The sudden blackout in Row Seven didn’t merely dim the room. It cut the workers’ fragile sense of physical safety. In Rookvale, an unmonitored shadow was not a sight inconvenience. It was a heat-powered void, a patch of unlisted territory where the country grid could assemble a guard from the cold dark.
A sharp clatter echoed down the hall as two young cutters dropped their curved iron blades onto the flat stone slabs. A woman backed away from an oak bed. Her hands grabbed her throat, her eyes wide as she stared into the black well of the dead aisle.
“STAY ON THE BRICK!” Elsi Marr’s roar cut through the rising panic like a rasp against copper pipe. She didn’t raise a weapon. She brandished her iron spading fork high, the rusted tines catching the edge of the leftover lantern light. “Nobody step off the paved trench! If you run into the dirt alleys, you break your neck in the drainage drain pits! Varner! Bring two hooded copper torches down the center line! Stellan, keep the blades moving!”
At the far end of Row Seven, young Stellan Gault didn’t drop his knife.
He was nineteen years old, his shoulders narrow and knotted with the wire-hard muscle of a boy who had spent seven years hauling oak logs through steam tunnels. His canvas trousers were stiff with black peat at the knees. His fingers were dyed an indelible, purplish-black from the acid-burning spore-oil of the shelf-fungi. Old acid burns from the…
