For a moment, all Seven could do was stare. The cathedral was carved into the rock itself, ancient and forgotten, stalactites making up the pillars which supported its walls. It stretched out in all directions, the ceiling lost in shadow overhead. It seemed impossible that LMC would have forgotten about something so large underground; the cavern had to take up most of the middle levels of the mines. Impossible, she thought. And improbable.

  Indeed, she saw signs of LMC’s meddling nearby; abandoned carts littered the fine marble of the cathedral, and there were tools and other implements stacked nearby, stamped with that grinning slime logo—as if someone had begun an operation, then abandoned it in haste.

  But it wasn’t the cathedral cut from the rock which made her stare, open-mouthed. It wasn’t the blood, splattering the walls in a few places, obvious signs of a fight. It wasn’t the great gashes in the rock at her feet.

  It was the ore.

  Seven took a few tentative steps forward, her nausea and her pain forgotten. Obviously the seven she’d rolled with her dice earlier hadn’t been enough to capture this. Ore shimmered in the walls, so concentrated that she wasn’t sure there was room for any normal rock left. Dice shards of all colors twinkled there, whispering promises of combat skills that might never run out, of summons that might be cast forever. Entire sections of wall glowed, captured starlight embedded in the cracks, and Seven shook her head slowly, marveling at it.

  “Oh no,” Luca said beside her, clearly panicked. “Oh no oh no oh no…”

  “What?” Seven asked, but her heart wasn’t in it. With this amount of ore, she could…she could practically buy LMC. And besides that, she hadn’t forgotten her search for a dice. She had this one, perhaps, but what if she could find one that never ran out? One that was worthy of her title, of her legacy?

  “This is going to get us killed,” Luca said. “They wouldn’t have abandoned all this without a reason—look.” He pointed to the gashes in the floor, and that snapped Seven out of it. Slowly, anyway. Still, she could barely tear her eyes from the wall. “We need to get out of here. Seven, we need to—are you even listening to me?”

  Seven trailed over to the nearest vein of violet ore, fascinated with it. There was something different about it down here. Something ancient which hummed pleasantly in her blood, calling out to her.

  She reached out with a bare hand, curious. There was that familiar pang of regret, of course—she hated draining these shards, these dice. They were promises of potential that would never be realized. But she couldn’t help it. She had to know.

  She laid a hand on the wall, and the ore pulsed beneath her touch.

  “It’s not fading,” she whispered, stunned. The ore twinkled there, and while she left her fingertips there for some time, shaking, it never faded. In fact, it seemed to strengthen, the glow growing with each pulse, brightening until she had to squint at it.

  “Princess,” Pocket hissed on her shoulder. “I know you’re having a, uh, private moment with the ore, but the kid’s right—something’s down here.”

  “I know,” she replied, though she was barely paying attention to Pocket anymore—or to anything else. But she did know. There was something in the ore, calling to her. The hum there resonated, echoing through her bones, singing a tune she swore she could hear.

  There was old power here. And touching it, she felt strangely connected. Like the old ore was speaking to her, showing her something. Not words, exactly, but some sort of impression. A map. A network. Far more detailed than the one she’d been mapping out before, this one spanned so deep she thought she’d never see the end of it. The ore was a sort of guiding light, spinning through those tunnels, but at each corner, there was that same sense of wrongness she’d felt with Rook’s dice all those years ago.

  She chased it through the tunnels, trying to find its source. Because there was one, she realized. A huge one. One that might poison every tunnel within its reach.

  “Is glowing a thing humans do?” Pocket asked. “Seems like something we should document for corporate.” Luca swore faintly from behind her, then grabbed her shoulder, yanking her back. The connection broke, and she felt like she’d just been doused with ice-water. Gasping, sputtering, she whirled on Luca.

  “Can you mind your own business?” she snapped. “I was this close to—“

  “To what?”

  Finally, some of the haze cleared from her mind, and she saw Luca for the first time, battered and bruised, his face pink with anger. What was she supposed to tell him? That she was having some sort of religious moment with the dice? That she’d never been able to so much as brush against one without killing it? That this was the first time she’d ever been able to hear the quiet song of their spirit?

  She let out a shaking breath, then fished for her lantern, which was still miraculously tied to her bag. She shook her head and trailed over to the sweeping pillars of the cathedral. There was an old mining table there, and she set down her lantern and pulled out her notebook.

  “Nothing,” she said, digging in her bag for her pen. “Just give me a second—I’ll find us a way out.”

  “The way out,” Luca snapped, “was there.” He gestured wildly at the cave-in, then moaned in agony, pacing back and forth. “I’m never going to get out of debt for this. Never. They’ll fine me so much it’ll be mathematically impossible to break free.”

  Seven waved at him dismissively, closing her eyes and trying to recreate what she’d felt. The network of tunnels was different than the one she’d mapped out with her dice earlier. This one was more complex; it went deeper into the mines—far deeper than she’d been able to see with her own dice. And yet, the two maps overlapped somewhat. She began to scribble feverishly on her map, marking the places where the two maps overlapped—and those that LMC had obviously taken great care to hide.

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  “We’ll find another way out,” she said, barely paying attention to Luca at all anymore. Luck take her that she’d brought along such a whiner, but at least he was safe. “We’ll get so many shards you won’t have to worry about debt again.”

  “I don’t want to go mining, Seven. I want to get back to the surface. And I don’t want to become something’s lunch.”

  She glanced at the blood, then returned to her notebook. “That blood is old.”

  “Yeah, and ours will be too when they never find our corpses.”

  “Do you have nothing better to do than complain?” she snapped. “I’m trying to find us a way out of this mess.”

  “There’s only one way forward,” he argued, still pacing. “You caved in the other way.”

  “Then it’ll still be there when I’m finished.”

  “Finished with what? Maybe you don’t appreciate structural integrity, but I can tell you that those pillars are not load-bearing in any—“

  Seven held up a single finger, then scribbled a few more tunnels on her map. With her knowledge of the tunnels from the spelunker dice, it was easier to identify the pattern of the tunnels. There were main arteries and smaller offshoots, as well as something else—sections that seemed artificial. Carved, not natural.

  Finally, Luca stopped pacing and peered over her shoulder. “You’re working on a map? Why?”

  “Because I saw it in the wall.”

  “You…saw it in the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a beat of silence, and Luca moaned again. “Do you know what it’s like to spend your days surrounded by not just the illiterate, but the dyscalculic? And now I’m going to be buried alive with someone who should be in an insane asylum.”

  Seven paused, still studying the map. A part of her didn’t want to bother defending herself—didn’t think that Luca would believe her anyway. But another, bigger part of her had finally had enough of his tirade. She set the pen down, straightened, and drew up to her full height. Luca was still taller, but as she stared him down and saw his anger waver, she realized that it didn’t matter.

  “I’m going to make this very clear to you,” she said, her voice low and dangerous. She let some of her Veilhome accent bleed into her speech—something she’d nearly done away with over the years. Anything to blend in. Anything to seem normal. “You are only alive right now because I shattered that tunnel. Bert doesn’t need witnesses, and he nearly had his way with me and tossed me aside on my first night at LMC. Maybe you’re content to be a coward, Luca, but I’m going to put a stop to the nonsense—and this is the best opportunity I’ve got to figure out what’s really going on with our employer.” She jerked her head down the tunnel. “You can find your own way back if that’s what you want, but make no mistake—you’re not dealing with your typical LMC coworker. And personally, I think it would be very unwise to piss off the woman who knows the way back. Give me five minutes, or don’t, but I’ll leave when I leave.”

  She returned back to her map, tapped the nearby column, and scribbled something in the corner of her notebook—the load tolerances of the columns, complete with a key factor Luca had overlooked—the uneven floor and the collapsed west shaft. She turned the page towards Luca.

  “You’re still treating it like it hasn’t collapsed,” she said. “The load paths changed when the ceiling came down, and the debris choked off the stress to this chamber. It’s through the arch now.”

  Luca frowned, leaning forward to read her notes, then looking overhead at the chamber. “It doesn’t look stable to me.”

  Sighing, Seven rapped the cracked column with her knuckles. Luca hissed, Pocket wailed, but it held. “See? Solid enough for now. Give me five minutes.”

  “Five minutes,” Luca repeated, looking baffled. “Why do you know all of this?”

  “Far too much schooling and far too much free time.”

  “But you would have had to study with some of the best in the Wheel. Even I haven’t…well…”

  He trailed off, muttering numbers to himself, but when Seven glanced at him, she swore she saw a note of respect in his eyes. Well, that was good at least. Her royal schooling had to be good for something—even if she would have preferred to just gamble with her own mental math rather than drawing it all out. But, well, annoying though Luca was, she’d have need of every brilliant mind at LMC she could possibly win over. Even if his cowardice made him functionally worthless.

  Quickly, Seven sketched the rest of what she remembered from the wall. Even if she wanted to stand there all day, they did need to leave. They had a shift to complete, and she had to get this information back to Emmet. Her spelunker dice had been one boon, but this was quite another.

  Luca leaned over the table, watching her. “That’s not on the company maps.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

  “Oooh a conspiracy!” Pocket chirped from her shoulder. He made a show of reshaping himself to include a silly little hat. “I’m ready! This is way better than mining.”

  The tunnels she’d sensed in the wall branched out far beyond what LMC had shown them. Many sections seemed older, predating the company’s operations entirely, and detached from the main arteries of the mine. Scattered throughout were what could only be described as some sort of installation—chambers that didn’t match the organic flow of the mines, or the roughly hewn border that the cavern system created.

  “It’s more than this room,” she said, studying the map. “Maybe this was the first place they discovered—an entry point. But the rest…those are new. Manmade. Artificial. And they’re spaced out evenly. They’ve got to be hiding something.”

  “Maybe they’re just old mining tunnels,” Luca tried, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “If they were, then they wouldn’t be absolutely loaded with ore,” she argued. “And they are.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trade secret.”

  Luca sighed, then ran a hand through his blonde hair, looking flustered. Well, Seven could have that effect on people. She smiled grimly and added a few last notes to her map. The biggest room there was too far to reach now. She’d need access to the deep sector to even have a chance of finding the way into that one. But there had to be a path forward. She’d come back. Had to come back, really. Because this had to be exactly what Emmet had been looking for, and she’d stumbled into it trying to escape from Bert. She let out a little laugh, tucking away her map.

  “Look,” Luca said, “you’ve proved your point. You’re smart. Capable. A true explorer. Possibly a structural engineer. Great. But I’d like to avoid finding out the extent of your humanity—and mine. Can we leave now?”

  Seven stuffed her notebook into her bag, satisfied. The ghostly vision the ore had given her was fading, the details growing fuzzy, but she’d captured the essentials. And better than that, she still had a few minutes left on her spelunker dice—and a route back to boot.

  She opened her mouth to make a wise crack to Luca.

  That’s when her lantern went out.

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