The iron gear catch of the kitchen pocket watch finished its shuddering descent, the heavy bronze gears clicking into the stroke of twenty-four hundred hours.
Outside in the Tram square, the night remained dead and motionless. No town siren wailed from the watchtowers. No bells chimed from the Survey citadel. No thunder rattled the corrugated iron of the locomotive sheds.
Inside Len Vey’s vision, the violet wire of Milestone Eight snapped.
It didn’t break with an explosion of light. It parted like a thread of frozen glass stressed beyond its pulling limit. It dissolved in a brief, silent shower of amethyst sparks that fell across his sight and vanished.
In their place, projected directly onto the damp air two feet before his face, hung the austere, legalistic frame of the country system:
The pop-up alert remained static for five seconds. It was cold, sterile, office, indifferent to the five miles of muddy railway ballast he had crossed, the lead ball that had shattered Bram’s shoulder. The forty casks of fever animal fat he had hauled through the drainage water chutes.
Then the letters fragmented into gray pixels, drifting downward like soot from a put out wick, leaving his sight unclouded.
