Ivara Quill stepped out onto the center of the wooden walkway planks, putting her body squarely between Len and the copy. She didn’t have her crutch. She had dropped it in the slurry when she shoved Len into the ditch. She stood on her right leg with her left heel braced against an iron rail spike, balancing her weight with the hard, practiced balance of a woman who had surveyed mountain ledges with one arm for seven years.
In her right hand she held the broken leg of her land-mapper’s transit. A thirty-inch shaft of seasoned ash tipped with a sharpened brass metal ring.
“You’re seven minutes behind your clock, Deren,” she said. Her voice had no tremble in it. It was as level and cold as a brass rule laid across drawing parchment. “The four-horse freight didn’t wait for your spindle grease. It took the high road through the gap six years ago. The company wrote your bond off the books.”
The copy didn’t alter its stance. It wasn’t programmed for debate. Its mental boundaries were sealed within the narrow settings of the town voucher that Morn had stamped into its neck. It was an office watch-dog, tasked with holding the lower drift against pullback until the central guard could bring up the iron cages from Track Two.
