Geth Marr didn’t turn toward Tavi Rusk when the boy burst through the cedar door.
He remained standing by the narrow, unglazed watching slit of the Tier Two tool shed, his heavy leather apron pulled taut across his broad chest, his thick forearms resting on the cold limestone doorstep. Outside, the great cavernous tiered arena of the Quarry Ward dropped away into four hundred arm-lengths of upright shadow, lit up only by the faint, olive-green glimmers of the outer edge lamps strung along the residential tiers like dying embers in a forge hearth.
In his mind, Geth was not looking at the dark terraces or the distant hoist cables.
He was looking down through four hundred feet of living limestone, past the shored drifts of Tier Four, straight into the white baked-clay cube of the sealed bunkhouse. He was looking at Bed 19.
He remembered the morning of the First Black Sky with a clarity that twelve years of rock dust had never dulled.
He had been thirty-eight years old, already a master timber-man with three gangs of drillers under his whistle, his hands hardened by two decades of splitting blue limestone. His sister Elsi had been seven years old. A quiet, skinny girl with wide, dark gray eyes and thick black hair that their mother had braided that morning with three inches of red wool string.
