The Siren Mine

Comstock, Nevada. Present Day.

Jaya Mehta had been warned about the voice.

Every practitioner who'd survived the Ophir Mine said the same thing. You'll hear someone calling your name. Someone you lost. Someone you'd give anything to see again. And if you follow the voice, you won't come back.

The school had marked this site forbidden decades ago. Too many students lost. Too much liability. But schools didn't control every way in, and Jaya wasn't asking permission.

She stood at the mouth of the old mining tunnel and checked her kit for the third time. Three tokens. That was all she allowed herself. More than that and you started relying on borrowed feelings instead of your own judgment.

A railway spike from a labor strike in West Virginia. Solidarity and stubbornness.

A compass that had belonged to her grandmother, anchored with decades of navigating unfamiliar places.

A military dog tag from a soldier who'd survived three tours. Knowing when to hold and when to pull back.

She was here for a fourth token. Something the old mining families had left behind when they abandoned Comstock. A piece of concentrated ambition from the height of the silver boom, when men had torn a mountain apart chasing wealth and died by the hundreds doing it.

That kind of drive was useful. Dangerous, but useful. Jaya needed it for what came next.

The tunnel swallowed her flashlight beam after twenty feet. She walked into the dark anyway.

The siren didn't start with a voice.

It started with a feeling. Warmth spreading through her chest as she descended. The sense that she was going the right direction. That something good waited below.

Jaya recognized it immediately. The pull. The promise. She'd read about it in old texts most practitioners never saw.

Sirens weren't women on rocks singing sailors to their deaths. They were the hunger itself. The wanting. They manifested in places that had called to people and consumed them. Gold rush towns. Get-rich-quick schemes. Anywhere human desire had concentrated so intensely that it became almost alive.

The Ophir Mine had swallowed two thousand men in its heyday. Cave-ins. Fires. Equipment failures. They'd kept coming anyway, because the silver was real and the promise of wealth was stronger than the fear of death.

All that wanting had left something behind.

Jaya touched the railway spike in her pocket. Drew a thread of stubbornness from it. I'm not here because I want to be. I'm here because I have to be. There's a difference.

The warmth faded slightly. The pull loosened its grip.

She kept walking.

The mine opened into a larger chamber after a quarter mile. Jaya swept her flashlight across the space and found what she'd expected.

Bodies.

Practitioners. Recent enough that their gear was modern. A woman in hiking boots slumped against the far wall. A man face-down near the center of the chamber, his hand stretched toward something he'd never reached.

Three of them total. Maybe four. It was hard to tell in the dark.

Jaya didn't go closer. Didn't check for pulses. She'd read the accounts. People who died in siren territory weren't really dead. They were empty. The wanting had hollowed them out, taken everything they had, left the bodies behind like discarded shells.

Hollow Ones. That's what practitioners called them. Still breathing sometimes. Hearts still beating. But nobody home.

The siren had fed recently.

"That's close enough."

Jaya spun. Her flashlight found a man standing in a tunnel she hadn't noticed. Older. Gray in his beard. Wearing the kind of practical clothing that said he knew what he was doing in places like this.

"You're not a Hollow One," she said. Stupid obvious thing to say, but her heart was hammering.

"Not yet." He stepped into the chamber. No flashlight, she noticed. He moved like he could see in the dark. "You're the third one this month. Someone send you?"

"Nobody sent me. I'm on my own."

That got a laugh. Not a kind one. "Independent. Right. Let me guess. You need something from down here. Something you can't get anywhere else. Something worth risking your life for."

"Something like that."

"They all say that." He gestured at the bodies. "They said it too. Right up until the wanting got into their heads and they forgot why they came."

Jaya's hand found her grandmother's compass. The familiar weight of it steadied her. "You seem to be doing fine."

"I've been here thirty years." He said it like it was nothing. Like three decades in a siren mine was just a thing that happened. "Came for silver tokens when I was younger than you. Found out I couldn't leave."

"Couldn't?"

"The wanting gets in you. Even if you resist the pull, even if you don't follow the voice, it gets in you. And once it's in you..." He shrugged. "Everywhere else feels empty. Everywhere else feels like you're missing something. So you stay. You find ways to survive. And you watch the ones who come after you make the same mistakes."

Jaya processed that. A man who'd been consumed by the siren so gradually he didn't even realize it had happened. Who thought he was free because he was still breathing.

"The token cache," she said. "The old mining families left things behind when they abandoned the town. Where is it?"

"Deeper." He pointed past the bodies, toward another tunnel. "But you won't make it. The pull gets stronger the further down you go. You'll hear the voice before you're halfway there."

"Then why are you telling me where it is?"

He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "Because I like to watch."

Jaya left him in the chamber with the bodies. She could feel his attention on her back as she entered the deeper tunnel, but she didn't look back. Looking back was how you lost your nerve.

The pull was stronger here. He'd been right about that. Every step felt like walking toward something wonderful. Something she'd been missing her whole life without knowing it. The warmth spread from her chest into her limbs, making her feel loose and easy and certain that everything would work out if she just kept going.

She drew from the dog tag. Survival instinct. Knowing when a situation was going sideways. The borrowed caution helped her see the pull for what it was. Not warmth. Hunger. Not promise. Trap.

The tunnel narrowed. She had to crouch, then crawl. The beam of her flashlight showed tool marks in the stone. Miners had carved this by hand, chasing a vein of silver that had probably played out within a year.

And then she heard it.

"Jaya."

Her mother's voice.

Jaya stopped. Pressed her forehead against cold stone. Breathed.

Her mother had been dead for six years. Ovarian cancer. The kind that spread before anyone knew it was there. Jaya had held her hand at the end, had felt the moment when her mother's grip went slack, had carried that loss like a stone in her chest ever since.

"Jaya, I'm here. I've been waiting for you."

The voice came from deeper in the tunnel. From the direction she needed to go.

Of course it did. The siren knew what she wanted. The siren always knew.

Jaya pulled the railway spike from her pocket and held it so tight the metal bit into her palm. Solidarity. Stubbornness. The striking workers had faced Pinkertons with guns. They'd faced starvation and eviction and the knowledge that they'd probably lose. They'd kept going anyway.

She could keep going too.

"You're not her," Jaya said out loud. "You're just a place that learned how to want."

"I'm right here, beta. Just a little further."

Beta. Her mother's word for her. The thing only her mother had ever called her.

Jaya's eyes burned. She blinked the tears away and started crawling again. Toward the voice. Toward the cache. Toward whatever was waiting in the dark.

The chamber at the end was small. Maybe ten feet across. The walls glittered with traces of silver the miners had missed.

And there, on a natural stone shelf, sat a collection of objects that hummed with accumulated saturation. Tokens. Dozens of them. Left behind by the mining families when they'd fled the collapse of the silver market, when they'd realized the mountain had given everything it was going to give.

Jaya's flashlight played across the collection. Watches. Rings. A revolver with pearl grips. A woman's locket. A set of silver cufflinks that probably cost more than most miners made in a year.

Each one saturated with ambition. Drive. The willingness to sacrifice everything for success.

"Jaya."

Her mother stood at the edge of the chamber. Not a voice anymore. A shape. A figure made of shadows and wanting, wearing her mother's face, reaching toward her with her mother's hands.

"You came all this way. You can rest now. You can stay with me."

The pull was so strong Jaya could barely breathe. Every part of her wanted to step forward. Wanted to fold into those familiar arms. Wanted to stop fighting and let the warmth take her.

She grabbed the first token her hand found. A pocket watch, heavy and cold. The ambition in it flooded through her like ice water. Suddenly she wanted things. Wanted success and recognition and power. Wanted to be someone who mattered.

The siren's pull shattered against the wanting.

You couldn't be consumed by longing for what you'd lost if you were burning with desire for what you'd never had. The two hungers canceled each other out.

Jaya grabbed two more tokens. Stuffed them in her pockets. Turned away from the thing wearing her mother's face.

"Jaya, please—"

She crawled. Fast. Faster than was safe in a tunnel this narrow. Her shoulders scraped stone. Her flashlight swung wildly. Behind her the voice kept calling, but it was fading now, losing its hold, becoming just sound instead of compulsion.

The pull didn't want to let her go. She felt it clutching at her, trying to find another angle, another memory to exploit. Her father. Her first love. A childhood friend who'd died too young.

Jaya burned through the pocket watch's saturation like fuel. Ambition. Drive. The need to succeed at any cost. She would get out of this mine. She would complete her mission. She would not become another empty body in a forgotten chamber.

The tunnel widened. She stumbled into the chamber where the bodies lay. The old man was gone, or hiding, or had never been real in the first place.

She ran.

The Nevada sun hit her like a blessing. Jaya collapsed at the mouth of the tunnel and lay on her back, staring at the sky, letting the heat bake into her bones.

Three new tokens in her pockets. Enough ambition to fuel a small war.

The pull was still there, she realized. Faint but present. A whisper at the back of her mind suggesting she go back. Suggesting she'd missed something. Suggesting her mother was still waiting in the dark.

The man had been right. The wanting got in you. It didn't let go.

Jaya sat up. Pulled out her grandmother's compass and held it against her chest. Familiar places. Known paths. The opposite of hungry wanting.

The whisper faded. Didn't disappear, but faded.

She could live with that. She'd lived with worse.

The tokens were heavy in her pockets. Heavy with a century of desire, of men who'd torn apart a mountain because they couldn't stop wanting more.

Jaya started walking toward the road where she'd left her car. She had what she'd come for.

Now she just had to figure out how to use it without becoming what it was.