The White Pit

The child still breathes against my side when the slab gives way beneath us. We fall. All of us. Into the white belly.

The pit drops lower than I dared read. Crypts lined up like teeth in a frozen jaw. Each one holds a body. Each one holds a name cut away from the world.

My obsidian fists already smoke.

"Lower. We go down."

Lio's teeth chatter. The old man holds his ruined leg. Jolanda stares at the ice stairwell plunging into the dark, and I watch her throat move — the urge to climb back toward air, toward the surface, toward the warm forgetting.

I take her hand. I press it to the first crypt.

"You pull him out. You. Not me."

She protests without words. Her fingers burn against the rime, the skin catches, she bleeds. Good. I don't melt the ice for them. I warm the air, just enough to keep them standing, and I let them claw, tear, drag the dead up by the strength of their arms.

The first body comes loose with the sound of a root pulled from soil. A man, dried out, eyelids white. Lio catches him and topples backward under the weight. He weeps. He doesn't let go.

Boum-tak.

I strike the whole pit with my infrasound. The cadence rises in their bones, sets the labor. A woman opens the second crypt. Malik counts the niches under his breath — twelve, thirteen, fourteen — and each number is a grave reopened.

The Oubliés haul the bodies up one by one. Shoulders fail. Hands split. No one flees the frostbite.

The child I saved beats the measure on my collarbone, never stopping, as if guiding the living toward those who were stolen from them.

At the bottom of the last crypt, I read a heat I know. Too thin. Too clean. A drum, carved out of silence.