The old locomotive forge shop smelled of cold melted rock waste, rancid sheep fat, and fresh dark blood.
Through the unglazed transom windows high above the forge, the gray twilight of the twelve-year night pressed against the soot-crusted glass. Outside, thirty feet below the brick embankment, the high-pressure steam chimney pipes continued their shuddering, rhythmic discharge into the flooded rail cut. It sent a nonstop, low-hum rumble through the foundation stones. But inside the four walls of the workshop, the air was cold, dead, and stale.
Brant Sallow knelt at Doma Reel’s right side on the sawdust-littered floorboards. The clinic attendant’s hands were shaking so wildly that the nickel-plated dressing metal tongs rattled against the rim of his enameled tin basin with a sharp, wild chime. In his left hand he held a thick pad of folded raw, unwhitened linen. The last square of clean razor-sharp dressing from the emergency crate salvaged from Platform One.
He pressed the pad firmly into the hollow beneath Doma’s right collar bone, right where the jagged end of her first rib had sliced through the subclavian muscle tissue.
Within three seconds, the clean white linen was soaked through with dark, purplish crimson. The blood didn’t seep. It pulsed outward in hot, sluggish gouts that welled around Brant’s fingers, overflowing the dressing and dripping into the sawdust between the pine planks of the carpenter’s workbench.
