From the upper bridge deck, thirty feet above the boiling foam of Sluice Four, Ivara Quill stood with her single hand clamped tightly around the cold iron stone railing. The sulfur spray from the river rose in thick, freezing billows that coated her woolen land-mapper’s coat in a dangerous glaze of ice. Beside her, Len Vey stood with his boots braced against the timber decking, his sounding pole planted like a stay-rod, his face gray with the grinding agony of his braced forearm.
The wind howling down from the northern gap smelled of bitter fire melted rock waste and wet shale. Through the swirling vapor, the amber lights of the tram platform three miles to the west flickered like dying fireflies against the black curtain of the sky shield. For seven years, Ivara had navigated this valley as a half-bodied wreck, her empty left sleeve pinned to her canvas jacket, her spine twisted to compensate for the missing mass of her arm. Every morning had begun with the dull, phantom ache in a forearm that lay buried beneath forty tons of collapsed quartz lens in the high Star tower.
Down on the lower ledge, the rhythmic hammering against Nessa’s defensive screen had ceased.
