When Len woke, the air in the repair bay was still freezing cold. But the fever in his fractured arm had subsided from a blinding fire to a dull, manageable throb.
He sat up on the straw mattress. His right hand reached instinctively for his sounding pole. Beside him, sitting on an overturned nail keg, sat thirteen-year-old Heth Ash, Bram’s daughter. Her face was pale, her breathing shallow and wheezing from her chronic lung fibrosis. But she had a clean woolen blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a tin plate of dry salt-bread in her lap.
“Father said to let you sleep until the five-o’clock bell,” Heth whispered, offering him half a biscuit of bread. “He said you were snoring like a bellows.”
Len took the bread with his good hand, chewing the hard, salty crust slowly, savoring the simple, physical reality of food. “How is your chest, Heth?”
“It rattles when the sulfur mist comes off the tracks,” the girl replied, coughing softly into her sleeve. “Doma gave me two drops of pine oil on a sugar lump. It helps the breath. We moved the children into the brick bays, Len. They’re sleeping on the clean straw. The mothers have the copper lanterns lit at both ends.”
