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“I mean, conditions were bad. Real bad.” Garrett rubbed his jaw into Maxwell’s hair as he shook his head. “And most of the older men could remember what it was like before. Some of them used to be farmers like us and never wanted to be in this fucking place, and some of them had always been miners but with actual fucking pay.”
Garrett’s arms shook a little and tightened around his waist as he spat out their grievances. “And then the Resistance came to town. They’d heard rumors that the miners of Thule were considering rebellion, and they wanted to lend their resources and expertise.”
According to Garrett’s timeline, Maxwell had already been in the Resistance at that point. He remembered that stage of its life—when they’d consisted mostly of a collection of loosely organized strike teams going wherever they thought they could cause the most chaos.
“Dad hated them, but Ben and I loved them.”
Maxwell’s eyes widened. “Your brother?”
“Yeah. Ben. Little Benny.” Garrett chuckled. “Skinny with a hell of a mouth on him. Never learned to keep it shut either. Probably because he knew I’d always fight his battles for him.”
Despite his anxiety about the end of this story, Maxwell chuckled too. So Garrett had always been big, loyal, and protective. That didn’t surprise him.
“Honestly, I don’t have many details.” Garrett shrugged and rested his chin on the crown of Maxwell’s head. “It’s not like I was involved with the planning. I was only nineteen. I just knew we were all going to go to work like a normal day, we were going to gather in the way station, and then we were going to hold the center of the mine. I think the Resistance had provided some guns, and we wanted to make sure any Klah’Eel reinforcements would have to come down into the tunnels that we knew like the back of our hands but that they would be hopelessly lost in.”
Maxwell frowned. “Wouldn’t they have maps?” Then he grimaced. Clearly, the plan had failed, so his poking holes in it after the fact wasn’t particularly useful.
But Garrett just shook his head. “No. These mines predate the Klah’Eel by decades. There are plenty of tunnels they have no knowledge of.”
Then the elevator stopped, and Garrett gently pushed Maxwell away to open the lock. He didn’t even pull out his flashlight this time. The long-ingrained habits and muscle memory must have set back in.
Garrett rolled his shoulders as he returned and pulled Maxwell back into his arms like it was the most natural thing. “So the day comes, and Dad’s a little weird, but Ben and I are stupid teenagers, so we’re excited, and we’re riding this exact goddamn elevator down to the way station, and I realize I’ve lost track of Dad.”
Maxwell braced himself. They were getting to the crux of the story now.
“Because the elevator is packed. It always is. It’s weird to ride it this empty.” Garrett shook himself a little. “And we get to the way station, and people are milling about and getting ready, but nobody really knows what they’re doing, and I’m trying to find Dad. I can’t find him, so I leave Benny—”
Maxwell turned his head to tuck his forehead against Garrett’s neck as Garrett choked off. He felt Garrett swallow.
“I leave Benny, and I go up a few floors to where the office of our main supervisor is because I figure Dad’s pretty high up in the worker hierarchy, and maybe our boss needed to see him, and so maybe he needs help getting extracted from the situation.”
“Were your bosses Klah’Eel?”
“Oh yeah.” Garrett snorted. “Yeah, all the local bosses got the boot as soon as the Klah’Eel invaded.”
Maxwell nodded and didn’t ask any more follow-up questions. He shouldn’t have interrupted, and it took a couple seconds for Garrett to continue.
“So I get off the elevator, and I walk down the tunnel, and I run into Dad.” Garrett sighed, and he slumped into Maxwell with enough of his body weight that Maxwell had to lock his knees to hold him up. “And I just know.” Garrett shifted his weight off Maxwell and back against the pillar of the elevator and held Maxwell so tightly against his chest that Maxwell could feel him shaking. “As soon as I see his face, I just know that he’s done something he shouldn’t have.”
The elevator came to another stop, but Garrett didn’t let go.
“So we fight about it. I’m demanding to know what he did, he denies doing anything, I don’t believe him, he starts trying to get past me, and we get physical.”
Maxwell bit his lip as he imagined fighting with his own father. He didn’t have that many memories, but the ones he did were of a mild-mannered and gentle man.
Garrett finally let Maxwell go and shrugged. “A klah’eel guard that I had a bit of a history with finally saw us and dragged me off to a holding cell. I never saw Dad or Benny again.”
“Garrett.” Maxwell reached for him, but Garrett had already slipped out the gate.
He pressed the buttons and flipped the switches, and when he came back, his face had regained some of its color. “Only one more lock after this.”
Maxwell reached for him again, and this time, Garrett took his hand with a sweet smile but didn’t pull him close. He just looked down at their entwined fingers and ran his thumb over the back of Maxwell’s hand.
“I heard the explosion from my holding cell. I tried to get out, obviously, but there was no way.” Garrett blew his air out from between his lips and shrugged. “That same guard came back an hour or so later, and he just… He wasn’t so bad. You could see in his face how horrified he was by what had happened.”
Maxwell squeezed Garrett’s hand. “And what had happened?”
“The Klah’Eel had sealed up all the entrances to the way station before the miners could spread out, filled up this elevator with loosely packed uranium powder, and dropped it down this shaft.” Garrett tipped his head back and stared up past the grating of the elevator and into the darkness above them. “The guard said there was nothing left.”
