Len Vey didn’t try to pull backward.
In the physical mechanics of a postal courier, pulling against an unmoving restraint was an amateur’s fatal error. An ox wagon slipped its brake on a thirty-degree winter decline along the high shale cliffs of the Tern Highway. Then, an experienced wagon driver didn’t throw his body weight against the trace chains. He drove the team into the cut of the bank to force a load-bearing crash that altered the direction, speed, and driving force of the moving load. You met the mass with an opposing angle, and you let the mountain absorb the violence.
The double was an unbending anchor. Its right hand, welded to the two-inch solid wrought-iron handrail by the static mandate of Hookhold, formed a rigid pivot point anchored to the upright stonework wall. It expected Len to flail backward, to claw at the stone coping, to reach for the small skinning knife in his pocket, or to try to squirm his way out from beneath the crushing static pressure of its right knee.
Len did the exact opposite.
He gathered his knees tight beneath his chest bone, the steel-shod toes of both heavy mountain boots seating firmly into the diamond perforations of the cast-iron grating. The cold sewer slime lubricated the metal. But his fifth-level Road Sense traced the solid edges of the webbed iron, finding the uncorroded ribs where the friction would bite. His core muscles—hardened by four years of seventy-pound postal packs, rutted gravel roads, and…
