The stone switchback dropping from the bridge roadway to the eastern tenement embankment was slick with black river slime and freezing drizzle. Len took the steps with a reckless, sliding haste, using his good right hand to brake against the rough dark rock retaining wall whenever his boots skidded on the wet treads. Inside its ash splints, his fractured left radius screamed with white-hot agony at every jolt, the splint ties biting into his swollen flesh like wire. He kept the arm plastered against his ribs, his teeth clamped so hard against his lower lip that the copper tang of blood pooled in his mouth.
Behind him, on the upper landing, Ivara Quill didn’t try to follow.
Seven years of surviving as an amputee in an unforgiving heavy-duty province had stripped the land-mapper of any romantic delusions about heroic sacrifice. She knew her physical reality. With one arm, a crooked spine. An exhausted body, she couldn’t win a close-quarters struggle against a creature that possessed two whole limbs and eleven stolen physical refinements. If she went down into those dark tenement halls, she wouldn’t be an asset. She would be a hostage carrying the bronze delegate seal.
“Len!” her voice cracked down through the mist, hard, commanding, and stripped of panic. “Listen to me! Remember the letter! Remember what your father wrote from the lens chamber!”
