By the fourth simulated revolution of the turntable wheel, the air in the repair bay was thick with the choking reek of scorched canvas, hot mutton fat, and burning hemp oil. The eight-inch snatch-block overhead was running hot, its iron axle groaning with a gritty squeal as the cable ground through the pulley wheel under the repeated lift of the scrap-iron skid.
Melli Dorn leaned against the staging rail, her chest heaving, her hands held out before her. The double-layered canvas work gloves she had taken from the tool chest were in shreds. The sharp, diamond-pattern knurling that Len had rasped into the hickory spokes had chewed through the heavy cotton ducking like sharkskin. Through the ragged tears in the fabric, her palms were visible. Raw, angry red patches where the raised wooden pyramids had worn through her calluses to the living deep skin.
“Stop the rig,” Doma Reel ordered. She stepped up to the platform with a clay pot jar of yellow sulfur ointment and two heavy rolls of clean linen. “Step down, Melli. You’re leaving blood on the wood.”
“The wood doesn’t care about blood, Doma,” Melli grunted, though her voice was strained with pain as she peeled the shredded canvas from her right palm. The cotton was stuck to her skin with dried lymph and grease. It tore away with a sickening pushback that made her jaw clench. “If my hands slip during the actual discharge, forty thousand heat units vent into the pit. A blister is…
