Nessa Tern sat on the middle bench of the River delegation, her hands wrapped around a battered tin mug of chicory broth to suppress the tremors in her wrists. The chill had entered her marrow four hours earlier. Just then, she had crawled through two hundred yards of half-sunk overflow water chute beneath the north weir to bypass Morn’s road pickets. Her wool watch-coat, stiffened by canal silt and coal sludge, gave off a sour, swampy damp as the heat of the animal fat lanterns warmed the cloth.
Behind her sat six high-pressure mechanics. Veteran tenders who spent their working lives in thigh-high rubberized hip-boots. They cleared drowned timber, coal melted rock waste, and animal carcasses from the iron trash racks of the main intake. Their faces had the sickly, bleached pallor of men who rarely saw a lantern brighter than a half-wick animal fat dip. Their eyes were bloodshot from years of sulfur mist. They carried their three-foot forged iron packing wrenches upright between their knees like guild polearms.
“We brought the token,” Nessa said, her voice clear and hard enough to cut through the low hiss of the steam radiators along the platform wall.
She reached into the breast pocket of her watch-coat, unpinned a scrap of oilcloth, and laid an object onto the zinc table.
