He came up out of the mud swinging, and the coin was already warm in Thomas Bradshaw's right fist, and Dooly Hines went down on one knee with his nose pouring.

"Give it back!" Dooly hollered. "That's my fare! My mother's medicine!"

Thomas kept his hand closed even when Dooly lunged and bit him like a dog, and the boys stamped and whistled on the frozen ruts of Calloway's scrap lot, and the church bell across the river tolled the slow hour. Thomas felt nothing but the coin. It was a half eagle, thick as a biscuit, lifted clean out of the pocket of a sleeping man in the eastbound station, and it was his. His hand had made it his.

"Thomas."

His sister Kit stood at the fence with her shawl at her throat and the wind drawing color up her cheeks. Her good hand gripped the rail. The other lay hidden in the wool, the hand the loom had taken at eleven.

"Let the boy have his fare, Kit. It come off a drunk."

"You ain't a thief," she said. "You got the lucky hand."

"Luck don't buy medicine."

"Neither does the sheriff's wagon."

Dooly Hines was sniffling in the mud. Thomas looked at the boy's torn shoe, his raw-cold face, the run of snot he wiped on his sleeve, and for a moment he understood that the coin had belonged to somebody who could not spare it. Then the coin went warm again, and the understanding slid off him like rain. He shoved it into his pocket. Dooly walked off crying, and the other boys followed, and Kit walked home beside Thomas, close, the way she always walked, as if the streets might take him from her.

The lucky hand. Their mother had named it so at his birth, when she saw the mark on his palm: a coin of bright skin, the color of a wedding ring, the size of a half eagle exact. The midwife called it a stain of wine. Their mother said it was a promise. "The Lord held out a coin to this boy at the making," she said, "and he took hold of it. He will never go hungry." She kissed that palm a thousand times before the coughing took her, and Thomas had kept it closed ever since, the way a man keeps a letter from the dead.

Their father sat by the stove in the company shack with his crushed leg stretched onto a crate. He was a small, hollow man since the shaft collapse, and he did not scold Thomas for the fight or ask where the coin had come from. He only said, "Calloway come by this morning." The words had no air behind them, like a bellows with a hole in it. "Says if the note ain't settled by the first snow, he'll take the shack. And he's got a place for Kit in the weave room."

"Kit can't run a shuttle," Thomas said. "Her hand—"

"Calloway says she can. Says he'll set her where her one good hand will do."

Thomas looked at his sister, then. She was older than him by three years, and her face had all their mother's quiet arithmetic; it added the cost of everything before it spoke. She kept her bad hand inside her apron. She had wanted to be a teacher.

"Good we got a little time," said their father.

"When's first snow?" Thomas asked.

"When it comes," said his father, and the whole room fell silent with the answer.

That night Thomas could not sleep. He lay listening to the river grind its teeth below the city, and underneath the stamp of the mill and the cough of the mines. He opened his fist in the dark and looked at the pale coin burning in the middle of his palm. It was not money, and it had never bought a single loaf. But it had weight. It was the size of the hole in his family's life, and it had begun, already, to feel like something he was meant to spend.

He went to Rooster Mabe the way you go to a river when you mean to drown, because it was the only place that went deep. Rooster was a fiddle player in a smokehouse behind the livery, a man with blue hands that hung to his knees, and he told stories for coffee.

"Morrison's Works," Rooster said, drawing a shape in the air with his bow. "There was a time before Calloway. A time when a man could dig his own coal and sell it by the cart. Old Hiram Morrison dug under the hill until he hit the water vein, and the whole works drowned in a week." He leaned close. "And they do say, before the water took him, Morrison set his strongbox into the deepest room, the one they called the Golden Room. Sits there to this day, full of gold enough to buy this city twice and still leave enough for a horse."

"If it's down there, why don't the Calloways go fetch it?"

Rooster's wandering eye came back and settled on Thomas like a fly. "Some things belong to the dead, boy. The water holds who it holds." He sucked his teeth. "And they do say the gold has hands. Reaches up and takes a man's hand in trade. Calloway knows it. His daddy knew it. They've left a dozen men down there who went looking."

Thomas's palm itched. "That's just a tale."

"Everything true starts as a tale," said Rooster, and he looked at Thomas's closed right fist a long moment. Then he handed him his coal crowbar, the one with the bent claw. "If you go, go with iron in your hand and nothing in your heart."

Thomas went anyway. He went down through the collapsed culvert behind the old church, stripped to his drawers, with his clothes and his coin and Kit's photograph bundled at his back. The water that leaked up through the culvert was black and mineral. His right hand held the crowbar, and the mark on his palm was a sun in the dark. He had not told Kit. He had left a note that said nothing true, and the truth settled in him like a stone.

When he surfaced, the mine was everywhere. He had swum a whole flooded seam, and now the workings opened upward into a cathedral of black rock where the air was thick with years. He followed the rails where they had not rusted, and it came to him like a feeling: the Golden Room. It was not a room but a steel vault, the size of a wine cellar, riveted into the stone, with a door like the door of a bank. In the silt against its sills lay the bones of men, Rooster's dozen, kings of the crowbar, and Thomas did not kneel to them. He was not them. The mark on his palm burned like his mother's kiss, and he put his hand to the wheel of the lock, and the lock turned as if it had been waiting all those years for that exact touch. Inside were boxes of double eagles, enough to buy the city and the horse. He stood in that drowned kingdom with his hands full of fortune, and for one moment freedom had a face: Kit at a schoolhouse desk, and the loom nowhere in the world.

Then he heard the water change. The leak at the far end of the vault had become a mouth. A brown tongue of water licked the stones, and the timbers had begun to groan. Thomas shoved his clothes into a box, dragged it out into the tunnel, and the water was at his ankles, then his knees, and halfway through the cathedral the timber let go.

It came down with no sound of warning, a whole black tree of rotten oak, and it took his legs out from under him and pinned him to the gravel. The sound of the break went through him like bone. Thomas opened his mouth to scream, and the coal water rushed in. He choked. He shoved. He grabbed at the beam with his left hand, his right hot and trapped somewhere beneath, and he understood that the thing he had come to claim had claimed him. The gold had hands after all.

The lanterns came moving along the flooded rails like eyes, and behind them came a flat-bottomed boat, and in the stern stood Augustus Calloway in a greatcoat.

"Evening, boy."

Thomas's teeth were chattering. "You followed me."

"I had a man watch you," Calloway said. "Old Rooster talks too much, and boys with lucky hands talk even more. That vault belongs to me, Bradshaw. It's been mine since before you were born. My father sank his fortune there to keep it out of the hands of his creditors, and it drowned with his best engineer. The gold is mine by law and by right. The only question was whether it would cost an arm and a leg to get it out."

"It's cost me mine," Thomas said.

"No. You spent that arm the day you crawled in here." Calloway stepped to the bow and looked down. "The only question is whether you'll spend your sister, too. Put the box in the boat, and I'll forget the note. I'll forget Kit's place in the weave room. You and your father can go on starving in my shack and I won't press it."

Thomas lay in the rising water. He had never felt so small. He looked at his left hand, free and whole, and at the dark shape of the timber pressing his right. "Go to hell, Calloway."

"Sit in the flood, then. It's a slower way."

The water was at Thomas's ribs. The cold had moved into his blood like a black tide, washing the shape out of the world, but the box was still there, half under, and the fortune was in it, and on his trapped palm, even now, the golden mark had not gone out. He could not carry the box. He could not even crawl. He reached down into the water with his left hand, dragged the box to the lip of the boat, and let it go into the hands of Calloway's men.

"Take it," he said. "Take it and let my sister go."

Calloway laughed, but the laugh was a dry wind. "You disappoint me, boy. I told you—the gold is mine."

"No." Thomas's voice had gone flat as the water. "You told me it was yours, but you never put your hands on it, did you? You spent your life standing above it. I'm the one that walked in and took hold." He lifted his left hand and pointed at the greatcoat. "So now your price is my sister, and it's paid. Not by your gold. By my hand, and by my letting it go."

Calloway looked at him, and the lantern made his face all caves and ridges. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he lifted his own right hand from his pocket, and Thomas saw it in the light: a hand like a winter branch, missing two fingers, the scars gone soft and glossy as river stones.

"You think I don't know what the gold costs?" said Calloway, and his voice had changed; it was the voice of a man talking to a mirror. "I was twelve the first time I went down after it with my daddy. It took these. He carried the box up and told me I'd get my share when I grew. I grew, boy. I grew and I walked right past that debt the way you walk past a grave. You want to know what the gold wants? It wants hands. It wants sons sent down to feed it. And it always wins." He looked at the box, and his lantern shook. "You're the first thing in forty years beat it."

He turned his back. The miners took a rope and pulled Thomas out of the water, and one of them tied a twist of cloth above the crushed wrist. Calloway's shoulders were bowed when he said, "Your note is cancelled. Your sister stays out of the mill. And you will never come into my county again." He reached into his coat and drew out a single double eagle, held it over the dark water, and opened his hand. The coin winked once. Then he did not look back.

The doctor at the poorhouse took the arm a week later, and Thomas dreamed the whole winter that he was still holding the coin. He woke every night with his right hand curled into a fist, and the fist held the burning memory of the mark, and he would look down and find the bandage and then the emptiness. The hand that had been his whole fortune was a ghost, and yet it refused to leave him. It stayed clenched around a thing he had finally let go.

They left the city at the first break of thaw. His father walked on a crutch, and Kit carried Thomas's satchel in her good hand, and they met a man in a derby on the eastbound platform who brought a paper stamped with the seal of the county offices. Freedom, the paper said, in a scrawl that had once owned everything but the one thing it could not spend.

Thomas sat on the bench with his pinned sleeve and waited for the train. The air smelled of creosote and thawing mud, and already it was leaving them.

"Kit," he said. "Was it worth it? Mother's mark and the hand and all of it. I was supposed to keep it. She told me never to lose it, and I put it in the ground on account of a story about gold, on account of the cost of being free." He turned up his mouth without smiling. "And now I got freedom, and no hand to hold it with."

Kit was quiet. Then she reached into the neck of her dress and pulled out a little pouch of oilcloth, worn bright at the corners, and opened it into her palm. Inside lay a half eagle, thick as a biscuit, the very coin he had taken from the sleeping man.

"It fell out of your clothes when they brought you home," she said. "You carried it all the way down and all the way back. It's the one thing you never dropped."

Thomas stared. His left hand came up to take it, and stopped. He looked at the empty place on his other side, and for an instant the phantom weight of the gold pressed against the hollow palm that was no longer there, warm as the sun of his own drowned skin.

"You keep it," he said.

"Tom—"

"Some things don't got to be held." He closed his eyes, and the weariness of the whole winter moved through him. "I spent my life scared of opening my hand, scared the luck would fall out. But the luck didn't fall, Kit. It was never in the hand at all. It was in the letting go."

The train came in under the coal smoke, loud and black and steaming, and they rose together. Kit put the coin into his coat pocket, the left side, against his heart, and he let it rest there, a weight he did not have to carry.

"Thank you," she said, in the close, fierce way she had always said it.

"Don't thank me. The price was paid."

They boarded, and the train pulled out, and when the city began to slide away behind them in the cold bright afternoon, Thomas looked down at his flank. The sleeve was pinned flat; the hand was a ghost. But it seemed to him that he still felt his mother's lips on the empty palm, holding nothing, holding everything, patient as a promise that had finally been spent.