From the high stone low roof wall of the River bridge, Ivara Quill forced her eyes away from the terrifying perfection of her double’s left arm and looked only through the lens of load-bearing building.
She knew the exact mechanics of Load Sight. She had earned the milestone eleven years ago, during the desperate forty-eight-hour reconstruction of the northern floodgates. Just then, the original sky shield was activated. For three days before the midnight transfer took the improvement away, she had walked through Rookvale seeing the world not as matter, but as vectors of force.
It was an intoxicating, godlike perceptual clarity. Crushing stress pulsed as crimson ribbons through granite columns, shear forces flickered as sharp violet zigzags across bolted steel joints, and neutral zones where matter was resting without load glowed with a soft, pale yellow amber. An engineer with Load Sight didn’t need to calculate weight spreading with pencil and logarithmic tables. She could look at an eighty-ton cathedral dome and identify the single mortar joint that, if struck with a ten-pound maul, would cause the entire structure to fold inward like a crushed birdcage.
The River Ward bridge was not a decorative viaduct. It was a heavy-duty aqueduct and highway built forty years ago by the Imperial Ministry of Works to carry the country coal lines across the gorge. Four thousand eight hundred tons of dressed blue dark rock, quarried from the northern peaks and bound with high-pressure volcanic cement mortar, had rested upon these six arches…
