Geth Marr rose from the Quarry bench with the slow, grinding deliberation of a locomotive shifting off a siding. His six-foot-two frame towered over the low spruce frame stands, stretching the stiff duck-canvas seams of his coat until the brass grommets groaned. His beard, bristling like a wire brush, was coated in white limestone grit. His knuckles bore the purple-black tattoo of premature powder flash from the north drift cuts of Year Four. His right eye remained permanently narrowed against invisible rock-shrapnel. At the same time, his left, dark and wet as river dark rock, fixed upon the center of the table.
He didn’t touch the tin mug of water Doma had set down. Instead, he planted one scarred, six-pound fist onto the edge of the blue-chalk map, right where the lower gorge dropped into the underground drainage sump.
“I’ve spent an hour with your numbers, land-mapper,” Geth said. His voice was low, harsh as two dry millstones turning without grain. “You’ve laid out twelve thousand heat units a minute down the central release chimney pipe. Twelve thousand. You intend to vent the entire piled up fire of forty-three hundred noon shifts straight into my limestone floor.”
Across the zinc, Melli Dorn didn’t flinch. Her broad forearms, wrapped in fresh linen over raw yellow sulfur ointment, rested flat against the table. Her iron-rimmed glasses reflected the cold animal fat light of the roof beams.
