The reality of the eighteen-minute plateau settled over the repair bay of Track Two like the heavy, freezing damp of an unpumped drainage sump. Eighteen minutes in a warm drawing room reading a royal gazette was nothing more than three leisurely pipe-bowls of tobacco. But eighteen minutes suspended on a shaking iron grating above a boiling discharge chute. He held a two-meter cast-iron wheel against seventy-five pounds of hardened spring-steel while sixty pounds of sulfur steam screamed through the casing flanges, was an ordeal that few living men could endure without their lungs turning to water and their muscles seizing into knots.
Melli Dorn stood by the edge of the long workbench, using the hem of her coarse flannel apron to wipe the water drops from her iron glasses. Her thick, square hands, crisscrossed with white scars from twenty winters of handling molten salt-glass, were bent tight against her hips. The smell of cold ash, borax, and old machine oil rose from her clothes, mixing with the damp chill of the rail cut.
“We can’t go to that dark rock ridge as strangers to the wood,” Melli said, her voice cutting through the hiss of the Track Two steam radiators like a cold chisel through slate. “We can’t walk into Morn’s pit at four in the morning, under the eyes of forty guards, and expect our palms to find the spokes in the sulfur fog. If a worker has to look down to check where her boots are planted, she’s…
