The packed sled path is honest snow. The hill on either side is not a hallway you are invited into.

Your boots say crump, crump, crump and then, when you slow down, the spruce says hush. The adit’s grate is a black rectangle in a stone face, bars and a padlock the size of a bun. Behind the bars, the mine is a throat that does not steam, does not glow, does not do anything cinematic except hold still.

You remember the note. Stay out of the adit. If the hill knocks, you do not knock back from inside.

The knock does not come from a little spirit with a hammer. It comes from somewhere in the rock, delayed, like a drum in another room.

“Hey!”

A headlamp bobs up from the switchback trail. Ellis Crane, who is your age and knows every Cinder Notch tommyknocker tale by heart, jogs the last packed stretch and stops beside you, breathing white.

“Those are knockers,” Ellis whispers, delighted. “They warn miners, or they trick you in, depending who you ask. That’s the deal.”

“That’s a story,” you say, because Priya says stories are maps, not orders.

Your own breath walks into the grate and does not come home on time. The black mouth smells like wet stone and old nails, not like perfume, not like a person.

The padlock is a dare. The notebook is a different dare, quieter.

You keep three body-lengths from the bars without making a speech about it. Distance is a tool. Ellis’s delight is also a tool, if you steer it. The padlock wears a scab of ice. The mountain wears a scab of stories. Neither one is a door.