The grease-pencil made a dry, rhythmic squeak as Urel dragged its blunt point across the large slate board mounted against the brick wall of Track One. He didn’t need to consult the country survey rolls. Every measurement, every spreading joint, and every drainage baffle of the Star tower’s lower galleries had been etched into his memory over eighteen years of boiler upkeep.
Beside him, Melli Dorn stood with her arms folded across her grease-spotted canvas smock, her iron-framed glasses pushed down to the bridge of her nose. She watched the gray lines multiply across the black slate with the critical, unforgiving scrutiny of a master artisan who knew that a mistake of half an inch in a blueprint meant a broken chisel or a cracked crucible in the dark.
“The stonework changes at the sixty-yard marker,” Urel said, his voice raspy from the cold drafts blowing through the rail shed. He tapped the slate with the wooden end of the pencil. “The first section of Chimney pipe B was laid during the original construction of the Star tower foundations forty years ago. It’s squared granite cut stone, thirty-six inches across, with lime mortar that has long since hardened into solid rock. The going is wide enough there to move on hands and knees without scraping your elbows.”
