Gareth woke at five-thirty. The alarm clock was a luxury he had bought secondhand for three shillings. It worked most mornings. Today it did not. He sat up anyway.

The room was cold. The window had a crack in the lower pane that let in air no matter how tightly he pressed the newspaper against it. He pulled his sweater on over his head. It had a hole in the elbow. He did not fix it.

Downstairs, the kettle was on the stove. He filled it from the tap, set it on the burner, struck a match. The match smelled of sulfur. The kettle began to sing.

He made tea. Two spoons of tea, one spoon of sugar. The sugar was running low. He would stretch it by stirring longer, so each sip tasted sweeter than it should.

At six, he ate bread with margarine. No jam. The jam had run out yesterday. He drank his tea standing up, looking out the window at the row of houses identical to his own, all facing the row of houses identical to theirs, all facing the valley where the mountains rose grey and permanent against the morning sky.

At six-thirty, he kissed his wife Evilyn on the cheek. She was still sleeping. He did not wake her. The cough had been worse last night. The doctor said it was the dust. The dust was the mine.

At six-forty-five, he walked to the pit head.

---

The mine was called Cymmer No. 3. It had been running since 1892. The rock layers told the story of the earth: coal, shale, coal, limestone, coal. Three hundred feet down, the main seam ran thick and black, and the men went into it every day and cut it out with picks and dynamite and carried it to the surface in carts pushed by women and children who were too young to be working and too poor to be anywhere else.

Gareth had been working the seam for twenty-five years. He could navigate the tunnels blindfolded. He knew which floors were safe and which would collapse. He knew which air shafts were clear and which carried the whispers of gas. He knew the mine the way a man knows his own body.

"Morning, Gareth," said Dai, the shift boss. Dai was fifty but looked sixty. The dust got into you and stayed.

"Morning."

"How's the cough?"

"Same."

"Same."

They walked into the tunnel together. The air was warm and damp and smelled of rock and sweat and something older than either of them. Gareth took his pick from the rack and swung it at the coal face. The pick bit into the black rock. A chunk broke loose. He kicked it into the cart.

This was the first act. The second act was the cart. Push it to the conveyor. Load it onto the lift. Watch it rise to the surface where other men would load it onto trucks that would carry it to the power stations and the factories and the homes where it would be burned and turn into heat and light and then into nothing, the way everything turns into nothing.

At ten, they took a break. Gareth sat on a timber support and ate a sandwich. Bread, margarine, no jam. Dai sat beside him.

"They're talking about closing No. 3," Dai said.

Gareth chewed slowly. "When?"

"The board met last week. Said the seam is running thin. Said the cost of going deeper isn't justified. They're looking at No. 2 as well."

"How many men?"

"All of us. Maybe two hundred. Maybe more if No. 2 goes."

Gareth looked at his sandwich. He took another bite. "Two hundred families."

"Two hundred families."

No one spoke for a while. The mine made its sounds: the groan of timber, the drip of water, the distant clatter of the conveyor. Somewhere above them, the earth was heavy and patient.

"My boy's fifteen," Dai said finally. "He's got a good head for numbers. Was thinking he could go to office work. If the mine closes, he'll need it."

"Teach him to count coal," Gareth said. "Same numbers."

Dai almost smiled. Almost.

---

Mair Jones worked at the Aeterna Center on Queen Street. She was the night cleaner, which meant she arrived at seven in the evening and left at seven in the morning. The building was glass and steel, all sharp lines and bright lights, the kind of place that made you feel dirty just by walking into it.

Her job was simple: mop the floors, empty the bins, wipe the surfaces. The Aeterna Center didn't produce anything you could hold. It produced time. That was all.

She cleaned the executive suite on the fifth floor. It was a corner office with windows that looked over the city. The desk was mahogany, the chairs were leather, the bookshelf held books no one had touched in years. On the desk was a framed photograph: a man and a woman and two children. The man looked thirty. He was probably seventy.

Mair mopped around the desk. She listened.

The Aeterna Center had speakers in the ceiling. They played classical music during the day—Bach, Mozart, things that made the patients feel calm while they received their treatments. At night, when Mair was alone, the speakers played nothing. The silence was loud.

But sometimes, people forgot to turn them off. Sometimes, conversations leaked through.

"The Phase Three trials are showing promising results," a voice said one night, from a room down the hall. A man's voice. Professional. Calm. "We're seeing cellular repair rates of ninety-four percent. The aging markers are reversing at a rate of approximately—"

"Dr. Evans," said another voice. A woman's voice. "I don't need the statistics. I need to know if my husband will be able to recognize me in five years."

"Mrs. Caldwell, the treatment preserves cognitive function. Your husband will—"

"He won't feel anything. That's what I'm asking. Will he feel anything?"

A pause. "The emotional range of Phase Three patients is... reduced. But not eliminated."

"Reduced."

"Mrs. Caldwell, I—"

"My husband has been treated for eight years. He knows my name. He knows where we live. He knows that I am his wife. But he looks at me the way you look at a piece of furniture. He doesn't see me. He sees the shape I occupy."

Mair mopped the floor. The mop water was grey. She wrung it out and mopped again.

"I want my husband back," Mrs. Caldwell said. "Or I want my money back. I haven't decided which."

Mair emptied the bin. Inside: used tissues, empty vials, a crumpled tissue with someone's blood on it. She tied the bag and carried it to the collection point on the ground floor.

On her way out, she passed a mirror in the hallway. She looked at herself. Thirty-eight years old. She looked forty-five. The woman in the mirror had tired eyes and grey streaks in her hair and hands that were rough from cleaning other people's floors so they could afford to buy time.

She went home.

---

Angharad Williams was Gareth's sister. She was forty-two and looked fifty. She lived two streets over in a room that smelled of boiled cabbage and damp wool. She had never married. She had never had children. She had worked in a textile mill from fourteen to thirty, when her lungs gave out.

On the night of the accident, she was at the pub. The Royal Oak was the kind of pub that had not changed since 1920: dark wood, low ceiling, a fire that never went out. She was sitting at a table with three other women from the mill, drinking tea because they could no longer afford beer.

"The men from the board came to the pit head today," said Gwen, a woman with a face like a clenched fist. "They said No. 3 might close by Christmas."

"Christmas," said Iestyn. "We'll be lucky to last until October."

"My husband's been coughing blood for a month," Gwen said. "He won't go to the doctor. Says it'll pass."

"It won't pass," Angharad said.

"No. It won't."

They sat in silence. The fire crackled. Somewhere, a man was singing a song in Welsh about a woman who had left for America and never come back.

"My cousin works at the Aeterna Center," Iestyn said. "She says the treatments are working. People are getting younger. Not young young. But younger. Five years. Ten years."

"Ten years," Gwen repeated. "That's nothing. I need fifty."

"Everyone needs fifty," Angharad said.

They finished their tea and went home.

---

The accident happened at three in the afternoon on a Thursday. Gareth was two sections from the face, pushing a cart of coal, when he heard the sound. Not an explosion. A groan. The sound of timber under impossible weight.

He dropped the cart and ran.

He found Dai trapped under a fallen beam, his leg pinned, his face white with pain. The tunnel above them was shifting. Dust fell from the ceiling like snow.

"Gareth," Dai said. "My leg."

Gareth pushed at the beam. It did not move. He pushed harder. It did not move. He was a strong man. Twenty-five years of swinging a pick had made him strong. But the rock above them was stronger.

"Help," he shouted. His voice echoed through the tunnels. Other men came, five of them, then ten. They pushed. They pulled. They braced timber against the beam. It did not move.

"Get the winch," someone said.

They got the winch. They attached it to the beam. They turned the handle. The cable tightened. The beam moved an inch. Dai screamed.

"Stop!" he yelled. "You'll crush me!"

They stopped. The beam settled back. Dai lay still, breathing shallowly.

"The doctor," Gareth said. Someone ran for the doctor.

The doctor arrived forty minutes later. He examined Dai's leg. He shook his head.

"The bone's shattered. I can set it here, but he needs a hospital. And the tunnel is unstable. If we try to move him, the whole section could come down."

"Can you treat him here?"

The doctor looked at Dai. He looked at Gareth. He looked at the shifting ceiling.

"I can give him something for the pain. That's all."

Dai was given morphine. He drifted in and out of consciousness. The other men took turns holding flashlights and watching the ceiling. Gareth held Dai's hand.

"Gareth," Dai whispered.

"I'm here."

"If I don't make it—"

"You'll make it."

"If I don't. Tell Evilyn—"

"Don't say that."

"Tell her I tried. Tell her I tried to keep the seam alive."

"You did. You tried."

Dai's eyes closed. His breathing slowed. Gareth held his hand and watched the dust fall from the ceiling like snow and thought about the three hundred feet of rock above them and the two hundred families below them and the Aeterna Center on Queen Street where people bought time with money and he had neither time nor money.

The doctor came back two hours later. Dai was gone.

Gareth carried Dai's wedding ring in his pocket on the way out of the mine. It was a simple band, gold, worn thin on one side. He held it in his hand and felt its weight. Small and heavy. Like everything else.

---

Gareth sat at his kitchen table that evening. The house was quiet. Evilyn was sleeping. The cough had settled into a rhythm: breathe, cough, breathe, cough. Like the mine. Like the sea. Like the earth turning slowly above his head.

He took the ring out of his pocket and set it on the table. He looked at it. He did not cry. He had not cried since he was a boy, and he could not remember what had made him cry then.

Outside, the Welsh mountains rose against the sky, grey and permanent and indifferent. They had stood for three hundred million years. They would stand for three hundred million more. The coal beneath them had been made from ancient forests, from trees that had fallen and been buried and pressed into black stone by the weight of time.

Everything turned into coal. Everything turned into nothing.

Gareth picked up the ring. He put it back in his pocket. He stood up, turned off the light, and went to bed.

He did not dream.