The tram kitchen had filled with the pungent, heavy smell of scorched chicory and boiling turnip mash as Doma’s morning shift began in earnest. Outside the timber partition, forty men and women from the fever households sat on sacks of dry grain and overturned oil kegs, their faces gray beneath the green glare of the copper lamps, eating their thin broth in silence.
Len sat at the zinc table with a fresh leaf of coarse brown shipping paper laid out before him. He couldn’t hold the heavy brass ruler, so Heth Ash knelt on the timber bench beside him. He pressed the flat ruler down with both hands. Meanwhile, Len dragged a steel-nibbed dip-pen across the fiber with his awkward, blistered right fingers.
His left arm throbbed in its ash splints, the swollen radius throbbing in time with the deep, sixty-cycle shakes of the central pumps three miles to the north. Every time he dipped the pen into the square ink-pot, a sharp burst shot from his collarbone down through his chest muscle. But he kept his hand steady. That forced each letter to stand clear and upright.
To Cira Vey, Tern Road Station North, Len wrote across the top of the sheet, the ink soaking deep into the raw, unwhitened pulp.
