The silence that followed the final hammer blow was heavier than the lime dust settling over the cots.
In the vast, whitewashed vault of the bunkhouse, the green flames of the overhead chandelier hissed with a steady, rhythmic sputter. It cast long, motionless shadows across the white pine decking. The air tasted of charred blister-copper, sulfur flux. The cold, metal reek of battery acid that still rose from the cut seam in the granite breach.
Ivara Quill stepped forward from the drafting table. Her tone check tube was held in her single right hand.
She didn’t look at the breach first. She turned her land-mapper’s gaze toward the center aisle. There, the six child doubles stood among the iron cots.
The manifestations had frozen in place.
Len’s maul drove the second blister-copper wedge home and cut the channel’s connection to the main water chute. Then, the manifestations had been stripped of their forward drive. They didn’t dissolve into ash. Their local feeder line beneath the open hatch of Bed 19 remained connected to the subsidiary Quarry circuit, supplying just enough energy to maintain baseline physical focus.
Yet all volition, all clockwork driving force, and all sound mimicry had died.
The child double wearing Elsi Marr’s seven-year-old face stood three paces from the overturned bench. Her right cheek remained blistered, the skin peeled away in bloodless, paper-thin curls where the copper light had scorched the manifestation tissue. Her small hands hung limp at her sides, the four-inch shadow talons pulled back…
