Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (best romantic books to read txt) 📗

mouth and rims his light-bulb eyes. His clay horns almost reach to the ceiling. His nakedness is nearly hidden by a pile of coca leaves and he’s surrounded by a sloppy ring of open bottles of alcohol and lit cigarettes. I chew the inside of my lip nervously.

César takes a cigarette out of his pocket, lights it in the flame of the acetylene headlamp, and puts it in the devil’s mouth. “Tío, this is Ana Águilar Montaño, sister to Daniel Águilar Montaño, the boy who started two days ago. We want you to know her and not harm her.” He turns to me. “Do you have anything to give the Tío?”

At first, I shake my head. I barely have enough for myself, let alone anything extra to give to some statue in the middle of a mountain. But the Tío’s head is wreathed in smoke from the cigarette and he’s staring down at me out of his light-bulb eyes, and I realize I’m afraid. I reach into my pouch and pull out a handful of coca leaves and hold them out to César. He sprinkles the leaves on top of the pile already there.

“You should bring gifts to the Tío. Outside”—César points up the echoing tunnel toward the exit—“we pray to God. But down here, the devil is in charge and you must follow his rules, or he will kill you. Do you understand?”

I have never been further from understanding anything in my life, but I nod, wanting to get away from here.

“So”—César dusts off his hands and turns from the statue—“let’s go find you something to do for the rest of the day that’s worth your brother’s pay and won’t get you killed, hmm?” With that, he leads me deeper into the mine, farther and farther from the light of day.

By the time César stops again, I feel a creeping panic. Being down here is like being in a nightmare, one of those where I’m trapped in a tight space and can’t get out—but this is worse than any dream because I know there’s no waking.

César turns to say something else to me and his eyes go to my forehead.

“You never lit your helmet,” he says.

When he reaches for my head, my instinct is to pull away, but I stay put. His giant hands close over the edges of my helmet and I feel the sweaty tug against my hair as he lifts it off my head. He reaches over and taps the tank strapped to my hip.

“This is your acetylene,” he says. “The gas travels through here”—his giant finger traces the clear tube that runs from the tank, over the top of the plastic hat, to the beaten-tin disc centered at the front—“and comes out this spigot.” He turns a switch at the base of the beaten-tin reflector plate and touches the spigot to the flame on his forehead. A twin fire springs up on the front of my helmet. “You adjust the flame by turning this valve”—he demonstrates—“but you never turn it off, even if you’re with the main crews and their electric lights.”

“Why?” I ask, settling the helmet on my head, super aware of the live flame only centimeters from my face and hair. César studies me seriously.

“Because fire only burns when there’s oxygen,” he says. “If your flame ever goes out, it means you’ve come to a place in the mine that is full of other gases . . . arsine or carbon monoxide, for example, and you need to get out as quickly as you can.” He raps on my helmet with a callused knuckle. “If your flame can live, you can. Remember that, Ana. If it dies, it’s only a matter of time before you will too.”

I swallow against a throat gone suddenly dry. A few seconds ago I was only worried about the mountain around the tunnels. Now I’m afraid of the tunnels too. I nod to show I understand, gripping my hands behind me so he won’t see them trembling. César takes off again through the narrow tunnel, his broad shoulders blocking my view of where we’re going. As we pass a gaping black hole in the floor, he pauses and turns to me again.

“This is where Daniel and I were working yesterday,” he says softly. His eyes are sad. My gaze is pulled to the yawning hole in front of us.

“Down there?” My voice is a squeak. When I tip my head toward the hole, the weak light from my lamp glances off the rough sides of the narrow shaft but doesn’t come anywhere close to showing me the bottom.

“Yes, but we’re not going to work there today. I think maybe the air was bad and that set off his lungs. I’ll check it later.”

I stare at the gaping hole in the floor before me. Was that what happened to Daniel? Has the bad air of the mine already started killing him?

César puts his hand on my shoulder. I feel like I might buckle under the weight of it. “Come,” he says, “we’re working somewhere else today.”

The main entry is a long, smooth tunnel, wide enough that people can get out of the way of the ore carts that run along the narrow-gauge track in its center. But once you leave zone one, “tunnel” is no longer really accurate. Instead, the various paths that have been chipped or blasted or eroded from the mountain dip and weave and crisscross each other like the middle of an anthill. There are chimneys you have to climb up and down on spindly ladders; chasms you have to balance across on wobbly planks; passageways you have to slide through on your belly like a snake. You have to look down so you don’t trip on the spikes and ridges of harder rock jabbing up from the floor and so you can make sure not to splash when the standing pools of toxic orange water reach over your ankles. Looking up is a bad idea. There are places