The rumble of the burn was silent and loud. You could see it, though; you could see the fabric of the air bending under the heat and the red-yellow-orange near-white light that bathed the room. But really, there was nothing. There was the limping march of Grey. There was a falling drop of blood oil like a moving metronome for the two men, the sound like a line of water falling into a bowl. And perhaps, now and then, a whine or the scrape of a collar against the metal cage. Or, perhaps, they didn't. The sounds didn't even make a vibration. They just faded or remained in such a low crystalline state of placidity and endurance. Oppressively so, disruptions fading to a twinkle out.
Their boots grazed the plated floor surface. They were in that government wing they had met each other in, but there was no sense of nostalgia. That feeling is reserved for other times, times dissimilar to the one they faced. There was really nothing they felt. Nothing really at all.
They walked in the tempo like a string of soldiers, wounded. They did not check the rooms as Grey had done before. It was just the sound of boot spokes, of crampons, or the music box tune of the computer digitizing away. The room was dark but their eyes adjusted. They were walking out, departing, absconding, eyes transfixed on the nearly-unilluminated exit sign. They would never return to this area. They were at peace with that.
And during this, the data sat in the cabinets. It had not changed since Grey first opened it; the endless lines of data were still there. They were silent, basked in the darkness, now only getting light during power surges where the fluorescents suddenly flicker to life for a second. But otherwise, they remained untouched and entombed and undisturbed. They would remain undisturbed.
As the miner and Grey passed through that fateful entrance, the air in the mine was different. It was cooler. There was the frigidity of moving air. That much was perceivable. Deep in the mines, there were still the melodic squeaks of minecarts against tracks or the twisting of oil lamps. But there was also the low tenor of marching somewhere else, and that met with a siren of some kind, one easily forgettable or mistakable.
The two stood there in that central nexus of that cave and its arms. Neither said a word, there were just the ambient sounds of the underground—that smallest protrusion into the crust that man had found. Not a word was uttered. And so they continued forward, down the spiraling out passageways of the earth that took them deeper and deeper into the heart of the heat and the heart of their darkness.
The miner and the geologist walked with each other like partners in conflict. The miner, unbitten, moved faster but not at a rate so fast that he needed to stop for Grey to catch up. Grey hobbled along, committed to some unknown cause. But the two of them seemed to know where they needed to settle. Grey, academically curious, was met with an equal level of curiosity in the man he once wrote off as a mere brute that chipped away stone. But perhaps for the miner, it wasn't curiosity that drove him, but determination. Was it grit? A focus on retribution or reconciliation?
Their path took them down the areas of the mines that Grey used to study with a focus unbroken. They were going to the areas that everyone spoke about, the ones always behind the walled-off arms of the mine—the arms where people enter and get lost and so everyone thinks the government sells them. They don't. People know that now. They are the arms marked with 'PRIVATE' signs on the locked doors and the company logo beneath. That door that does not say Arizona Oil but Zonaco. Those that the miners are constantly told never enter. The miners weren't planning on it, anyway, but the arms were always there.
These were the branches where something new popped up and they changed Grey's agenda that day when they appeared. Where a puddle of crude oil would rise from the areas of Zonaco's mine that even he was restricted from entering. Where, a few days later, a Zonaco team would arrive to begin the drilling operations to construct a well. That's where they were moving to.
