The glass of Melli Dorn’s glasses had fogged to total opacity within twenty yards of the entrance doorstep. The cold air clinging to the outer lenses had met the sudden, ninety-degree vapor of the chimney pipe, blinding her in a smear of gray water drops that rendered the narrow duct impossible to tell apart from a coal cellar at midnight.
She didn’t stop to wipe the glass. With the practiced economy of a kiln worker accustomed to fire flare, she pushed the iron-framed glasses up onto the greasy wool of her felt hood with the back of her wrist, squinting through the stinging haze with her bare eyes. The rotten-egg vapor, soaked with tiny sulfuric acid droplets and unburned coal damp, bit into her corneas with a sharp, prickling heat that brought tears streaming down through the thick layer of sulfur animal fat coating her cheeks. She blinked rapidly, forcing the stinging moisture from her lids, her breath coming in slow, rhythmic measures through the wet wool cloth tied over her nose and mouth.
The physical character of the channel had changed forty paces from the quarry mouth. The salt-glazed, machine-molded firebrick of the outer discharge apron had given way to rough-hewn dark rock blocks. An older, hand-chiseled drift cut by quarry laborers during the fourth year of the sky shield to drain the lower steam cooler vaults. The ceiling here was barely thirty inches above the invert. The side walls were spaced twenty-six inches apart, their rough, unmortared joints…
