The transit tunnel smelled of wet granite, cold river gravel, and the greasy draft of coal-oil lamps. But as Tavi took his tenth step along the corrugated steel walkway, the air shifted. It drafted down from the high northern portal with a sudden, shivering chill that carried a smell so clean and unfamiliar that the boy stopped in his tracks, his boots frozen on the wet iron grating.
It was the smell of living grass. Not the sour, fermented silage of the tram mule stalls, and not the damp, moldering compost of Elsi Marr’s underground fungal beds. It was wild, rain-washed clover, growing on an open hillside thirty miles to the north, its scent drawn down through the mountain gap by the sub-zero highway wind. Tavi drew a long, ragged breath through his nose. His lungs burned with the strange, unpolluted purity of it.
Beside him walked Martha, an older nurse from the town clinic whose wool bonnet was pinned tight beneath her chin with brass safety pins. She held the small, cold hands of two orphaned children. Five-year-old Sarah, whose cheeks were flushed with the dry heat of the third-day fever. It was wrapped in a coarse gray wool blanket. Her seven-year-old brother Ned, whose giant boots were tied to his ankles with tarred twine. Behind them walked two burly railway wagon drivers in canvas coats. They carried the heavy wicker hampers containing the town casualty rolls and sixty personal letters written in pencil by dying fever patients to…
