The grip on Len’s belt was not an ordinary grab.
It was an unbending, clockwork clamp that arrested his forward driving force with the violent, bone-jarring finality of an anchor cable snubbing on an iron bitt. The rawhide strap snapped taut against his pelvis, digging deep into the flesh of his right hip, threatening to dislocate his lower-back spine as his forward scramble was jerked to a dead, shuddering halt.
Behind him, through the roaring fog of scalding steam, the hunter planted its boots into the seams of the cherry-red copper plates.
The creature’s strength was easy, total, and terrifying. It didn’t grunt with physical hard effort. It didn’t brace its back against a firebrick wall. It simply leaned its weight backward, using the zero-drag moving leverage of Burdenless Step to haul Len toward the valve chamber like a sack of scrap iron.
Len felt the cold, hard certainty of his postal training fire through his nervous system.
He remembered Ivara’s warning on the river embankment: if you try to pull against that grip with muscle, you die. A living human body can’t win a trial of strength against a duplicate running without body limits.
If he reached back with his blistered right hand to claw at the creature’s fingers, the double would seize his wrist, twist his radius out of its socket, and drag him beneath the four-hundred-degree steam main before he could scream. Grappling against a vessel with superior physical statistics was suicide.
