine changed its mind about us.
It started small. A pressure on the back of my teeth. A taste of coins. The ledger wall felt like it had leaned forward when I wasn't looking.
"Do you hear that," I asked.
Kado listened the way he listens to pain when it thinks it's being quiet. He shook his head. Quiet tilted his face toward the wall and squinted like the rock was speaking too softly to be polite. He signed three fingers splayed, then a slow closing. Closer. He heard it. He hears everything he is not allowed to say.
I put my palm to the stone under the tallies. It was cold. Then it wasn't. Not warm. Just less dead. Not a vibration. Not a sound. A hum you feel in bones that didn't ask to participate.
The tallies do not move. They are carvings. They are dead lines. They were still dead lines when I looked again. I told the hum to leave. It didn't.
"We spread the tallies," Kado said. "Load balance. We don't put all our dead in one room. The stone is old. Old things remember wrong."
"Is this seals," I asked. "Are we building seals by accident."
Kado didn't shrug. He isn't rude to ideas. "Maybe the stone is building us," he said.
Quiet cut me a look that said do not make this into poetry. Then he signed tap-code quick. G R I D. He pointed to the three by three he had scratched in the dirt earlier. Spread marks by the grid. New rule. Not chiseled yet. Real anyway.
We worked quiet for a long hour moving scratches. Not erasing the old ones. Never that. We carved a fresh set of shallow notches in Spine's alcove and in Throat's dogleg. Promise marks went to the doorway. Kill tallies went to the farthest point where hands would hate to reach. Debt tallies remained where we would always see them when we tried to sleep.
The hum softened. Not gone. Not friendly. Just less interested in us for the moment. That will have to count as mercy until we can afford more.
Afternoon turned mean. The wind quit. No digging when air sits like a sore. We sharpened. The whetstone rasped. I could have fallen asleep to that sound if sleep was brave enough to show its face here during daylight.
Kado made me hold the knife the right way. He always does. "Sharp decides," he said. "Dull gets told no."
"Your leg decides more," I said.
He snorted. "My leg pays. My knife decides. Don't confuse the cashier with the owner."
Quiet tossed a pebble at my foot to stop me from smiling. He pointed at the pipe that feeds Lung and tapped a pattern I didn't know yet. Not ours. Not the market's. Not the levy boys' drunk knock. A child's rhythm. Three light. Pause. Three light. Pause. Then a long scrape.
I crawled close and breathed small. The pipe breathed back. I could taste ashes from above. Old fire, not new. The scrape came again. Not a hand. A stone against metal.
"Don't trust triangles," I whispered. The words crawled out before I meant them to. The dead-drop lid had teeth.
Kado nodded once like caution was a flavor he approved of today. "Throat," he said. "Chimes. Quiet takes point. You keep your knife and your head in different places so one of them survives if the other does not."
We bled our lamp to a sliver and took it. Throat is narrow. Good for us. Bad for anyone who thinks numbers beat rules in the dark. The chimes were quiet. The paste on the vent ring had dried to a dull skin. A fingerprint rested in one edge where I shouldn't have touched it. I wiped it. Too late to matter and too late not to try.
Quiet held up a hand. He flattened his palm. Stop. He leaned. He put his ear to the stone. He does that sometimes. I think he listens to the world the way I listen to people, which is to say badly but with commitment.
Tap. Tap. Tap. The child rhythm. Then a scuttle. Then nothing.
"Animal," I mouthed.
Quiet shook his head and flattened his hand again, then made a pup shape with two fingers, then closed them. Not animal. Not pup. Not alive? He frowned. He hates not-knowing worse than cold.
We waited until waiting became a job instead of a choice. Then Kado touched my shoulder and squeezed once. Back. We do not chase mysteries into vents. We let vents bring mysteries to us and then we hurt them where we built rules.
We spent the last of the light shaving rat bones into hooks and beads. The beads will sing when lies try to crawl in. The hooks will annoy animals so they decide the tunnel hates them and go die somewhere we are not. Quiet etched a tiny spiral into one bead. He did it without asking me. It didn't feel like a theft. It felt like a memory rooting in new dirt.
When night took the last of the light and our lamp agreed it was done arguing, we ate a thing that insisted it had once been stew. Kado salted it like a man who has forgiven the world but not forgotten. Quiet stared at the ledger wall until I wanted to drag his eyes away and couldn't.
"Kids glow too loud," I said, because my head had decided to think old thoughts loud. "Pathways leak. Sensors follow the noise. The paste smears the noise, but only if you don't sweat and only in the cold."
Kado looked at me over the edge of the cup. "You talk like a man with books," he said.
"I talk like a boy who doesn't want to be erased," I said back.
He nodded once. That counted as I hear you.
We lay down. The drip counted like an accountant with a grudge. I slid the knife under my ribs and the whetstone under my palm. I whispered the rules into my chest so the paste could hear them and decide to help.
Something breathed in Lung. Not air. Not animal. Sound without lungs that wanted to be one. Then the chime kissed its partner so soft I thought I imagined it.
Quiet was already up, knife in hand, eyes wide and white. Kado rolled to a knee and bit down on a noise his leg wanted to make. I crawled to the bend and held the mirror out to throw the lamp's last penny of light along the stone.
It glinted off something pale right at the edge of the vent. Not eyes. Not bone. A little triangle scratched into the metal, new, clean, fresh paste scraped away where a finger had rubbed to draw it. Three taps against the mark. Then silence.
I didn't see a face. I didn't need to. Someone with a finger and time had told us a joke they found funny. They had drawn the thing our lid warned us about.
"Move the ledger to Spine," Kado said softly. "We sleep in Throat. We set double chimes. We learn the new tap. Tomorrow we find a story that fits this one and break its teeth."
Quiet breathed out through his nose. He looked at me. He made a small circle with one hand and a short, sharp line through it with the other. Our circle. Cracked. Not broken. Not yet. His eyes said make it never.
I nodded. I pressed my palm to the spiral on my chest. It had dried. It itched. It had done its job or pretended it had. I pressed harder until my scar bothered me and then stopped because pain is a poor god to feed before sleep.
When I turned to lie down, I saw something by the ledger wall we hadn't left there. A small spiral, newer than the rest, drawn with a fingertip in dust low to the ground near where a child might reach. The line was shaky but sure. It was our shape. It was my mother's hand in a memory through someone else's body.
I didn't wake the others. Not yet. I wiped it away and then drew it again, slow, off-center, with a dot where my mother never put one. A key only I would know. If someone drew it again without the dot, I would know they could see through stone like I pretend I can.
I lay down and let the dark take the space above my face the way the sky used to. The drip counted. The pipe hummed. The chimes told me a story I didn't like and didn't get to choose. Somewhere outside this rock, a man in a white mask tapped a triangle into a post and walked away without hurrying.
"Survive," I whispered. It wasn't a prayer. It was an invoice.
The mine listened. The rule sat between us like a knife between friends. And far down in Lung, the scrape came again, slow, careful, apologetic. Then it stopped like it had learned manners.
We slept with our knives pointed toward the sound.