Within fifteen minutes, the communal kitchen beneath Track Four transformed from a back kitchen into a tactical dispatch depot.
The central preparation tables were cleared of flour sacks, salt water crocks, and vegetable cleavers. In their place, sheets of heavy gray butcher’s wrapping paper were tacked to the maple boards with brass drawing pins, weighted at the corners by iron scale-weights, chipped tea mugs, and clay pot ink pots. everyone could feel the scent of boiling vinegar and carbolic soap from the butcher’s bench. He mixed with the dry, earthy smell of the raw, unwhitened wrapping paper.
Len Vey sat at the head of the table, his chair pulled tight to the timber.
His braced left arm rested in its heavy canvas sling across his ribs, an unmoving block of red cedar and waxed steer-hide that throbbed with a dull, steady ache in time with his resting pulse. He ignored the ache. His right hand held a steel-nibbed drafting pen, moving across the rough paper with the rapid, economical strokes of a courier who had learned by heart eighty miles of mountain trails by touch. His knuckles were bruised. The skin around his thumb was stained with dried blood and black nut-dark oak-ink. But his grip on the pen was rock-steady.
