Present Day
The pick was too heavy for Amari's hands.
It had been too heavy three months ago when they first gave it to him, the wooden handle rough and splintered, the iron head rust-pocked and chipped from years of use by children who came before him. It was still too heavy now, even though his palms had developed calluses thick enough that he couldn't feel the splinters anymore, even though his shoulders had learned to compensate for the weight by hunching forward in a way that made his spine ache at night.
He swung it anyway. The motion was automatic now—lift from the knees, rotate the hips, let gravity do most of the work on the downswing. The pick head struck the rock face with a dull crack that sent vibrations up through his arms and into his teeth. A chunk of stone the size of his fist broke free and tumbled down to join the pile at his feet. Dark gray mineral shot through with veins of something that caught the lantern light and glittered dull red. Iron ore, probably. Or copper. Amari didn't know. Nobody told the children what they were mining. They just told them to dig.
Around him, seventeen other children worked in the same mechanical rhythm. The sound of picks hitting stone echoed through the tunnel in an irregular percussion that had become the soundtrack to Amari's existence. Crack. Crack-crack. Crack. Somewhere to his left, a girl who couldn't have been older than ten grunted with effort as she swung her pick. To his right, a boy Amari's age—thirteen, maybe, tall and gangly with arms that looked like they belonged on someone twice his size—worked with his eyes half-closed, moving on muscle memory alone.
The air in the tunnel was thick. Not just humid, though it was that too—moisture condensed on the rock walls and dripped in steady rhythms that counterpointed the picks. It was thick with dust, with the smell of unwashed bodies, with something else Amari had stopped trying to identify. Despair, maybe. Fear. The particular scent of a place where hope went to suffocate.
The tunnel ceiling was two meters high at its peak, forcing the taller children to work with their backs perpetually bent. Lanterns hung every ten meters, their flames fed by oil that smelled like rendered animal fat mixed with kerosene. The light they provided was anemic, yellow and flickering, creating shadows that moved independent of the bodies that cast them.
Amari swung the pick again. Another chunk fell. His arms trembled. He'd eaten yesterday—half a bowl of watery grain porridge with something that might have been meat but was probably just fat and gristle—but the day before that he'd gotten nothing because he hadn't met his quota. Three days before that he'd gotten the heel of a stale bread loaf that he'd had to fight another boy for, a scuffle that ended with the bread split in half and both of them nursing bloody noses.
He was always hungry. The hunger was a living thing now, a creature that lived in his stomach and chewed on his insides with dull, persistent teeth. It made his hands shake. It made his vision blur at the edges. It made him weak.
The overseer's voice cut through the tunnel before Amari saw him. "Move faster! You think I'm paying for you lazy shit to stand around daydreaming?"
Kael. That was the overseer's name, though nobody used it to his face. The children called him "Boss" or "Sir" or "Master" depending on how angry he seemed at any given moment. Kael was a thick man, not tall but wide, with shoulders that suggested he'd done manual labor before he'd gotten the job of supervising children doing manual labor. His face was sun-weathered despite spending most of his time underground, skin the color of old leather, with a nose that had been broken at least twice and healed crooked both times. He wore canvas work pants held up by suspenders and a shirt that might have been white once but was now the color of the tunnel dust.
He carried a stick. One meter long, thumb-thick, made from some dark wood that didn't break no matter how hard he swung it. The end was wrapped in leather that had absorbed enough sweat and blood that it was permanently darkened.
Kael walked down the line of working children with the stick resting on his shoulder, his boots—actual leather boots with metal-capped toes—crunching on loose stone. His eyes tracked over each child, evaluating, calculating, looking for any sign of slowness or weakness or rebellion.
He stopped behind Amari.
Amari felt the attention like a physical weight. He swung the pick faster, ignoring the way his shoulders screamed protest, ignoring the tremor in his wrists. The pick head struck rock. A small chip broke free. Not enough. Never enough.
"You." Kael's voice was conversational. Almost friendly. "What's your count today?"
Amari didn't turn around. Nobody turned around when Kael spoke to them. "Eleven baskets, sir."
"Eleven." Kael let the word hang in the air. "Quota is fifteen."
"Yes, sir. I'm working on—"
The stick caught Amari across the shoulders before he could finish the sentence. The impact drove him forward into the rock wall, his cheek scraping against stone. Pain bloomed hot and immediate, radiating out from the point of impact. He'd been hit there before. Three days ago. The bruise hadn't healed yet. Now it was a bruise on top of a bruise, layers of damage that made his entire upper back feel like raw meat.
He didn't cry out. He'd learned not to cry out. Crying out meant more hits. Crying out meant Kael would make an example. So Amari bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper and kept silent.
"Eleven baskets," Kael repeated. He was still using that conversational tone, like they were discussing the weather. "You know what happens when you don't meet quota?"
"No food, sir."
"That's right. No food." Kael walked around to face Amari, the stick dangling from his right hand. His face was calm, almost pleasant. "But you know what? I'm feeling generous today. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can skip dinner tonight, or—" he tapped the stick against his palm three times in quick succession, "—you can take three more and keep working. Get to fifteen baskets by shift end, you eat. Don't get to fifteen, you take three more and you still don't eat."
Around them, the other children had stopped working. They'd learned to recognize the tone that preceded real violence. The tunnel had gone quiet except for the distant drip of water and the sound of Kael breathing through his broken nose.
Amari's mind worked through the math with the cold clarity of someone who'd done this calculation before. His back was already compromised. Three more hits might crack a rib. Cracked ribs meant he couldn't swing the pick properly. Couldn't swing the pick meant he couldn't meet quota tomorrow. Couldn't meet quota tomorrow meant more punishment, less food, a spiral that ended with being too weak to work and getting sold to someone who needed bodies for worse jobs than mining.
But if he skipped dinner tonight, he'd be weaker tomorrow. Weaker meant slower. Slower meant he wouldn't meet quota anyway.
There was no good choice. There never was. That was the point.
"I'll take the three, sir."
Something flickered across Kael's face. Not quite disappointment, but close. Like he'd been hoping for a different answer so he could justify something worse. "Smart boy. Turn around."
Amari turned to face the wall. He could see his reflection dimly in the moisture on the stone—a dark-skinned boy with close-cropped hair that had grown patchy from poor nutrition, eyes too large for a face that had lost all its childhood roundness, arms like sticks wrapped in leather-brown skin. He looked like a stranger. He looked like every other child in the tunnel.
He braced his hands against the rock wall and waited.
The first hit caught him across the shoulder blades. The same spot as before. Amari's vision went white at the edges. His knees tried to buckle. He locked them, pushing back against the wall to keep upright.
The second hit landed lower, across his ribs on the left side. He felt something shift in there, not quite breaking but threatening to. The air left his lungs in a rush and he couldn't pull it back in for three seconds that felt like minutes.
Kael was raising the stick for the third hit when the explosion happened.
The sound came from somewhere above and to the left, muffled by layers of rock but still loud enough to make the lanterns swing on their hooks. It wasn't the sound of mining—Amari had been hearing picks hit stone for months and he knew that percussion intimately. This was different. Deeper. The kind of sound that moved through your chest and rattled your bones. The kind of sound that came from things being destroyed rather than excavated.
Kael froze with the stick raised. His head turned toward the tunnel entrance, forty meters away where the passage sloped upward toward the surface. "The hell?"
Another explosion. Closer this time. Definitely closer. The rock wall vibrated against Amari's palms. Dust sifted down from the ceiling in thin streams. One of the younger children—a girl maybe eight years old—made a small, frightened sound.
Then the screaming started.
Not the screaming of children being punished. That was a sound everyone in the tunnel knew, a sound that had become background noise. This was different. These were adult voices, male voices, the slave owners and overseers who ran the mine. And they weren't screaming in anger or authority. They were screaming in pain. In terror. In the specific pitch of people who suddenly realized they were prey instead of predators.
Every child in the tunnel turned toward the entrance. Even Kael lowered his stick, his expression shifting from authority to uncertainty. He took three steps toward the passage entrance, then stopped. His right hand dropped to his belt where he kept a knife in a leather sheath. The knife was for utility—cutting rope, scraping ore samples, things like that. Amari had never seen Kael draw it as a weapon. He was drawing it now.
A third explosion, and this one was close enough that Amari felt the shockwave through the floor. One of the lanterns fell from its hook and shattered, spreading burning oil across the stone. The flames caught immediately, hungry for anything flammable in the oxygen-thin air.
"Stay here!" Kael's voice had lost its conversational tone. Now he just sounded afraid. "All of you, stay the fuck here and keep working!"
He ran toward the tunnel entrance, boots pounding on stone, the knife held low and ready. Two other overseers—men Amari didn't know the names of—emerged from a side passage and joined him. They conferred in rapid whispers Amari couldn't make out, then all three moved toward the surface together.
The moment they disappeared around the first bend, the children stopped pretending to work.
Amari turned away from the wall, his back screaming protest, and looked at the other children. They were all frozen in various poses of interrupted labor, picks held mid-swing or resting on shoulders, baskets half-filled with ore sitting forgotten at their feet. Everyone was looking at the tunnel entrance. Everyone was waiting for something they couldn't name but could feel approaching like a storm front.
The screaming got worse. More voices joined the chorus, some of them cutting off mid-shriek in ways that suggested sudden and permanent silence. There was a sound like metal hitting metal—swords, maybe, or something heavier. There was a sound like fire, a roaring whoosh that suggested accelerant meeting open flame.
Then a single voice, louder than the others, cutting through the chaos with crystalline clarity:
"THIS IS THE COST OF YOUR CRUELTY!"
The words echoed down the tunnel, distorted by distance and stone but still comprehensible. The voice was female, young, filled with the kind of righteous fury that made the air around it feel charged.
Another explosion. The tunnel shook hard enough that several children lost their footing. Amari caught himself against the wall, his injured back sending white-hot signals of protest that he ignored. The flames from the spilled lantern oil were spreading, following the gradient of the tunnel floor toward where the children stood.
Then someone appeared at the tunnel entrance.
Not an overseer. Not a slave owner. Someone else.
A man, maybe twenty years old, wearing clothes that looked like they'd been assembled from three different sources—canvas pants similar to what the overseers wore, a shirt that might have been military issue at some point, and a coat made from some kind of treated leather that looked like it could turn a blade. His skin was sun-darkened, not the deep brown of Amari's complexion but the tan of someone who spent time outside by choice rather than by force. His hair was pulled back in a tail, and his face was striking not because it was handsome but because it was intense—sharp cheekbones, eyes that tracked over the tunnel interior with tactical precision, a jaw set with the kind of determination that suggested he'd come here for a specific purpose and nothing would stop him from completing it.
He held a weapon. Not a sword, not a gun. Something that looked like a staff made from dark wood, both ends capped with metal that glowed dull red like it had been pulled from a forge. Smoke rose from the metal caps in thin spirals.
The man's eyes swept over the children, counted them in maybe two seconds, then focused on the spreading oil fire. He moved his staff in a tight circle, and the fire responded—not going out, but gathering, pulling together into a sphere the size of a man's head that hovered approximately one meter off the ground. The man gestured, and the fire sphere shot away from the children, down a side passage where it wouldn't spread.
He'd just manipulated fire. Used his Uncos. Controlled an element like it was an extension of his own body.
Amari had seen Uncos users before—some of the higher-ranking slave owners had them, usually small things like being able to lift more than their frame suggested or having reflexes that made them almost impossible to surprise. But he'd never seen someone control fire like that. Never seen someone reshape an element with that kind of casual precision.
The man turned back to face the children. When he spoke, his voice was rough, like he'd been breathing smoke. "You're free. All of you. Run. Follow the tunnel up, turn left at the first junction, and keep moving until you see sunlight. We'll handle the rest."
Nobody moved. Seventeen children frozen in place, unable to process what they'd just heard.
The man's expression shifted. Not quite frustration, but close. "Did you not hear me? You're—"
"Who are you?" The voice came from somewhere behind Amari. The tall gangly boy, the one who worked with his eyes half-closed. He'd stepped forward, his pick still clutched in both hands, and he was staring at the man with something like hope warring with disbelief on his face.
The man's expression softened slightly. "Right now? I'm your way out. We can do introductions later. Move."
Another voice from deeper in the mine—another adult voice, male this time, shouting something about the east tunnels being clear. The man glanced back over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the children. "I'm not going to tell you again. Run. Or stay here and hope we don't lose. Your choice."
That broke the paralysis. The girl who'd made the frightened sound earlier dropped her pick and bolted for the tunnel entrance. Then another child followed. Then three more. Then it was a stampede, seventeen children dropping tools and scrambling over loose rock, tripping over each other in their desperate race toward the surface.
Amari started to follow, then stopped. His back was screaming at him, each movement sending fresh waves of pain that made his vision blur. His legs felt like they were made from wet rope. He took two steps and his right knee buckled, sending him sprawling across the stone floor.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms, tasting blood where he'd bitten his tongue in the fall. The other children were already disappearing around the first bend, their footsteps fading. The man with the staff was moving away too, heading deeper into the mine complex toward the sounds of fighting.
Amari got his feet under him and started after the children. Made it five meters before his legs gave out again.
This time when he fell, he landed on his already-injured back. The pain was immediate and absolute, whiting out everything else. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only lie there on the cold stone floor while his body tried to decide if it was going to shut down entirely.
Footsteps approached. Different from the man's—lighter, faster. Amari managed to turn his head just enough to see someone new entering the tunnel.
A woman, younger than the man but older than Amari. Maybe seventeen, eighteen at most. She wore similar mismatched clothing—practical pants, a sleeveless shirt that showed arms corded with muscle that didn't match her slight frame, and a vest made from what looked like repurposed leather armor. Her hair was cut short, practical, dark coils cropped close to her skull. Her skin was a shade darker than the man's but lighter than Amari's, the kind of brown that suggested mixed heritage from multiple regions.
She carried two weapons. A short sword strapped to her left hip, the blade visible through a tear in the scabbard—clean steel, recently sharpened. And something else holstered on her right thigh. Not a gun. Some kind of cylindrical device with markings that glowed faint blue.
She saw Amari on the ground and changed direction, crossing the ten meters between them in maybe four seconds. She dropped into a crouch beside him, her hands moving to check for injuries with practiced efficiency. Her fingers pressed against his ribs, his spine, his shoulders. Each touch sent fresh pain signals, but her expression remained neutral, focused.
"Broken?" Her voice was pitched low, meant only for him.
Amari tried to answer, managed to shake his head slightly.
"Bruised then. Recent. Today?"
He nodded.
"Can you walk?"
He wasn't sure. He tried to sit up, made it halfway before his back spasmed and he collapsed again. The woman caught him before he hit the stone floor, her hands surprisingly gentle despite the calluses he could feel through his threadbare shirt.
"Okay. Different approach." She shifted position, getting her shoulder under his arm, taking most of his weight. "We're going to stand up together. On three. One—"
She didn't wait for three. She just lifted, and Amari found himself vertical, his feet barely touching the ground as the woman supported his entire body weight with apparently no effort. She was strong. Not physically imposing—she was barely taller than Amari—but strong in the way that suggested her Uncos was enhancement-based. Strength, durability, something along those lines.
"Can you move your legs?"
Amari tried. His right leg responded, taking a shaky step. His left leg dragged behind, the knee refusing to lock properly.
"Good enough. Come on." She started moving, and Amari moved with her, half-walking and half-being-carried toward the tunnel entrance. Behind them, deeper in the mine, the sounds of combat had intensified. Steel on steel. Shouting. Another explosion that sent tremors through the floor.
They made it to the first bend before Amari's curiosity overwhelmed his exhaustion. "Who..." His voice came out as a croak. He swallowed, tasted blood, tried again. "Who are you people?"
The woman didn't slow down, didn't look at him, just kept navigating the tunnel with the confidence of someone who'd memorized the layout before entering. "You hear about the attacks on the eastern plantations? The raids on the mining operations in the Kresht Mountains? The forty-three slave owners who've disappeared in the past six months?"
Amari had heard rumors. Whispered conversations between overseers who thought the children weren't listening. Stories about a group that moved through the country like a wildfire, burning slave operations to the ground and vanishing before authorities could respond.
"That's you?"
"That's us." They reached the next junction. The woman turned left without hesitation, following the route she'd told the children to take. Daylight was visible ahead now, a gray square of overcast sky that looked impossibly bright after months underground. "We're called the Liberators. We find places like this—" she gestured vaguely at the mine around them, "—and we burn them down. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally. Depends on the situation."
They emerged into daylight. Amari's eyes watered immediately, his pupils contracting painfully after so long in dimness. The woman gave him a moment to adjust, then started moving again. They were on a hillside, rock and sparse vegetation, with a dirt road cutting across the landscape fifty meters below. The mine entrance was behind them now, smoke pouring from multiple shafts.
Amari counted seven buildings in the immediate vicinity—the main operations office, two storage structures, three residential buildings where the overseers lived, and what looked like a kitchen or mess hall. Four of them were burning. The other three looked abandoned, doors hanging open, windows shattered.
Bodies lay scattered across the compound. Overseers, slave owners, guards. Some of them weren't moving. Others were moving in the specific way that suggested severe injury. Amari felt something dark and satisfied twist in his chest at the sight. These were the men who'd beaten him. Starved him. Worked him until his hands bled. Seeing them broken felt like justice.
The woman must have felt him tense because she spoke without looking at him. "Don't celebrate yet. We're not clear until we're off this mountain."
She guided him down the hillside toward where the other children had gathered. They were clustered together near the road, most of them still clutching the tools they'd grabbed during the escape. The man with the staff was there too, along with three other people Amari hadn't seen yet—another woman in her mid-twenties carrying what looked like a medical kit, and two men who were systematically checking the compound buildings for additional prisoners.
The woman lowered Amari to sit with the other children, then straightened. "Medical check in five minutes. Anyone injured badly enough that they can't walk, we carry. Anyone who can walk does. We've got maybe twenty minutes before reinforcements arrive, and I want to be gone in fifteen."
One of the children—the tall gangly boy—raised a hand tentatively. "Where are we going?"
The woman's expression shifted, losing some of its tactical hardness. For a moment, she just looked young. "Safe house. Three days' travel northwest. From there we'll figure out next steps—getting you to family if you have any, apprenticeships if you don't, whatever you need. But first we need to move." She scanned the group, counted heads silently, then nodded to herself. "Everyone accounted for. Good. Let's—"
"Wait." Amari's voice surprised him. He hadn't planned to speak. But the question had been building since the tunnel, and now it forced its way out before he could reconsider. "Why?"
The woman turned to look at him. "Why what?"
"Why are you doing this? Freeing us. You could've just..." He gestured vaguely, unable to articulate what he meant. "Why risk it?"
The woman was quiet for a moment. Around her, the compound continued to burn. Smoke rose in black columns that would be visible for kilometers. In the distance, maybe coming from the direction of the nearest town, Amari thought he heard bells ringing. Alarm bells. Summoning guards, authorities, anyone who could respond to what was happening here.
Then the woman crouched down so she was at Amari's eye level. Her expression was serious, but not unkind. "Because someone freed me once. Four years ago, different mine, same situation. And the person who got me out told me that freedom is contagious—you catch it from someone else, and then you're obligated to spread it. So that's what we do." She stood, offered her hand to help him up. "That answer your question?"
Amari took her hand. Let her pull him to his feet despite the protest from his injured back. Looked at her face, memorizing it, because he understood that this moment was important. That this was the moment his life changed trajectory from one path to another.
"What's your name?"
The woman smiled. It transformed her face completely, made her look younger despite the exhaustion around her eyes. "Zara. And you?"
"Amari. Amari Zanders."
"Well, Amari Zanders." Zara started walking, pulling him along with the rest of the group. "Welcome to the rest of your life. Try not to get killed in the first week."
Behind them, the mine burned. Ahead of them, the road stretched toward something Amari had stopped believing in months ago. Ahead of them was possibility. Was choice. Was freedom, whatever that meant.
Amari didn't look back.