Tavi Rusk didn’t duck under the raised bronze barrier. He threw his entire body forward in a desperate, lunging sprint that sent him skidding across the wet dark rock flags on his knees and the palms of his hands.
Behind him, an iron whistle shrieked beneath the steel canopy. Two sharp, piercing blasts from Sergeant Kroll’s brass lanyard as the gate sergeant realized the boy was not walking with an apprentice’s measured shuffle. But Peter was already stepping into the narrow gap between the oak barricades. His broad shoulders and was heavy ash truncheon blocking the transit lane, his voice bellowing out a made dispute about voucher duplicates to drown the sentries’ shouts.
Tavi scrambled back onto his feet, his boot soles finding purchase on the crushed limestone aggregate of the outer boundary apron. He didn’t look back. He ran with his head down, his haversack clutched against his ribs with both arms. His elbows tucked was tight against his trembling torso.
Ten paces.
Twenty paces.
The blinding jade-green glare of the overhead floodlights fell away behind him. It faded from a harsh, searing bright glare into a diffuse, misty glow that cast his running shadow far out onto the open road. The sulfur stench of the country heaters—the bitter reek of scorched copper, coal-coke, and boiling turnip starch that had coated the back of his tongue for thirteen years—was suddenly snapped away by a huge, roaring draft of clean mountain air.
