The corduroy track groaned beneath the weight of the third supply wagon, underwater logs splintering under eight metric tons of high-pressure steel and salvage.
“Left tread is dragging three inches,” Kira Jansen called down from her perch on the fuel tank of the recovery rig, lowering her phosphorus flare rifle. Her goggles were pushed back over her dark hair, her face smudged with diesel exhaust and powdered lime. “Arthur, the timber bed beneath the ditch has rotted through. If the water-purification trailer slips off the road, the whole chassis will turtle into three deep-water lengths of sulfuric acid.”
Arthur Vance stood fifty paces behind the convoy’s tail, his boots sunk ankle-deep into the oily silt of the embankment. The wind blowing across the Great Rust-Mire was rising. It carried with it a wet, warm mist that smelled of boiling vinegar and stone-hard iron. On his chest harness, the sight magnifying glass clicked against his brass collar tabs with every step, its quartz prisms refracting the dim greenish soft glow of the marsh water.
Beside him, Grimm stood motionless, his heavy skull turned toward the reed banks that flanked the corduroy road for three miles in either direction. The hound’s black glass bone spurs were locked flush against his neck spine. But his left ear—notched and scarred from his first days in the academy cull pens—twitched rhythmically, tracing low, deep ripples in the stale water.
