The fire-gate didn’t drop like a stone dropped down a dry well. The three-quarter-inch chain was choked with decades of piled up lime scale, coal grit, and hardened sheep fat. It fought against the iron cheeks of the overhead pulley wheel with a sustained, shrieking roar that showered the drift with flakes of orange rust.
The friction bought the copy three-tenths of a second.
To an ordinary laborer caught under a falling drop-gate, three-tenths of a second was only enough time to realize that his skull was about to be split. But Deren Vey had spent twenty-five years rigging timber bridges over mountain gorges, handling runaway log wagons, and catching falling bents before the cross-ties crushed his crew. That physical reflex—the instant, subconscious shape of an experienced rigger—was burned deep into the creature’s nervous system, preserved in the cold amber of the town ledger.
The copy didn’t look up. It didn’t freeze.
With a sudden, violent twist of its hips, it dropped the brass sounding bar horizontally across its chest. It planted its square-toed boots into the wet ballast. Then it threw both hands skyward, locking its elbows and arching its spine into an iron bridge.
CLANG-SHUDDER.
The impact was ear-splitting. The lower cross-rail of the drop-gate struck the creature’s palms with four hundred pounds of falling heavy rush. The iron teeth stopped sixteen inches from the stone floorboards, suspended on the locked forearms of the double.
