Doma Reel stepped directly into the narrow gap between the pine butcher’s table and the low brick archway that led to the water chute alley.
She wasn’t a tall woman, but her shoulders were broad, thickened by thirty years of hauling eighty-pound flour sacks and stirring iron kettles of boiling bean porridge. She planted her heavy, felt-lined kitchen clogs squarely on the threshold. She crossed her muscular arms over her apron. Her apron was stained with dried bean starch, soot, and the brown grease of mutton drippings. But her stance had the unbending solidity of a stonework retaining wall.
“Step back, Len Vey,” she said. Her voice dropped into the flat, dangerous tone she used when an unruly stoker tried to steal sugar vouchers from the pantry.
Len stopped three feet from her, his ash sounding pole held vertically in his right hand. His brown coat was buttoned tight against his chest, the tarred bundle containing Deren’s bell knocking against his right hip with every breath. His face was pale, smeared with coal grime and sweat, the dark circles under his eyes bruised with five days of uninterrupted tiredness.
“Doma, we have fifty minutes before the change of the watch at the Star tower,” Len said, his voice hoarse. “If we don’t move through the water chute now, the steam from the midnight laundry will clear. We won’t have cover in the under-road drains.”
