Ivara Quill walked to the rough pine work bench at the edge of the instrument landing and picked up her canvas land-mapper’s pack. She hauled it onto her right shoulder with a practiced, fluid twist of her torso. She didn’t need to consult a system slate or read a lit up parchment to know the state of her own ledger. The cold, clockwork reality of her body was all the record she needed.
Her left arm was still gone. Where the double had possessed five supple fingers, an intact radius. A whole set of working tendons, Ivara’s sleeve ended four inches below the shoulder joint. The stump was covered in thick, scarred skin, puckered and purplish-gray from the crude cautery the Survey doctors had applied seven years ago. The sulfur humidity spiked before a rain. Each time, the cut nerves flared with a deep, sickening throb that felt like rusted iron teeth biting into bone. The eleven stolen milestones—the acute sense improvements, the mental three-point sighting counts, the dynamic balance corrections, and the load-bearing vision she had earned during fifteen years of grueling mountain building—had not returned to her mind.
For fifteen years before the sky shield closed, Ivara had climbed the jagged granite peaks of the Wyrmtooth Range. She laid the three-point sighting baselines that connected Rookvale to the outside world. She had earned her milestones one painful step at a time: Trigonometric Sight-line while shivering on a knife-edge ridge in a November gale. Bedrock Vision after spending three…
