“No, little one,” Len answered, his voice gentle and steady as he tucked the torn frieze hem around Renna’s knees. “They aren’t coming for you. They’re looking for a boy carrying an unsealed dispatch, and he isn’t going through this chute.”
The ten-year-old girl held his gaze, absorbing the quiet certainty in his voice. She nodded once, a brief, adult jerk of her chin that acknowledged the terms of the crossing. Then she turned back to the iron hopper, placed both palms against the riveted lip. Then she hitched her frame into the dark square.
The passage swallowed her frieze skirts with a soft, scraping rustle. Len kept his uninjured right hand resting against the edge of the sheet iron. He felt the faint shakes of her boots as she climbed the thirty-degree incline. Ten feet above, the muted scrape of wool against rusted tin ceased, replaced by Tobin Callow’s low, steady rumble: “I have her. Renna’s through. The young ones are on the straw.”
Len let out a slow, measured breath through his teeth.
Now came the true body test of the extraction: Urel’s wife.
Mara lay on the damp mattress of the hospital gurney, shivering beneath the horse-hair blanket. Five years of coal rationing, sulfur smoke, and office surveillance in the upper Star tower quarters had hollowed her cheeks until the skin stretched taut over her cheekbones. Her lips were cracked and bleeding where she had bitten through the flesh to stifle her groans during the transit down…
