The cord bit into the flesh of Len’s fingers like a heated copper wire, slicing through the salt-crusted calfskin of his glove before his reflexes could pull his arm clear.
He didn’t fight the downward haul with brute muscle. To pit his nineteen-year-old shoulders and an inflamed left forearm against whatever clockwork or body horror had seized the eight-pound lead six yards down was suicide. Instead, he dropped his hips instantly, throwing his balance point backward onto the wet dark rock blocks, planting the heels of his heavy river boots hard against the dressed stone coping.
His Road Sense surged through his lower body, a sharp, body web of tactile check firing from the balls of his feet through his ankles and into his pelvis. The dark rock coping was sound, three hundred pounds of dressed black granite anchored into the riverbed by lead-grouted iron pins. The hemlock stringer beneath his right boot bent three-eighths of an inch under his sudden shift in ballast. But the wood grain held without splitting.
“Line fouled!” Len rasped, his teeth clenched against the searing burn across his palm. “It’s dragging the spool under!”
Ivara didn’t hesitate. She dropped her pencil, her right hand whipping the carbon-steel grafting knife from her knee with the smooth, lethal economy of a land-mapper clearing survey lath. The blade flashed in the green glare of the copper bridge beacons, striking downward across the iron grating.
