Len Vey stood with both boots balanced on the narrow iron ladder rung three feet below the coaming of the backup intake hatch, pausing to let his body adjust to the upright plane.
The air here, at the boundary between the open terrace and the underground chimney pipes, was an unstable heat shear. From above, the freezing mountain gale poured down his collar, smelling of dry snow and the sharp, unsealed ozone of the southern cordillera. From below, rising out of the eighty-year-old brickwork of the backup cooling ducts, drafted a sluggish, lukewarm current of stale sulfur vapor, damp lime slurry. The greasy reek of machine oil that had pooled in the lower drain pits during twelve years of uninterrupted operation.
He took a slow, five-second breath in through his nostrils. He held the air in the lower lobes of his lungs before releasing it in a steady, controlled stream.
Long Breath responded instantly. The enhancement didn’t grant him gills, and it didn’t filter the skin-burning sulfur dioxide that pricked the wet inner skin of his throat like tiny needles. What it did was optimize the clockwork smooth speed of his chest muscle. His between-rib muscles relaxed, his heart rate settled into an unbroken rhythm of fifty-eight beats per minute. The cold, dizzying hypoxia of eight hundred meters height pulled back from the edges of his vision. It was the same discipline he had used when snowshoeing through six-foot drifts over the Highwater Pass. He carried thirty pounds of government…
