Len Vey stood on the iron narrow high walkway of the eastern overhead frame bridge, forty feet above the stone floor of the Tram basin.
He leaned his uninjured right shoulder against the cold angle-iron railing. His left arm was held firm in its clean linen sling, his right hand resting on the ash shaft of his sounding pole. The wind blowing through the high load-bearing lattice of the roof was cold, moving at four knots from the western quarry. But it no longer carried the stinging, chemical bitterness of burning copper flux. It tasted of cedar ash, boiling oats, and the clean, sharp dampness of river stone.
Below him, spread across three acres of switching tracks and platform aprons, the Tram Ward was stirring with an unfamiliar, astonishing life.
By his pocket watch, the hands stood at:
05:45:10
In all his five days in Rookvale, this was the hour of total, choking terror. The final, freezing ninety minutes before the false shift bell, when the streets were dead, the apartments shuttered behind triple-barred doors. The town patrol sweeps moved through the alleys with truncheons and iron chains to collect the bodies of those who had failed to survive midnight.
