From the high iron narrow high walkway of the western check gallery, thirty feet above the freezing floor of Greenhouse Two, Len Vey looked down upon the final dissolving of forty-two stolen lives.
The gallery was a narrow, unpainted walkway of punched holes in cast iron bolted to the granite foundation wall forty years ago, its handrail caked in a thick, greasy skin of sulfur dust and frozen water drops. Beside Len stood Ivara Quill and Stellan Gault, their woolen collars turned high against the bitter sub-zero gale that swirled down through the cracked seams of the leaded roof. Len leaned heavily on his jointed hickory sounding pole with his sound right arm, planting the brass metal ring into a drain hole in the iron grating to keep his balance.
His fractured left forearm, cocooned within its rigid split-ash splints and gray linen wraps, throbbed with a vicious, rhythmic fire that seemed to pulse in exact sympathy with his heartbeat. The sudden plunge in heat—a drop of eighty degrees in less than twenty minutes—had caused the bruised joint padding around his broken ribs and collarbone to contract, pinching the between-rib nerves with a cold, unrelenting pressure that made every shallow breath in taste of copper and bile. He had learned on Day 1 that cold was an amplifier of body truth. It stripped away the numbness of shock. Then it left a man alone with the exact, rock-solid inventory of his physical damage.
