The domestic walkway ended at a heavy oak wicket door, its iron hardware crusted with pale green rust. Ivara Quill didn’t reach for the latch. She paused with her right shoulder braced against the frame, listening through the damp grain of the wood. The shaking of the Great Quartz core was louder here, thrumming through the top door beam like the purr of a sleeping fire.
“Unlatch the bottom bolt, Len,” she whispered. “Use your boot toe. Don’t let the iron drop into the socket.”
Len stepped forward, his right heel catching the square tongue of the lower bolt. With a slow, steady upward pressure, he eased the rusted bar from its iron staple. It caught the weight before the spring could snap. The bolt slid back with a dull, muffled scrape that was swallowed by the hiss of the corona discharge overhead.
Ivara pushed the door open three inches with the cup of her leather-padded stump.
Beyond the threshold lay the disused sky-high terrace. A wide, semi-circular platform of dressed granite projecting from the northern shoulder of the ridge at Height +280 meters. Sixty years ago, before the sky was sealed beneath the emergency shield, students from the country academy had gathered here with brass refracting telescopes and star charts to measure the movements of the northern star-patterns. Now, the terrace was a heavy-duty boneyard. Stacks of weathered wooden roof shingles, coils of rusted steel mooring cable, and broken crates of baked-clay insulator rings lay scattered across the flat…
