Ashfall

Chapter 1: Shovels and Sherpas

Chapter 1: Shovels and Sherpas

The coal is a mountain. It is black and it is deep and it is always falling. Jonah Pike swings the shovel, and the blade bites into the seam, and he lifts, and he turns, and he throws. The fire gapes open, orange and hungry, and the coal disappears into it like a man stepping off a ledge.

Two steps. A rest. A gasp.

The engine room of the Aethelred is a lung that never exhales. Heat presses down like a glacier on a tent, and the air is a thing you have to chew. Jonah chews it. He has been chewing it for six hours, and his arms are ropes pulled taut, and his back is a ridge that has been climbed too many times.

He does not think about the mountain. He thinks about the shovel.

His thumb finds the handle, the groove worn into the wood, the place where his fingers have rubbed the grain smooth over months of this work. He does not look at it. He does not need to. He knows the shape of it the way he knew the shape of a carabiner, the way he knew the click of a rope locking into a belay device. The groove is a name. He carved it there with a knife on the first night, when the ship was still new and the grief was still fresh and he thought that if he could just