Ivara Quill didn’t wait for the constables to reach the wheels of the staging cart. She stood beside Doma Reel with her single arm resting on her leather surveying satchel, her land-mapper’s measuring tongs hooked into her belt, her gray eyes assessing the crowd’s sharp-angled thickness.
She was thirty-four years old. The empty left sleeve of her heavy canvas coat was pinned neatly to her waist with an iron harness buckle, marking the place where her forearm had been cut seven years ago during Deren Vey’s failed try to uncouple the broken-sun release. Her leftover right hand was weathered, scarred by acid fumes from the battery tunnels, and steady as a sky-high plumb-bob. Where other survivors of that disaster spoke with bitter pause, Ivara spoke with the cold, exact care of someone who had measured the exact weight of stone needed to crush a human shoulder.
She raised her right hand. Then she made a sharp, two-finger cutting motion toward the raised steel overhead frame that spanned the tram tracks twenty arm-lengths above the square.
High on the iron lattice, thirteen-year-old Tavi Rusk was perched on an ungreased upkeep platform. The boy had spent the morning working among the rusted overhead cable pulley wheels, checking the hemp lines and greasing the iron pulleys with lard stolen from the kitchen fryers. The sulfur smoke that rose from the locomotive sheds had coated his bare arms in greasy soot, and cold wind whistling through the corrugated iron roof made his teeth chatter…
