Len Vey climbed up the iron rungs of the ladder. His sound right hand hauled his body upward through the square opening of the trapdoor.
Beneath him, Bram Ash climbed with painful slowness, his boots slipping on the wet iron rungs, his breath coming in dry, wooden rattles that sounded dangerously close to Heth’s coughing spasms. Len reached down through the hatch, caught Bram by the collar of his sodden uniform coat. Then he heaved the older man up onto the dry stonework floor of the forge shop nook. Bram collapsed onto his hands and knees in the coal dust, groaning as his infected shoulder bumped the brick chimney footing.
Len turned around, straightening his spine—and stopped dead.
The darkness that filled the forge shop was unlike any night he had ever witnessed in his nineteen winters.
In the outside world beyond the southern border canopy, night was a living thing. It had stars, the silver curve of the crescent moon, the pale gray horizon of open farmland, and the cold, clean rustle of wind moving through cedar branches. Even within Rookvale, across twelve years of engineered gloom, the darkness had never been complete. The central sky shield was a vast heavy-duty machine that leaked. It hummed with the dim, sickly copper glow of street lanterns, the flickering red marker lights along the switchbacks, the green liquid silver lamps of the Survey depots. The pale sulfur corona that hung over the smelting chimneys of the Salt Ward. A courier on…
