Len held his breath. He pressed his back against the rusted iron sideboards of the coal tender until the rough oxide flakes bit through the coarse wool of his courier coat. Six paces away, Conductor Vane’s heavy leather boot struck the crushed dark rock ballast with a dull, grinding crunch that rang through the steel trucks of the carriage.
The heavy iron ticket punch swung in the dead guide-rod’s right hand with the slow, pendular regularity of an ungreased clock. The man didn’t turn his neck. His entire torso pivoted from the hips, his milky, unblinking eyes scanning the narrow aisle between the two stalled trains. Beneath the frayed cuffs of his blue uniform trousers. There, an ankle ought to have met the leather upper, the darkness pooled into an anchor root. A tether of semi-fluid shadow, thick as an ox’s tail, that dragged behind his heels through the oily gravel and disappeared down into the ballast bed.
Road Sense sent a nonstop, shaking warning through the soles of Len’s boots.
The ground beneath the tram interchange was not solid bedrock. It was a maze-like honeycomb of abandoned drainage channels, unmapped telegraph ducts, and high-voltage cable trenches excavated forty years ago during the province’s great heavy-duty spreading. Through those buried iron galleries, anchor energy pulsed like cold, acidic salt water through a diseased artery.
