The vault of Anchor Three was dead silent save for the deep, spark hum shaking through the bronze stone stand.
Melli Dorn stood with her heavy cowhide apron brushing the edge of the drafting board Ivara had laid across two timber packing crates. The silver-bronze Delegate Seal lay flat upon the thick parchment, its intricately cut warding teeth catching the cold green light of the overhead salt-glass bright light.
She didn’t look at the drawings. She didn’t look at Deren Vey’s careful, seven-year-old high-pressure diagrams or the clean graphite cross-sections of the broken-sun brake.
She stood with her thick arms crossed over her chest. Her soot-stained knuckles were tucked into her armpits, her bloodshot eyes fixed on Ivara Quill with the unbending, transactional hostility of a merchant who knew the exact value of her cargo and had no intention of being paid in promises.
“I’m not an ideologue, Ivara,” Melli said. Her voice dropped into a harsh, gravelly deep that rang off the dressed dark rock walls like an iron rasp on slate. “I don’t write pamphlets in cellars. I don’t give a damn about the constitutional charters of thirty winters ago. I’m the forewoman of sixty fire gatherers, forty raw-batch mixers, twenty mold-smiths, and fifty-two haulage wagon drivers who live in the bitter salt apartments between here and the melted rock waste heaps.”
