The iron floor of the central watching gallery shook beneath Ivara’s boots with a persistent, low-hum that seemed to rattle the teeth in her jaw. The smell of ozone and burnt animal fat was so thick that every breath felt like inhaling cold ash. Outside the narrow quartz viewing slit, thirty feet down in the bedrock, the core of the Sky Shield pulsed with a violent, violet soft glow that washed across the iron rafters every six seconds.
Chancellor Ves Morn stood twenty paces away, his heavy back turned to her, his grease-stained frock coat hanging stiffly over his broad frame. He had stopped shouting. The desperate, defensive anger that had colored his voice had burned down into something colder and far more dangerous. The exhausted clarity of a man who had decided that an atrocity was merely an office necessity.
“You believe I’m a strange flaw,” Morn said, his voice flat, competing with the thrum of the holding bus-bars below. “You believe that somewhere in the country statutes there’s a clean, honest gearwork that could have preserved eighty thousand people through twelve winters of war. That I simply chose the butcher’s knife because I found it convenient.”
Ivara sat on the unpainted spruce bench, her left sleeve pinned securely to her wool jacket where her forearm ended. Meanwhile, her right arm lay strapped against her ribs to immobilize her sprained wrist. The pain in her wrist was a steady, thrumming ache. But she kept her back straight against the…
