New Hope Mine, Yuzovka (Donbass), Russian Empire.
The snow in Yuzovka didn't fall white and pure like in children's fairy tales or the Christmas cards of St. Petersburg. This snow was ash-gray before it even touched the ground, stained by the particles suspended in the air, and it turned completely ink-black within the first five minutes of contact with any surface. A crust of soot covered absolutely everything, the entire city, the rooftops of the workers' houses, the churches, the skeletal trees, and above all, the lungs of the inhabitants who coughed up that black dust throughout their shortened lives.
Yuzovka, named after the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, whose surname was adapted into "Yuz" when he founded the first metallurgical plants here in 1869, was the black heart of the Donbass, the coal basin that fueled the Empire's industry. It was also, without exaggeration, one of the most miserable places on earth in this century.
Nikolai Solkov, thirty-two years old, crime reporter for the Kievlianin newspaper, divorced, recovering alcoholic, adjusted his coarse wool scarf over his nose and mouth to filter, even minimally, the air that smelled of burnt sulfur and something like industrial-grade oil.
As a crime and incident reporter, he was professionally accustomed to human misery in all its variations. He had covered horrific fires in textile factories where women jumped from windows to escape the flames because the owners had locked the exits. He had documented drunken brawls in the ports of Odessa that ended with men gutted. He had seen bodies pulled from the Dnieper after weeks in the water.
But the sound coming now from the mouth of Shaft Number 13, the main entrance to the New Hope Mine, an ironically cruel name, was completely different from anything he had ever heard.
It wasn't the sound of machinery failing. It wasn't the roar of an underground collapse. It was a sharp sound, desperately human-sounding, a collective wail from the women that froze the blood more effectively than the cutting wind from the eastern steppe.
It was the sound of mothers who know their children are dead.
"Back! No one past this line!" A private security guard, not an imperial policeman but a hired guard, shouted aggressively, shoving Solkov brutally in the chest with the wooden stock of his Mosin-Nagant rifle. "This is the private property of the Anglo-Russian Mining and Metallurgical Corporation! Extraterritorial jurisdiction!"
"I'm accredited press." Solkov said with the false authority of a journalist, showing his worn leather credentials from the Kievlianin. "I heard the emergency siren from my hotel. Was there a collapse? How many injured?"
"Minor firedamp leak on level six." The guard responded in that memorized tone. "Nothing serious. Completely under control. The situation has been fully contained. There's no need for press coverage in the area, so vacate the area now."
"If it's completely under control..." Solkov pointed toward the crowd of women and children pressing against a makeshift police cordon. "...then why are those women screaming like that? Why is there so much panic?"
"Female hysteria. You know how they are. They get scared over nothing."
Solkov seized a moment of distraction, the guard turned to violently shove an elderly woman trying to cross the line, striking her in the shoulder with the rifle butt, to slip nimbly under the barbed wire fence. He ran crouched toward the main shaft entrance, where a crowd of perhaps two hundred people, mostly women with headscarves and small children clinging to their skirts, pressed against a cordon of foremen wielding clubs.
The main lift cage, a riveted iron structure the size of a small room that transported miners from the surface to the depths, creaked with a piercing groan, rising slowly from the bowels of the earth.
The mine's operations manager, an Englishman named Mr. Arthur Henderson, forty-something, with a clipped military-style mustache and a three-piece gray wool suit that was completely immaculate despite the omnipresent dust, stood by the shaft mouth, checking his gold pocket watch as if verifying a slightly delayed train, not awaiting the results of a tragedy.
"Bring up the injured who can work tomorrow first." Henderson ordered in Russian with a marked but comprehensible British accent. "And have someone silence those damned women immediately. They're disrupting the morning shift change. It's unacceptable."
The lift cage finally emerged from the shaft's darkness amid dense clouds of steam mixed with suspended coal dust.
Solkov readied his camera, a Kodak Folding Pocket he treasured more than any possession, bought with six months' savings, expecting to document what he assumed would be the usual scene: robust adult miners, men with bodies toughened by years of labor, covered in black coal, coughing blood from damaged lungs or bleeding from rock-splinter wounds.
What he saw when the cage opened literally made his breath catch in his throat.
From the metal cage, no men walked or limped out.
Small bundles came out, being carried. Pathetically small. Bodies that couldn't be more than four feet, maybe four-foot-three at most. They were completely covered in black coal dust, so thickly that they looked like statues carved from solid ebony, except for the irregular streaks of bright red blood, obscenely vivid against the blackness, marking their faces and clothes.
They were children. Lifeless children.
"LUKASHA! LUKASHA, WAKE UP!" A young woman to Solkov's left, no older than twenty-five but looking forty from labor and hunger, screamed in a voice that broke into something between a word and a howl, violently breaking the police cordon and running toward the cage with a speed born of maternal desperation.
Solkov, functioning on professional autopilot, began counting the small bodies the foremen were removing with mechanical efficiency and lining up on the dirty, oil-stained snow.
One. Two. Five. Seven. Eight.
Eight children's bodies lined up like firewood.
"What... what is this?" Solkov asked, hating that his professionally cynical voice trembled, approaching Henderson directly with steps that wanted to be firm but faltered. "Are these children? Do you employ children in the mine?"
Henderson didn't even deign to look at him, keeping his eyes on his pocket watch as if time were the only thing that mattered.
"They're registered vocational apprentices." His voice was completely bureaucratic, devoid of emotion. "The coal seam in that area is structurally narrow, less than thirty-two inches in height in sections. It necessarily requires... personnel of reduced physical size to place dynamite charges in confined spaces where adults don't fit."
"Apprentices?" Solkov knelt beside the nearest child, the one identified as Lukasha. His face was partially destroyed by the force of the gas explosion, his jaw dislocated. But his hands... his hands were small, definitely, with slender fingers, still rigidly clutching a piece of black bread wrapped in a rag that he evidently hadn't had time to eat before the explosion. "This child isn't more than nine years old. Maybe eight."
"He was ten years old." Henderson lied. "That's the minimum legal age for vocational training apprentices under the Imperial Mining Regulations of 1897. They all signed legally binding apprenticeship contracts. Their parents or guardians receive monthly wage compensation. This is a regrettable workplace accident but within normal operational parameters. The inherent risk is explicitly specified in the contracts they signed."
Solkov felt violent nausea rising from his stomach. He had heard the rumors for years, of course. The whispers in taverns. The "Mole Children" or "Coal Sparrows" as they were euphemistically called. Children used in mines because they were economically cheaper than the cost of widening tunnels. Used because their small bodies fit in spaces no machinery could reach. Used because they died without leaving widows to demand pensions, only orphans who could be put straight to work.
But he had never seen it directly. Never seen the evidence lined up before his eyes.
The journalist raised his Kodak camera with hands trembling with adrenaline and fury.
"NO! Absolutely forbidden!" Henderson shouted, reacting for the first time with genuine visible emotion, his composure breaking. "No photographs! Confiscate that camera immediately! This is private property! Industrial espionage!"
Two massive foremen, former heavyweight boxers hired specifically for physical intimidation, advanced on Solkov with expressions promising violence.
But Nikolai Solkov was not an aristocratic gentleman with honor to defend. He was a survivor of Kiev's brutal streets who had learned to fight dirty from the age of nine.
"ELENA!" Solkov shouted directly at the young mother kneeling, cradling her son Lukasha's broken body, rocking him as if he were a sleeping baby. "Lift him! Lift your son! Let them see! Let all of Russia see him! Let God Himself see him!"
The woman, Elena Mikhailovna, a twenty-four-year-old widow, mother of three children, two of whom had just died in the explosion, understood instinctively through her grief.
Instead of protecting her dead son from the invasive camera lens, instead of covering him with her shawl as maternal instinct screamed at her to do, she did something extraordinary.
She lifted him in her arms with effort, his body already stiff, holding him against her chest. The small, inert body of the child, dressed in coarse adult work clothes that were ridiculously too big, sleeves rolled up multiple times, boots mended with wire that were two sizes too large, hung limp like a puppet with its strings cut.
Solkov quickly framed the shot: Elena with her dirty headscarf, her face destroyed by absolute grief. Lukasha dead in her arms, small and broken. And behind, barely visible but intentionally in the frame, the impeccable figure of Henderson checking his watch, corporate indifference personified.
'CLICK'.
The magnesium powder flash exploded like an artillery shot, illuminating the entire scene with a white, raw, merciless light that forgave nothing and hid nothing. It froze for eternity, or at least for the emulsion of the photographic plate, Henderson's completely impassive face, Elena's devastating, primal grief, and the small, coal-covered corpse that had been a boy named Lukasha who dreamed of being a train engineer.
"Grab him now! Destroy his camera!" Henderson roared, his control completely lost.
Solkov didn't wait to see if they obeyed. He snapped the folding camera shut with a click, shoved it inside his coat against his chest, and ran as if his life depended on it.
Because it probably did.
He ran between the conical slag heaps, mining waste accumulating in black pyramids twenty meters high. He ran as the security guards shouted threats at him in Russian and English. He ran, slipping in black snow mixed with oil. He ran until his lungs burned from the freezing air mixed with coal dust that cut like ground glass.
He reached the small Yuzovka telegraph station thirty minutes later, gasping, leaning against the brick wall to keep from collapsing. He knew with certainty that the local telegrapher would be bribed by the mining company, they all were. He couldn't send the story from here without Henderson being immediately informed and confiscating it.
But he could send the photograph. The negative. The physical evidence.
He spotted a train engineer on the platform he knew from previous trips, an old man with a gray beard named Sasha who had lost two fingers in an accident years ago and who hated the corrupt managers with a passion.
"Sasha." Solkov gasped, grabbing the engineer by the lapels of his greasy coat. "You have to take this. It's a matter of life and death."
With trembling fingers, he removed the film roll from the camera, shielding it from the light with his body.
"What is it, Nikolai?" The engineer asked, seeing the terror and determination in the journalist's eyes. "Trouble with the English again?"
"It's dynamite, Sasha. Better than dynamite." Solkov wrapped the roll in his handkerchief. "It's the bomb that's going to blow those murderous bastards to pieces. You have to take it personally to St. Petersburg. To the main editorial office of Birzhevye Vedomosti on Galernaya Street, 40. Ask for Editor-in-Chief Propper. Tell them it's from Solkov. Tell them... tell them they're little skeletons. That Russia has to see what they're doing here."
The engineer saw the terror and righteous fury in the journalist's bloodshot eyes. He nodded once, tucking the wrapped roll into the inside pocket of his jacket, against his heart.
"It'll reach St. Petersburg, Nikolai. I swear on my dead mother."
"Thank you, brother."
Solkov let himself collapse heavily onto a wooden bench on the platform as the train blew its steam whistle and began to pull away with a screech of iron against iron. He knew with certainty that Henderson would send his thugs to look for him. He knew he would likely lose his job at the Kievlianin, the paper wouldn't want trouble with British advertisers. He knew he might lose his teeth, or his ribs, or end up floating in the river.
But he had seen the face of corporate indifference on those types. Those neat businessmen, those investors who probably talked in shareholder meetings in London about reducing labor costs, had just killed eight children to save the expense of properly shoring up a dangerous tunnel.
Solkov pulled out his sweat-soaked reporter's notebook and began writing the headline for his article in shaky handwriting, in case he didn't live long enough to dictate it in person:
"Today, the snow in Yuzovka fell black as always. But no snow will ever be as black as the conscience of the Anglo-Russian Mining and Metallurgical Corporation. We have literally sold our children for coal. And that coal is stained with the blood of innocents who will never see adulthood..."
. . .
Fifteen hundred kilometers north, St. Petersburg.
In an office on the third floor of the Imperial Security Directorate building, Tatiana Nikolaevna did not yet know that a roll of film was traveling toward her on the night train.
A roll that would give her brother Alexei the most powerful weapon he had ever had in his arsenal against a company operating against the Empire's norms.
The moral outrage of an entire nation.
And the heads that would roll when that photograph was published would be countless.
[Nemryz: If you've enjoyed this story and want to read ahead, I have more chapters available on my patreon.com/Nemryz. Your support helps me continue writing this novel and AU. Thank you for reading!]