Edda sat on an overturned ammunition crate on the windy terrace. Her heavy corduroy trousers were tucked into high-laced quarry boots stiff with dried limestone slurry. Her left forearm rested in a broad canvas sling pinned tight across her ribs, shielding the three middle fingers of her left hand.
The fingers were ruined. Four nights ago, in the abandoned underground nursery beneath the Quarry feeder tunnel, a half-formed duplicate had thrust its gray, unformed hand through a fissure in the rock wall. It seized her wrist with the mindless, crushing torque of an uncoupled record. The bones of her index, middle, and ring fingers had been crushed against an iron wooden props bracket before Len could sever the manifestation with an iron pry-bar. The surgeon at the Tram clinic had done what he could with willow splints, horsehair stitches, and pitch-soaked linen. But the joints were fused into flat, rigid spoons of dead bone that could never again close around the handle of a four-pound quarry mallet or twist the frozen spindle of a bronze gate valve.
To an administrator on High Street, Edda was a depreciated asset. A sixty-year-old stonecutter whose physical productivity had dropped to zero, eligible only for an office ration reduction and a referral to the Survey claim rooms.
