The underground boiler room had grown so cold that ice was forming in thin, needle-like rimes along the edges of the stale puddles on the floor.
The cold was not the clean, dry chill of the northern mountain passes beyond Rookvale’s border canopy. It was a choking, lime-heavy damp that condensed upon the rough dark rock walls, dripping down in greasy rivulets that smelled of coal scale, dead lichen. The stale ammonia of ancient fertilizer runs. For twelve years, this chamber had been a fire. It shook with the roar of forced-draft chimney pipes and the nonstop, low-hum of copper cables carrying stolen striking force from the country grid. Now, with the hard coal fires drawn and forty tons of red cinders cooled in the iron troughs, the cellar was returning to what it had been before the war engine approached. A damp limestone vault buried under forty feet of cold ice-slow shale.
Elsi Marr stood in the center of the vaulted chamber, six paces before the shuddering iron bulk of the Orchard Ward Claimant Cabinet. Her hands, thick-fingered and blackened with forty years of handling peat, acid fertilizers, and boiler sludge, were locked around the bronze crossbar of the Orchard Delegate Seal.
