“Wait,” I said, “this isn’t right.”
Suddenly the small room seemed to shrink even tighter. I licked my lips, eyes flickering toward the door.
“What’s wrong?” She asked me, “we’ve been waiting for this for a long time. After this we can finally be at peace.”
“Tina, let’s leave,” I said. “Please, let’s just walk away from here and go far away.”
She looked at me, her gaze softening, a smile on her face. If that smile was the only thing I ever saw in my life, life would be worth it. “All you need to do is finish your work and we’ll have peace. We’ll be able to start a family! We will both be so happy.”
“We don’t need to do this to have peace, please, we don’t need this.”
“I need this,” she said walking over to me. “After what they did to my family, there won’t be any peace without this! These underground mining cities are deathtraps, run by men who don’t see us as people, they see us as assets! They have to see that it’s
not worth it to keep these cities going. Then no one else would have to die like our
families.” She was right up in my face now, close enough for me to feel her body’s heat, like a
furnace trying to escape it’s casing.
“So we’re going to destroy the support, collapsing the city, killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands so no one else will have to die?” In the time since I’d met her, really it was she who met me, an excavator orphaned by the same collapse that took her family, she’d made it seem so right, somehow. Maybe I’d never really listened.
“Morgan,” she said, and the way she said it reminded me of my mother chastening me, “you’re almost done, now finish rigging the explosives!”
“No!” I screamed, startling myself with my vehemence. Tina, though, was hard as steel.
“If you don’t love me, then I’ll find someone who does!” she replied, her eyes hardening.
I looked at her, without those fabled rose-colored glasses for the first time. Instead of passion and heat inside her eyes I saw the burning fire that had long since devoured all other emotions, a woman whose rage could destroy millions. “No,” I whispered. Loneliness is what drew me to her in the first place, the icy ache inside of me. I thought her fire could warm that ice around my heart. Fire isn’t only for warmth.
I now saw myself, too, a tired, lonely man. Down here, we looked mostly the same, her and I. The mining uniforms faded and worn, the blues and whites mingling together at the edges, her hair cut short to prevent machinery accidents. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered what diseased fever led to a tailor linking the words “unisex” and “garment” in the same sentence. I probably was just as bitter as she was about how we’d been orphaned. Somehow I never had an inferno grow me like I saw in her. I walked over to the tools we used to plant the mining charges into the support pillar. That’s the nice thing about being a demolitions expert in a mine. You don’t get to be one if they don’t trust you first. My clearance level was high enough to get me into anywhere but the storage rooms for the ore we mined.
”Morgan, don’t you dare walk out that door,” she said, and I hear her clearly, for the first time, her voice harder than the diamonds we mine, no trace of tenderness.
Her unspoken threat was the end, though she probably didn’t realize it. Inspiration hit me like a mine cart running full speed. She didn’t see me falling away from her. She saw that her tool was starting to malfunction. First she’d tried to repair it, now I could see her getting ready to find a new one.
I picked up the jackhammer we brought to cut deep enough into the support to plant the charge. I flicked it on, and a low humming filled the room as the last foot glowed yellow-white like a forge. “Morgan, what are you doing?” she snaps.
I see fear in her eyes as I walk toward her with the hammer. It doesn’t take long to finish it. Our explosives are made to detonate under very strict conditions. They require high-intensity electrical charges to set them off, no amount of heat or kinetic energy can do it. That’s what I’d been rigging after we’d planted the explosives.
I felt something twist inside me as I saw the fear in her eyes change to rage.
“Scream, please,” I said, each word tearing part of my heart away. “The louder you scream
the faster the security will come.”
Such a warm woman when she wanted to be. She’d learned to use her fire in any number of ways, such as to bring warmth into the life of a lonely demolitionist. Now, having destroyed the equipment to detonate the pillar, I saw, no, I felt the destructive side of her fire. She glared at me, and it felt like my eyebrows were being seared off from just that look, overflowing with
her burning hatred. I couldn’t meet those eyes, their fire would have burned away everything I am. I knew anything I would’ve said would’ve either end up with me sobbing on the floor or in tears. I let the ice form around my heart again, it kept the fire from destroying my will. I can live with being alone. I can’t live with so many deaths on my conscience. I knew I couldn’t stay here. The ride out to the surface was a long, quiet one. I wondered if she’ll find someone else to do it, or if she’ll somehow end up doing it herself. I’ll probably think about her for the rest of my life, her memory staying with me, seared into my mind by her inner fire. Finally I stepped out into the open air, leaving the city beneath me behind. She was right about almost everything. But the deaths can’t be stopped by more deaths. That will only make more lonely people like Tina and I.

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