Free Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer

He has been in the camp two weeks but his overalls are already worn as if he’s had them for years and his boots badly need resoling. He covers his head with the hard shell of his helmet. He rubs the chin stubble that he’s come to hate, but as yet he doesn’t have enough company scrip to afford a good straight razor.
    He is sixteen years old.
    Iwan.
Sometimes he’s sure the shafts are whispering his name under the growls and coarse laughter of the other men. It began his first time down and he hasn’t talked to anyone about it since then. Many days, he’s sure that he’s insane. When he sees the chicken-legged dacha in the center of the street. When the shafts speak to him. When he looks at the dresses of the boarding house’s proprietress, her neatly coifed hair under her scarf, her hands – somehow both rough and delicate – and feels a yearning that has nothing to do with wanting her the way a man should want a woman.
    He knows that he’s broken.
    Iwan,
Baba Yaga murmurs to him as he staggers home under the weight of the coal dust and the low ceiling of the shaft, his back bent for so many hours that it is as though he carries the weight of the entire mountain on his shoulders.
My little Iwanka. They don’t know who you really are. Let us discuss what might happen if they find out.

----
    The low mountains of western Pennsylvania are greening now, coming out of a winter so brown and barren and long that he had wondered if it might end at all. A few times there had been snow – which at least was familiar – but there was much more ice than snow, cold rain that leached into the bones and settled there, and everywhere dead vegetation like the earth herself was dying. At first, looking at the mine, seeing the dark scar of it and the black hell inside, he had wondered if its poison was seeping outward and infecting everything.
    What have I come to,
he had wondered then.
God.
    He no longer believes that God cares about him.
    So now green life is creeping back into the mountains, but in his dreams, perhaps to torture him, Baba Yaga sits him behind her on her spoon and they fly across the ocean and back to the rolling green mountains, dear and distant – and his heart aches as if it wants to burst from his chest and bury itself in the soil of his birth.
    You have to remember,
Baba Yaga says, no mocking laughter in her voice now,
where you came from. Such things can sustain you when nothing else does.
    He shakes his head, in his dream, in his sleep, on his flat boarding house pillow, his thin blanket gathered around his shoulders.
I have nothing now. Not even this. Why are you showing this to me?
    Baba Yaga does a little jig, more to prove a point than out of any personal glee. She lowers her spoon and scoops up the earth, pours it into his outstretched hands. It is nothing like the coal.
Iwanka, you are soft and deep like this here. And you can be hard like the mountain into which you dig. You must be both in order to survive.

----
    On the worst nights he dreams of the ship pulling into the harbor, the great statue lifting her torch over everything, the cold look in her eyes. Everyone else leaned over the deck and chattered, excited, and he thought of little birds flitting through his dense forests. She was welcoming to them, or they thought she was. But he looked up at her and he saw no welcome at all, and began to wonder if he had made a mistake.
    The same coldness in the man with his many papers spread out in front of him.
    Name? Place of origin? Are you literate? Where are you going? Is anyone meeting you there?
He had stumbled through it in broken English, the little he had managed to scrape together in the passage. Iwan Charansky. Austria-Hungary. No. Lattimer.
    No.
    I am alone.
    It was like confession. He hung his head and felt his cheeks burn.
----
    The warmth of the stove in the early mornings. The lowing of the cattle, the soft jangle of their bells as he takes them to the fields. The sun rising over the