Free Stronger: A Super Human Clash by Michael Carroll Page B

relationship with her country’s secretary of defense and he’d been careless enough to leave unprotected documents on his computer. Keegan found the documents by accident and, being naturally curious, read them. The documents proved that a minor election had been rigged. She mentioned it to the secretary, and a few days later she was here, in the mine.
    Every new arrival was quizzed mercilessly by the other inmates: We wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. Did they know about us? Where exactly is the mine located?
    Keegan, just like the rest of us, knew only that it had taken the best part of a day to reach the mine, and that she had been blindfolded throughout the journey.
    But Jakob and the others would find out exactly where we were. As summer approached and the air under the dome became almost too hot to breathe, that was the only thought that kept us going.
    In mid-June, the ventilator that pumped clean air into the deepest of the tunnels suddenly stopped working. Hazlegrove decided that it would be too costly to fix or replace, so we had to make do with the second ventilator being switched back and forth every half hour.
    A week later, the second ventilator overheated. Sweat-drenched workers emerged from the mine shafts, pale skinned and hollow eyed, gasping for breath.
    Within an hour, the last of the mined ore had been put through the crushers, and then no one—not even the guards—knewwhat to do. For the first time since I’d arrived at the mine, work was halted.
    We had grown accustomed to the constant humming of the ventilators, the whining of the drills, and the relentless growling of the ore crushers. Without them the silence was shocking, almost ghostly.
    Hazlegrove found me lifting Loligo into her vat. Loligo was like me, a former superhuman whose powers had come with a physical change. She had tentacles in place of her arms, and gills in the side of her neck. She was a water-breather, and could live in the air for only a few hours at a time. There wasn’t a lot of work she could do in the mine, so she helped prepare the meals and looked after any new babies. Loligo was Italian, but unlike most Italians I’d met, she’d never learned to speak any language other than her own.
    “You!” Hazlegrove shouted at me. “Get these people organized!”
    “Organized doing what, Mr. Hazlegrove?”
    “Something.
Anything
.” His eyes were wide. “It could be
days
before we can get the ventilators working!”
    Loligo said,
“Abbiamo bisogno di riposare.”
    He looked at her, his upper lip curled in distaste. “What?”
    “She said we need to rest. She’s right. A few days off will do us good.”
    “This is
not
a blasted vacation camp!” He stood there for a moment, seething, his swagger stick slapping furiously against the side of his leg, and for the first time I wondered what it was that drove a man like Thomas Hazlegrove.
    Why would any sane person voluntarily work in thisplace? Perhaps it was money. I had no idea what platinum was worth, but we extracted quite a lot of it, and the costs were minimal. Maybe the warden paid Hazlegrove hundreds of thousands of dollars to run the mine.
    “All right … Brawn, spread the word. This time tomorrow I’m going to address the crowd. I want everyone there. Everyone. Understood?”
    “Sure. What’s this about?”
    “You’ll find out when everyone else does.”
    Some of the younger prisoners had never experienced silence. They’d been born in the mine, where there had always been the ever-present rumble of heavy machines. That first night few of them were able to sleep. For the adults, though, there was almost a party atmosphere. We gathered in groups, talking, sometimes even laughing. The night was filled with a sense of hope, a feeling that this one simple change was a harbinger of better days.
    And those of us who knew of Jakob’s escape were even more certain of that feeling.
    I slept well that night, better than I had in more than