Edda leaned her shoulder against the rough limestone doorframe of the tool shed, her breath tearing through her throat in ragged, whistling gasps that tasted of crushed chalk and copper smoke.
The coarse gray wool of her working tunic was coated in an unbroken crust of white rock dust, but beneath the apron bib. Her left hand was shaking with a violent, rhythmic tremor. Blood, dark and thick with rock grease, seeped through the weave of her sleeve, dripping from the ball of her thumb to form a pool on the threshold. Her thumb and forefinger were blackened, the nails split down the center where the shaking steel of an eight-foot jumper rod had kicked back against her grip.
She had spent eight years running drill gangs across the deep benches of the Quarry Ward, working alongside men who had lost eyes, fingers, and hearing to the violent percussion of hand-sledges, but she had never seen steel behave like that.
Steel had laws. Steel obeyed clockwork leverage. If a driller struck a jumper with an eight-pound hammer, the striking force drove the hardened chisel bit into the rock seam. If the seam was tight, the steel rebounded with a clean, high-pitched ping that stung the palms. If the rock was fractured, the bit seated itself with a dull, heavy thud. Steel didn’t turn in a man’s palms with the deliberate, muscular malice of an animal fighting a tether. Steel didn’t seize an iron guide sleeve and wrench it out of…
