‘The Investigation Is Sealed’ by Kate Heartfield

Corporate Cover-Ups

In ‘The Investigation Is Sealed’, feature author Kate Heartfield reminds us of the heavy price of silence.

In our interview with Kate, she revealed that this story is loosely based on the Westray Mine disaster.

Here’s what she told us about it: “It was a coal mine in Nova Scotia which closed less than a year after it opened when a terrible explosion in May 1992 killed 26 miners. Eleven of them are still entombed in the mine, as their bodies were not able to be recovered, and I hope this story honours them and their colleagues in some small way.”

Read the beginning of this chilling story with this excerpt from Issue 44, Autumn 2024, on sale now.

The Investigation Is Sealed

by Kate Heartfield

The draeger flowed into the mine shaft like thin, pale honey. At the entrance, the chief alchemical investigator supervised the application, though his job was mostly done. He’d made the stuff. He’d poured it onto the ground, just inside the blown-apart doors. There was little to do now but watch it grow, from a pint to many gallons, feeding on disaster.

“What happens next?” asked the chief of police, standing and watching in the way men in uniform stand and watch.

“Stand well back, please. Once it reaches the end, I can take a sample and analyze the changes.”

“And it will tell you … what happened? Whether there’s …”

The chief alchemical investigator breathed in rotten, burnt air. There was no way any miners within would be alive. He needed no potion to tell him that, though the draeger was, as always, eager to tell him. It was a powerful potion, and it spoke to its maker. When he squatted casually and dampened his fingers, he saw flashes of what the draeger found.

Shining and clear it flowed, with canary-yellow glints near the doors where the weak morning sun hit. It dampened the layer of coal dust that lay unburned near the entrance—the remnants of the stuff that had acted like gunpowder when the coal seam breathed methane onto some unknown spark. The golden liquid flowed an inch deep, in the opposite direction the fireball had taken. It flowed past twisted equipment, seeping into a charred body trapped beneath it: the body of a man who’d told his supervisor about dangerous amounts of coal dust.

“Any investigating potion can tell us a lot,” said the chief alchemical investigator, standing up again, resisting the urge to wipe his wet fingertips on his pants. “Draeger absorbs truth the way analyn absorbs pain, the way eljanbar absorbs pressure, or the way some alchemists hoped mirasol would absorb energy. The truth of what happened here will be in the draeger.”

Find out what happens next, in Issue 44, Autumn 2024.

Kate Heartfield’s novels include The Valkyrie, The Embroidered Book, and The Chatelaine. She has won the Aurora Award for Best Novel three times. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, Sunburst, and Crawford awards, as well as the Ottawa Book Award, and her journalism has been shortlisted for a National Newspaper Award. Kate’s story ‘And in the Arcade, Ego’ was our feature story for Issue 33, Winter 2022. ‘The Investigation Is Sealed’ is very loosely inspired by the Westray mine disaster of 1992 and the song about it by the Canadian band Weeping Tile. Kate grew up in Manitoba and now lives in Ottawa. Visit her at kateheartfield.com.