The mouth of the eastern railway cut opened like a jagged limestone wound forty arm-lengths wide, cut deep into the bedrock of the valley bench.
The morning mist had settled into the trench in thick, freezing layers of sulfur-gray vapor that smelled of coal cinders, damp mortar, and stale water chute water. Standing four abreast along the rusted ballast between the abandoned tracks, one hundred and five men and women of the restoration coalition stood waiting in disciplined, unmoving silence.
Fifty quarry drillers from Tier Two stood at the center of the formation, their sixteen-pound sledges and steel star-drills muffled in strips of coarse gray wool, their leather aprons stained with limestone slurry. Beside them were thirty salt-glass riggers from Melli Dorn’s annealing sheds. It carried four zinc-lined crates of replacement bronze couplings on heavy ash litters. Behind the riggers stood twenty kitchen workers and trackmen from the Tram Ward. He hauled two four-wheeled handcarts laden with sacks of sea salt, drums of refined animal fat, and forty loaves of Doma’s hard-tack bread. Bringing up the rear were five defected town constables in unbuttoned blue fustian coats, their ash truncheons sheathed, their duty pouches packed with wrench sockets, caulking irons, and wrenches.
