Urel sank to his knees beside the litter, his knuckles driving into the frost-rimed wooden roof shingles on the terrace floor. His wool coat fell open. He showed the stained linen tunic beneath, soaked at the collar with cold sweat and coal grease. He pressed his palms against his ears, but the physical gesture couldn’t shut out the shaking. It wasn’t a sound that traveled through the air. It was a rhythmic, deep-rock thudding that traveled through the granite spine of the ridge, passing directly through the bones of his pelvis and rattling his ribs like dry kindling.
Thump-shudder... Thump-shudder...
The interval was seven seconds. Exactly seven seconds. For six years, Urel had logged that interval three times a shift on the master balance parchment in the sub-vaults beneath the central lens. In the eighth year of the darkness, the pulse had been twelve seconds. A slow, deep, calm breathing that showed the heat collectors were absorbing sky-high sunlight and draining away eighty percent of the energy through the deep radiator drain pits in the Quarry Ward. In the tenth year, after Chancellor Morn ordered the backup cooling loops isolated to run the self-running border fences, the pulse had quickened to nine seconds.
