The heavy iron wheels of the delivery heavy cart were gone, left behind in the Star tower courtyard under Captain Vance’s armed guard. But the sound of iron on stone seemed to follow them down the railway cutting like a phantom echo.
The clinic service line had not carried a coal train in nearly a decade. Between the rusted iron rails, the ballast was choked with dead, frost-blackened nettles, snapped telegraph wire, and six inches of piled up fire melted rock waste that crunched like broken glass beneath their boots. Pushing a five-hundred-pound rubber-tired mine ambulance through that muck was brutal physical labor, especially for four adults carrying open wounds and torn muscle. Every five yards, a wheel would catch against a heaved rail spike, jarring the frame and forcing Tobin Callow and Bram Ash to heave their shoulders into the ash push-bar with ragged, timed together curses.
Len Vey stood at the steering tongue of the cart. His right hand gripped the cold ash wood, his boots braced against the slippery ballast. His left shoulder was bound tight against his chest, the linen bandages stained with dark slow leak from the morning’s strain. But his Surefoot milestone automatically adjusted his balance point whenever the wheels slewed in the frozen mud.
