Urel stepped to the center of the platform beneath the glare of the animal fat lanterns. The thirty-two-year-old technician looked worn to the bone, his slight, angular frame swallowed by a giant shop coat of stiff gray wool. The standard uniform issued to Survey Office mechanics on the northern ridge. His coat bore dark smears of graphite grease, machine animal fat, and wet brick dust from his escape down the chimney pipes six hours earlier, and every brass royal button had been snapped from his front placket with a cold chisel. That left small, ragged circles of raw gray wool.
He didn’t place his hands behind his back or tuck them into his sleeves. He spread both palms flat upon the zinc tabletop, right beside the Recovery Charter, under the direct beam of the overhead reflector.
Across the ball of his right thumb ran a jagged, three-inch clean cut, held together by four clumsy loops of black shoemaker’s thread. The skin around the stitches was swollen, red, and weeping a thin, pale serum mixed with dried droplets of dark blood. It was the mark he had carved into his own flesh that morning before Bram Ash and Len Vey in the tool shed. A brutal, body proof that his veins carried living red marrow rather than the inert copper melted rock waste and gray dust of a showed up double.
