Elsi Marr climbed the frozen stone steps of the upper overhead frame until she reached the narrow high walkway that overlooked the western roof-pipe rim of Greenhouse Two. Her woolen smock was crusted with mud and yellow sulfur slime. Her breath plumed in short, ragged puffs against the iron handrail. She didn’t carry a weapon. In her right hand, she held only her heavy iron spading fork. She used the rusted ash handle as a crutch to ease the arthritic grind in her left knee.
Beside her, young Stellan Gault followed, carrying an unlit copper hand-lantern. His nineteen-year-old face was gray with cold, his spore-stained hands shoved deep into the torn pockets of his canvas jacket to stop their shaking.
Below them, Greenhouse Two stretched across two acres of the terrace like a dormant iron beast.
Twenty minutes had passed since the circuit breakers in the upper overhead frame had tripped. For twenty minutes, the two hundred copper arc-lamps that hung above the planting tiers had been dead. In Rookvale, twenty minutes of nonstop, unlisted darkness was not merely an absence of lumens. It was an invitation to the machinery of the sky shield. The country energy grid, sensing an unmonitored zone within an active anchor sector, had begun to vent its latent claimant records into physical space.
