Read Online Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) by Josi Russell - Free Book Online

way to see who was underground. He’d reached for his
so many times that it was no chore finding it among all the others. He slid it
on the clip on his chest and headed to the tram line.
    He hated Gaynes. Hated the way he made people
grovel. Hated the way he needled people. Hated the way he made everyone feel
small.
    Daniel’s father had been the opposite. Thorian
Rigo had been big and made others feel big, too. He had joked with everyone,
and when you were talking to him, you were the most important person in the
world.
    Daniel felt tears slipping out of his stinging
eyes and ducked, blaming it on the wind from the tram ride.
    Marise was peering at the tram as it hissed to a
stop. She put her arms around him for a long moment. He knew how worried she
must have been, but she didn’t say anything, simply laid a hand on his cheek
and turned back to her work.
    “I got some rangkors,” he said. “Plenty.”
    Marise hugged him again, spontaneously. “I don’t
know how. I heard what happened at the market. But you’re like your father,
Daniel. You always find a way to take care of us.” She kissed him quickly and
the two found their way to the section of open vein they’d been working on
before the break.
    Daniel swung the pick and popped out a chunk of
Yynium. He’d gotten pretty good at dislodging chunks that weren’t too big,
because the next step was for his mother to load the chunk into the tram. He
hated to see her strain to lift them, and she was furious if he stopped to help
her carry one.
    A mine was a funny place: loud with the ringing
of the picks and the reverberations on the glassy Yynium vein, loud with the
crash of the ore being tossed into the trams, loud with the coughing and
shuffling of the miners. But all these sounds were dampened by the immense
weight of the stone above them, the narrowness of the drift, and the hovering
darkness at either end of their work section, past the tall blast lights that
stood precariously on their tripod bases. It was as if, at any moment, the
clamor of Yynium extraction might be snuffed out like a flickering lamp and all
that would remain would be silence.
    Some days they talked. Today, though, they worked
in silence. Daniel was lost in his memories of the market. He wished he’d punched
Gaynes through the bars or that he’d simply taken the rangkor tubers and walked
out.
    But being locked up wouldn’t help his family. He
knew that. What made his heart beat faster and his teeth clench as he swung the
pick again was that Gaynes knew it too.
    The tram on the way out of the mine was always
exhilarating. Even after a long day’s work, when Daniel’s shoulders and back
ached, and his hands throbbed from the percussion of steel on stone, he loved
the feeling of going up and out of the pit. When, on the last long slope out of
the mine, the tram bogged down and slowed, straining under the weight of the
miners and the pitch of the track, he always felt a twinge of apprehension. And
then, above them, rising like Candidus, the Minean moon, was a patch of sky
that brought his heart to his chest every time.
    He glanced around to see if the other miners felt
it. But most of them had their eyes closed against the wind or were dozing from
their exhaustion. Only one other miner was looking. Only one, whose clear blue
eyes caught his and shared with him the moment of liberation from the pit:
Zella.
    ***
    Daniel’s mother was chatting with neighbors as
they walked home, and they quickly outpaced him, leaving him walking the long
road alone in the crowd. That didn’t last long, however. He heard a lovely,
bright voice next to his shoulder.
    “I love coming out of the mine, don’t you?” Zella
slipped her arm through his as they walked easily together. She was almost his
height, and as they walked she reached up and pulled off her bright head covering.
Her light curls cascaded down around her shoulders, and Daniel’s breath caught
in his throat.
    “I do.” Daniel glanced away,