They’d called it the Harrowing, Skyfall, Rapture. Names didn’t matter. It was desolation, wrought by heedless men. Skies torn open, earth cracked and dry, sun burning everything it touched. Civilization had died, but the ghost of humanity still clung to the edges. Not quite dead. Not yet.

     Resolver Roberta Coleman’s work in this region was done. She’d tended several haunt cycles scattered through the heart of the Appalachians. The echoes of the lost had to be eased, or they’d fester, turn dangerous, and press their grief into the hearts and minds of anyone who passed too close.

     She had planned on leaving the next day, but being born around here before the Harrowing, she felt a need to see what remained of her old home. More than that, something held her. The shadow of a memory played at the edges of her mind, too painful to dredge fully into remembrance.

     Without thinking, Roberta glanced at the black-and-white photo wedged into the sill of her rover’s observation pane. A man in work-stained coveralls smiled, one hand lifted to block the sun, the other holding a baby girl. “Jimmy and Birdy,” written in her mother’s handwriting, marked the bottom margin.

     Then her scanners caught it: a faint signal, barely there. Old, delicate as a layer of dust. She followed an abandoned road and parked among the rusted bones of a coal loading station to begin her work.

     Rain slicked the rover’s glass, running down in thin, grimy rivulets. Outside, the hills rose in green folds, almost beautiful enough to make you forget what lay beyond them. The mine lay in the belly of a hollow, half-swallowed by forest. Tipples stood like skeletal arms, conveyor belts sagged with decades of disuse. Coal cars sat rusting on broken tracks, their sides flaking red and black. A rail engine lay on its side in a dry creek bed, vines twisting through shattered windows, roots splitting the old crossties on which it lay. Nature, indifferent and relentless, was taking back what men had squandered.

     Her transceiver chirped. “We are still here, and we are trying…” The voice was thick with an Appalachian drawl, warm enough to make her chest tighten.

     An automated drone lifted from its cradle and swept toward the collapsed mine entrance. The shaft was blocked, the lift broken and wedged sideways in the opening. Sensors showed nothing, no heat, no movement, but the voice came again, faint and wavering.

     “We are still here, and we are trying to evacuate everyone we can.”

     She froze as the words crystallized in her mind. She stared at the jittering signal, holding her breath as if the quiet might keep it from breaking.

     A soft pulse of light flickered across her console. The ghost-trace of a spiritual echo. The link was fragile but strengthening, crossing not just distance but the thin place between life and death.

     Her listening device shimmered faintly, the metal taking on a translucent edge as it tuned to the spectral frequency. Soon the image would resolve: men in soot-blackened gear, feeding coal into a jury-rigged generator deep underground.

     “Surface, is that you? Frank? Over?”

     She cleared her throat, voice catching on the first word. “Yes. I’m here.” Resolver Coleman would have to play the role of this Frank to resolve the haunt.

     Relief came through even over the static. “Aw, man, I was startin’ to wonder if y’all’d ever respond. Power got cut in the collapse. We hooked a generator to the lift. The boys is diggin’ out coal right now to keep her hot. Folks’ll be comin’ topside soon.”

     Her hand trembled over the console. The sound of him, the cadence, the warmth, tugged at frayed memories: calloused hands gently tending a scraped knee, the smell of creosote and coal dust, a voice humming “Sixteen Tons” through the bathroom door.

     And then the bitter part, the empty kitchen, her mother’s quiet crying. The news of the “accident.” The years of absence.

     She had come here almost unconsciously, but as the voice steadied against the dark, a hot sting welled behind her eyes. She slipped off her glove, surprised when a tear spattered and slid down her palm.

     “Surface? Frank? You hear me?”

     She swiped her eyes dry. “Yes, I hear you.”

     “So, I told the boys help was comin’… but y’all sure takin’ your time.”

     There was an unspoken question in the statement. “Is help on the way?”

     She paused a bit too long. “What’s your name, young man?” she asked, voice tight.

     A silent answer to the implied question, “No.”

     “Hmm. Oh, uh, come on, now Frank, ain’t no time for kiddin’. You know you’re talking to ol’ Jimmy-boy.”

     The name landed heavy. She looked at the feed but saw only the past. Her mother stringing green beans. Her own small voice: “When’s Daddy comin’ back?”

     The lie: “Soon, baby.”

     “Jimmy,” she said, “everyone you sent up made it out. Rattled and filthy, but they’re safe.”

     A pause. Then, husky: “Good. ‘Em boys was just young’uns. Nothin’ they coulda done down here but… anyway, we did what we had to.”

     The quiet between them was thick. She pictured the lift rising, the younger miners climbing in one by one, trying to joke away the fear. The guilt of survival.

     “Hey,” Jimmy said softly, his voice taking on a somber tone. “Tell ‘em not to forget about us, wouldja, ‘bout our families?”

     He wasn’t talking about rescue.

     He was talking about sacrifice.

     “Tell Birdy and Virginia, I’m sorry. We did our best. We just couldn’t let ‘em boys die for nothin’.”

     Her resentment cracked. The truth was simple. He had chosen to stay so others could live. Her father had weighed years of her life without him against dozens of families losing sons, brothers, and fathers.

     “I’ll make sure of it,” she said, swallowing the sob.

     Minutes passed. Her equipment cataloged every word, building a record that would outlast both of them.

     “Well,” Jimmy said at last, his voice changing back to loud and nonchalant for show, “I’ll go sit with the boys… wait on y’all.”

     “It’s ok.”

     The line went dead.

     She sat in the quiet, wanting to say it all. Daddy, I love you. I’ve missed you. I was so mad for so long.

     But it didn’t work that way. Silence buried her intentions. Rain and tears poured down.

     He had stayed to keep the furnace hot.

     He had chosen to die so the other boys in the mine might live.

     He and his crew had fed coal into the generator until the air burned up. When it was clear they wouldn’t make it, they sat together in the dark. Someone took out a fiddle and played Ashokan Farewell until his bow went still.

     For years she had called it foolish, cursed his name in private. Refused to even see if his haunt needed resolution. He had left them, chosen duty over family. It had never made sense. But now she knew the rest of the story.

     Roberta reached for the photo of her father. Behind it, another, a little boy with the same eyes. She slid them both back into the sill, side by side.

     She wasn’t so different. Down in her own mine, keeping the living warm with memories of the dead, letting them rest through remembrance.

     She flagged the recording for high-resolution synthesis and added a note: James Coleman. Father. Hero. Still here.

     The loud chirp of the radio broke her reverie. “Resolver Coleman? Roberta? This is Vivere Outpost. Are you en route? What are you doing out in the Green?”

     She looked once more at the photographs, swiping her eyes.

     “Affirmative,” she said, steadier than she felt. “En route.”

     She cued Ashokan Farewell and set the rover for the long road back. Her father’s voice echoed in memory, but now without resentment:

     We are still here, and we are trying…

And for the first time, she understood him.