Edda followed Melli Dorn up the rusted iron rungs of the upkeep ladder, moving with a cautious, hitching rhythm that kept her weight centered over her right leg. The wind scouring the sheer quarry face caught the skirts of her wet wool smock, plastering the heavy, freezing fabric against her thighs. But she kept her gaze fixed straight ahead on the dark stone rock six inches from her nose.
Her left arm remained tucked inside the breast of her coat, bound securely in a silk sling that Doma Reel had stitched from an old parachute shroud. The two splints of split ash, binding her broken index and middle fingers, throbbed with a dull, sickening ache that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Five days ago, when the nursery feeder gate had collapsed on Track Four, three hundred pounds of timber and boiler iron had dropped across her knuckles. It crushed the proximal joints into a jagged mess of bone chips. The bones had begun to knit, but they had set crookedly. Stiff, unmoving hooks of calcium that flared with white-hot agony whenever her wrist rotated more than twenty degrees.
She reached the narrow iron doorstep of Chimney pipe B, swung her boots over the edge. Then she dropped onto her belly in the box-shaped opening.
