Before leaving the vault behind Kiln Four, Melli Dorn didn’t lead them back toward the scrap yard.
She gestured with her iron skimmer toward a narrow, raised iron narrow high walkway that ran along the western flank of the Annealing Lehr. The walkway was barely eighteen inches wide, suspended four feet above the concrete foundation piers by heavy angle-iron brackets. It shook with the nonstop, rhythmic rumble of the internal steel moving belt rollers.
“Up the ladder, land-mapper,” Melli said. Her voice dropped below the roar of the chimney pipes. “Look at what your boy saved with that bronze wrench.”
Len climbed the iron rungs behind Ivara, his boots moving carefully across the diamond-tread plates.
His right hand was a throbbing, swollen fist inside Ivara’s clean linen bandage, the zinc salve soothing the raw deep skin. But every accidental brush of his knuckles against his hip sent a sharp, nauseating jolt of pain into his elbow. He kept his arm hooked securely across his ribs. He used the palm of his hand and his left elbow to steady his balance, leaning his weight into his Surefoot baseline.
They reached the master check rack at the midpoint of Zone Two.
Here, set into the double-coursed firebrick wall of the sixty-meter tunnel, were three circular watching ports fitted with three-inch slabs of polished green quartz. Below the ports sat a said clearlycopper reflector bracket holding an unshielded, high-intensity copper-flame check lamp, fed by a high-pressure kerosene line from the pulpit.
