Every day, I ran to the mines and shoveled dirt that somehow managed to be worse than dirt.
It was too dry to be mud, too soft to be stone, too sharp to be sand. It crumbled like ash, cut like gravel, and found its way into everything: clothes, boots, food, ears, lungs. By the end of every shift, I coughed up enough gray dust to patch a wall. Every morning, I swore I would quit. Every evening, I remembered starving was worse.
“Damn it.”
I nearly tripped over a support root as I sprinted down the tunnel, one hand gripping my shovel, the other holding my helmet down before it bounced off my head. The shift horn had already sounded. That meant I was late again, which meant Foreman Vekk was probably standing somewhere with my name loaded in his mouth like a thrown rock.
The tunnel sloped beneath my feet, narrow and ribbed with old support beams. Each beam had been wrapped in cracked resin, wall-worm paste, and prayers no one fully believed in but everyone kept using. Heat Grub jars glowed weakly along the walls, giving off a sick orange light that made everyone look half-dead even when they were still arguing. To be fair, most of us in Rooknest looked half-dead before breakfast.
That was home. If the cold didn’t stiffen your bones, the dust filled your chest. If the dust didn’t kill you, the work bent your back. If the work didn’t break you, someone with a louder voice and a better title made sure you remembered your place anyway.
I took the corner too hard and scraped my shoulder against the wall. Pain shot down my arm, bright and mean. I hissed through my teeth but kept running. Maybe Foreman Vekk wouldn’t notice. Maybe he was busy. Maybe a support line had snapped, or a Skitter had gotten loose, or the whole tunnel would collapse and bury me before he had the chance to yell. Honestly, that last one was starting to sound peaceful.
“KHERN!”
There it was.
I stopped so suddenly my boots skidded across loose crust and nearly sent me face-first into a pile of Skitter dung. Foreman Vekk stood at the mouth of Section Nine with his arms crossed over his chest. He was short even for a Kharuun, but somehow managed to look down on everyone anyway. His shoulder fur was dusted white, his left ear membrane had a tear through it from some old mining accident, and his mouth sat in the permanent expression of a man who had been born disappointed and spent every year since collecting evidence.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I mean—yes. I know. But not on purpose.”
“You were late yesterday.”
“I know.”
“And the day before.”
“I know.”
“And the day before that.”
“I was only almost late that day.”
Vekk’s eyes narrowed, and I immediately regretted having a mouth.
“So what exactly,” he asked, “are you being paid for?”
I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again, and produced nothing. Unfortunately, silence counted as an answer.
Vekk stepped closer and jabbed one clawed finger against my chest. “This isn’t a sleeping den, boy. This is Rooknest. Seven thousand mouths, seven thousand backs, seven thousand problems. You think the walls hold themselves up because you apologize nicely?”
“No, Foreman.”
“You think the Skitters feed themselves?”
“No, Foreman.”
“You think Saint Rook keeps this place alive so you can stumble into work whenever your little heart feels ready?”
“No, Foreman.”
“Then move.”
I moved fast.
The others were already working when I slipped into Section Nine. The tunnel ahead had been opened only a few days ago and still smelled like old crust, sour moss, and the faint metallic tang that sometimes came from deeper cracks. Not blood. Not exactly. At least, that was what everyone said when they didn’t want to think too hard.
We were not supposed to think too hard. Thinking too hard slowed the hands. Slowed hands missed quotas. Missed quotas got noticed, and getting noticed was usually worse than being forgotten.
I grabbed a rusted scrape-pan from the tool rack and hurried to the wall, where gray crust had started flaking loose in thick curling sheets. The job was simple: pry off the bad layers, bag the useful scraps, toss the rot into the worm trench, and try not to breathe too deeply. Simple jobs were the worst kind. They gave you too much time to think.
“Late again?” a voice called from behind me.
I turned. Veyrun leaned on his shovel like it was a royal staff, grinning wide enough to show the gap where his lower left tooth used to be. He was taller than me by half a head, with darker stone-brown skin, thicker shoulder fur, and the kind of easy posture that made it seem like the world had personally agreed not to bother him. I hated that about him. I also would have died without it.
“Barely,” I said.
“You got yelled at loud enough for the Skitter pens to hear.”
“Good. Maybe they’ll learn discipline.”
Veyrun laughed and shoved a sack into my hands. “Section Nine today. Tough luck.”
“I heard.”
“No, no. You don’t understand. Tough luck means you’re working with me.”
“That’s worse.”
“Exactly. Which is why I’ll treat you tonight.”
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“With what money?” I asked.
“With future money.”
“That’s not money.”
“It is if you believe hard enough.”
“Veyrun, that’s called debt.”
“Debt is just money with a memory.”
I hated that I laughed.
Vekk’s voice snapped across the tunnel. “Less flirting with bankruptcy, more scraping!”
“Yes, Foreman!” we both shouted.
Veyrun leaned closer afterward, his grin sharpened by trouble. “He only yells because his ears are too ugly to whisper.”
I coughed into my fist to hide the laugh. Vekk turned, and we both started scraping like our lives depended on it. In Rooknest, they usually did.
The Outer Crust was not kind to anything that wanted to live. Nothing grew properly here except Hollow Moss, and even that had the decency to taste like wet dust and old rope. The ground above us was flaky, frozen in places, dry in others, and always waiting for an excuse to split open. The Shuddering came every season, sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes hard enough to bury whole tunnel lines and make everyone pretend they hadn’t heard the screaming.
Rooknest survived anyway, though not because we were strong. Kharuun were not strong. We were small, wiry things with wide feet, hooked nails, folded ear membranes, and tails good for balance during tremors and not much else. Our skin dried and flaked in the cold air. Our noses could seal against dust if we remembered quickly enough. We could crawl, scrape, climb, smell bad air, hear cracks before the ceiling fell, and survive on food most creatures would rather die than chew. That was our great gift. We were hard to kill. Not impossible. Just irritating.
Rooknest survived because everyone carried something. Miners scraped crust. Handlers raised Skitters. Menders patched cracks with wall-worm paste. Moss-pickers crawled through narrow wet pockets and prayed nothing else had found them first. Children sorted shell flakes. Elders repaired breathing cloths until their fingers stiffened. Everyone did something. Everyone had to. If you were useful, people remembered your name. If you weren’t, they remembered where you used to stand.
A wet cough echoed from the back of the tunnel, and the scraping slowed only for a second before everyone kept working.
Old Jim sat against the wall with his shovel across his knees. Dust clung to the fur around his throat, and his chest rose and fell in shallow jerks. His hands trembled so badly the shovel handle tapped against the ground in little hollow clicks. Tap. Tap. Tap.
No one went to him. No one called for Vekk. No one asked if he was all right. These things happened every day. A worker slowed. A worker sat. A worker coughed. Then one day the worker did not stand up again, and by the next week someone else held his tool.
Veyrun scraped beside me in silence.
I tightened my grip on the pan. “He should be resting.”
Veyrun did not look at me. “He is resting.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“Then why doesn’t someone—”
“Do what?” His voice was still light, but his face was not. “Give him our ration? Take his quota? Carry him home? Tell Vekk? Tell Saint Rook?” Veyrun scraped a sheet of crust off the wall harder than he needed to. “Everyone knows, Khern.”
Old Jim’s eyes had closed. He was still breathing, for now.
“I hate this place,” I said quietly.
Veyrun snorted. “No you don’t.”
“I do.”
“No. You hate being scared of this place.”
I wanted to argue. I couldn’t.
Veyrun glanced at me and smirked, softer this time. “Don’t worry. You’re still a rookie. Give it a few years and you’ll be as miserable as me.”
“You’re twenty.”
“Exactly. Ancient.”
“You still owe me future money.”
“And you still believe in it. That makes you the fool.”
I shook my head and went back to scraping.
By mid-shift, my arms burned. By late-shift, my back hurt. By the time the second horn sounded, every part of me had either gone numb or started complaining with legal confidence. Vekk inspected our bags, grunted in a way that might have meant approval in some dead language, and waved us off.
“Tools cleaned. Moss rations collected. Skitter dung shift tomorrow for anyone who leaves a scrape-pan dirty.”
Everyone cleaned their tools very thoroughly.
I was wiping down my shovel when I looked back toward Old Jim. He had not moved. His bag was half-empty.
Veyrun noticed me noticing and muttered, “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
“I can finish half a bag.”
“You can barely finish your own.”
“I finished mine.”
“Because I helped.”
“You talked near me. That’s not helping.”
“My presence inspires labor.”
“Your presence inspires crimes.”
He sighed, but when I took Old Jim’s sack, he did not stop me. He only shifted so his body blocked Vekk’s view from the mouth of the section.
I scraped fast. Too fast. Badly, at first. Then better. Fear was a useful teacher when it was not busy ruining your digestion. I filled the rest of Old Jim’s sack with salvageable crust, tied it shut, and set it beside his boots.
Old Jim opened one eye. “Idiot.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I did not thank you.”
“I noticed.”
“You trying to get both of us docked?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
His eye closed again.
I crouched lower. “Can you stand?”
“Could stand before your father had the poor judgment to become your father.”
“That sounds like no.”
“It sounds like mind your skull.”
Veyrun made a quiet choking sound behind me. I was not sure if it was laughter or dust.
Then Vekk’s shadow fell over us, which was wonderful in the way a ceiling crack was wonderful.
He looked at me. Then Old Jim. Then the full sack. My stomach sank so hard it probably reached the lower vents.
Vekk crouched and untied the sack.
No one in Section Nine breathed.
He looked through the crust pieces, picked one up, rubbed it between his claws, and frowned. “This is sloppy.”
“I—”
His eyes cut to me, and I shut up.
Vekk tied the sack again, tighter than before, and shoved it toward Old Jim’s boots. “Bad wall section,” he said loudly. “Scrape layers were thin. Count stands.”
Every worker suddenly found the ground fascinating.
Old Jim opened both eyes. Vekk leaned closer to him and lowered his voice, but not enough that I missed it. “You fall asleep on shift again, I assign you to tool counting where your corpse will at least be organized.”
Old Jim coughed. It might have been a laugh.
Vekk stood and pointed at me. “And you. If you have energy to hover, you have energy to carry rot bins.”
“Yes, Foreman.”
“Now.”
I carried rot bins until my shoulders forgot they belonged to me.
Veyrun found me afterward near the tool wash, where I was trying to remove gray paste from my hands with water that looked dirtier than my hands. He leaned against the wall and looked far too pleased for someone who had also worked all day.
“That was stupid,” he said.
“I know.”
“Vekk saw.”
“I know.”
“He covered it.”
“I know.”
“That’s suspicious.”
“Everything is suspicious to you.”
“Because I am alive.” He lowered his voice. “You going straight home?”
“Yeah.”
“To your mother?”
“Usually how home works.”
“Tell Auntie Mara I said she still owes me two moss cakes.”
“She does not.”
“She does. I complimented her stitching.”
“That doesn’t earn you moss cakes.”
“It should. My compliments are rare and spiritually nourishing.”
“Your compliments are lies with better posture.”
He put a hand to his chest. “You wound me.”
“Not enough.”
Veyrun grinned, but the grin faded when I picked up my ration bundle. It was smaller than yesterday. Not by much. Just enough to notice.
He noticed too.
“Bad count?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“You should say something.”
“To who?”
“Vekk.”
I stared at him.
He winced. “Right. Stupid idea.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s enough.”
“For you?”
I tied the bundle shut. “For her.”
Veyrun went quiet. That was the thing about him. He talked too much until something actually mattered. Then he talked just enough.
“Come by later,” he said. “I’ll steal something from my uncle’s pot.”
“You say that like he won’t notice.”
“He’ll notice. He’ll also yell. Then he’ll feed us because he likes yelling at full stomachs.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“That means no.”
“It means I’ll think about it.”
“That means no, but anxious.”
“Everything I do is anxious.”
“True.”
I shoved him. He laughed, and for a moment the tunnel felt less like a throat trying to swallow us.
The walk home took longer than usual because one of the lower passages had sealed wrong again. Wall worms had been overactive all week, leaving thick gray paste over cracks that did not need sealing while ignoring the ones that did. The menders cursed about it constantly. Nobody knew why the worms had changed, just like nobody knew why the Shuddering had been stronger this season or why the Skitters had started biting their feed rails at night. Nobody knew much of anything, really. Rooknest survived on old habits and desperate confidence.
My mother lived in the eastern stack, three levels above the Skitter pens and one level below the old vent line. The air there was always cold, but cleaner than the miner dens. I pushed through the hanging hide curtain and ducked inside.
“Ma?”
A small lamp glowed near the wall. My mother sat beside it, bent over a strip of breathing cloth, pulling thread through the fabric with slow, careful hands.
Mara of Rooknest had once been able to climb faster than anyone in the eastern tunnels. That was what people used to say. She could hear cracks through three walls, smell bad air before beetles panicked, and carry two full scrap sacks without dragging her tail. That was before dust-lung. Before her hands started shaking. Before people stopped saying Mara and started saying Khern’s mother, as if illness had eaten the rest of her name first.
She looked up and smiled, and the room felt warmer when she did.
“You’re late.”
I froze. Then she laughed softly, which turned into a cough. I moved before thinking, setting the ration bundle down and reaching for the water jar.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re coughing.”
“I’m always coughing.”
“That doesn’t make it fine.”
“It makes it familiar.”
I handed her the cup. She drank slowly, and I looked away from the cloth in her lap. The stitches were uneven today.
“You ate?” I asked.
“Did you?”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It was mine.”
I sighed and sat across from her.
The room was barely large enough for two sleeping mats, one storage shelf, the lamp, and a crate we pretended was a table. The walls had been patched so many times they looked diseased: old resin, worm paste, shell scrap, and ash pressed into seams. A child’s prayer charm made from Skitter bone still hung near the entrance, though I was too old for those now. I had made it when I was seven. She had never taken it down, and I hated that I liked that.
I opened the ration bundle: two moss cakes, a strip of dried grub, half a lump of Skitter cheese. My mother looked at it, then at me.
“That’s less than yesterday.”
“Bad count.”
“Khern.”
“It’s fine.”
“Khern.”
“I was late.” Her face changed, not anger but worry, which was worse, so I quickly added, “Vekk yelled, but that’s normal. He yells at breathing. I worked Section Nine. Full shift. No deductions except maybe the late mark, but that’s not—”
“Khern.”
I stopped. Her voice was gentle, and I hated when it was gentle. It made me feel like a child trying to hide a broken cup behind my back.
“You do not have to bleed yourself dry to prove you are worth feeding.”
I looked down at the moss cakes sitting between us like stones. “Someone has to.”
“No.”
“Yes.” The word came out sharper than I meant, and her hands stilled. I swallowed before continuing. “I mean... if I lose this work, what happens? To us? To you?”
She said nothing, because we both knew. If I lost the mine, there were other jobs. Worse jobs. Dung scraping. Crack crawling. Moss pocket diving. Vent clearing. The kinds of jobs people gave to those who were not quite dead but no longer valuable enough to protect.
“I can work,” she said.
“You can stitch.”
“That is work.”
“You know what I mean.”
Her eyes hardened a little. “Yes. I know exactly what people mean when they decide some work counts and some work doesn’t.”
Shame crawled up my throat. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
She set the cloth aside and reached across the crate. Her fingers touched mine, dry and thin and warm.
“You are tired,” she said.
“I’m always tired.”
“That does not make it fine.”
I almost smiled. She did.
Then the room trembled.
Only slightly. Dust fell from the ceiling in a thin gray veil, and the lamp flame shivered between us. Both of us looked up and waited through one breath, then two, then three.
The tremor passed.
Somewhere below, a Skitter shrieked. Another answered. Then the whole pen erupted in chittering panic. My mother’s fingers tightened around mine.
“The Shuddering?” I asked.
“Too small.”
“Then what?”
She listened.
All Kharuun knew how to listen. Not just with ears. With feet. With tail. With teeth, sometimes, when the ground was angry enough. The walls settled. The Skitters quieted one by one. Finally, she released my hand.
“Probably nothing.”
People in Rooknest said that a lot. Probably nothing. A crack in the ceiling. A missing worker. A strange smell from a new tunnel. A Skitter refusing to eat. A stronger tremor. A weaker wall. Probably nothing, because if every small fear became something, we would never move. We would just sit in our little rooms, listening to the world decide whether to crush us.
After dinner, I left my mother the larger moss cake and pretended not to notice when she pretended not to notice. Then I stepped outside into the eastern passage.
Rooknest stretched around me in layers of tunnel light and shadow: homes stacked into walls, bridges of scavenged shell, rope lines, hanging cages of Heat Grubs, Skitter-hide curtains, children chasing Scrape Rats between support beams, old women gossiping while repairing masks, menders arguing over paste thickness. Somewhere far below, miners sang badly because singing badly was better than hearing the walls creak. It was ugly. It smelled awful. It was always cold. It was home.
I walked toward the overlook without really meaning to. The eastern overlook was only a widened ledge where three tunnels met, but from there I could see almost everything: the Skitter pens clustered low near the heat vents, the scrap yards spread in crooked rings, the worker stacks clinging to the walls, and the Saint’s Domain rising from the center.
Saint Rook’s fortress was not built like the rest of Rooknest. It had grown, or at least that was what people said. A tower of pale resin, dark stone, and old shell stood wrapped in roots that pulsed faintly beneath their surface. It rose from the deepest part of the settlement and reached toward the cracked ceiling like a hand trying to hold it up. Maybe it was.
Saint Rook lived inside it. Or as it. Or with it. People argued about the difference when they were drunk enough to sound brave. I had seen him only a handful of times: once during a tunnel collapse when I was twelve, once during a Skitter plague, and once when a Rukhar raid came too close and the raiders suddenly found every path into Rooknest sealed by walls that had not been there the night before.
He was not like us, not anymore, but everyone said he remembered names. I did not know if he knew mine. Probably not. Why would he? Still, I watched the pale tower breathe slowly and quietly, keeping seven thousand people from becoming another dead colony in the Outer Crust.
My mother’s words returned to me.
You do not have to bleed yourself dry to prove you are worth feeding.
I wanted to believe her. I really did. But below me, the Skitters needed feeding, the walls needed patching, the tunnels needed scraping, Old Jim needed replacing soon though no one would say it, my mother needed medicine, and Rooknest needed hands. If hands were all I had, then I would use them until they broke.
I leaned against the cold railing and looked at Saint Rook’s tower. The roots along its side pulsed once, twice, then stopped for one breath.
The central hollow seemed to hold still around them. A child’s laugh faded near the lower bridges. A Skitter clicked below, sharp and nervous. Somewhere in the walls, a support line gave a tiny wooden groan.
Then the roots pulsed again, slow and steady and normal.
I let out the breath I had been holding. “At least you know what you’re doing,” I whispered.
The words disappeared into the hollow. No answer came, of course. Saints had better things to do than listen to tunnel boys.
I stayed until the lamps dimmed and the cold started biting through my coat. Then I went home. Tomorrow, I would wake up, put on my helmet, grab my shovel, run to the mines, get yelled at, apologize, work, worry, and come home. Again and again and again. Maybe, if I did everything right, things would be okay.
Behind me, deep in the lower pens, a Skitter clicked once.
Then went quiet.