The descent into the lower drainage water chute was an unbroken slide through cold, acidic grease. Len dropped flat onto his right hip. He tucked his braced left forearm tightly against his ribs, his right boot heel digging into the wet limestone furrow to check his speed. The rock walls were slick with decades of stonecutter slurry and lime runoff. It curved tightly around his shoulders like an unsealed sewer pipe. Water foamed around his knees, freezing cold where it seeped through the eyelets of his boots, carrying the sour, metal reek of copper filings and wet sulfur. Every jolt through his spine sent a dull, throbbing ache into the fractured radius beneath the cedar slats. But he kept his sound hand clamped around the leather thong of his father’s brass bell, muffling the clapper against his canvas jacket.
Above him, the mouth of the chute echoed with the sudden, sharp clatter of iron. The hunter had vaulted off the narrow-gauge cart rail without breaking stride. Len heard the impact—not the heavy, splashing crash of a mortal runner slipping in gray silt, but the precise, weightless click of boots landing on wet stone with the uncanny balance of Burdenless Step. The duplicate was already inside the water chute. He dropped the thirty-degree pitch with terrifying driving force, its balance point perfectly lined up with the curving rock floor.
