The lantern flame gave a thin, greasy sputter inside its brass housing, throwing Ivara Quill’s shadow across the steel drawer fronts in long, wavering bars of gray. She didn’t take her hand from the drawer runner. The skin across her knuckles was dry, cracked at the joints from years of river spray and bitter salt dust, the gray veins standing out like frozen twine beneath the surface.
“I was twenty-seven years old,” Ivara said. Her voice was flat, dry, stripped of any inflection that might invite pity or dramatic guilt. “I had spent five years at the polytechnic school in the northern lowlands learning transit shape, high-pressure head loss, and air-pressure draft. I came into Rookvale with three cases of brass transit theodolites, four notebooks filled with logarithmic tables. The total conviction that if a machine failed, it was simply because the man who built it hadn’t calculated his margins.”
She looked down at the typed foolscap still resting in Len’s hand.
“Deren told me on the third day of the climb that my margins were worth nothing. We were sitting on a granite ledge at Mile Marker Four. He watched the frost form on the casing of the main steam channel. The air was already foul with sulfur smoke leaking from the packing glands. He watched me checking my slide rule with cold fingers. He told me that a young land-mapper who trusts her numbers more than her boot soles is a land-mapper who will end up dead beneath…
