Before he lowered his shoulders into the square iron mouth of the intake chimney pipe, Len Vey paused. His right hand gripped the cold bronze rim of the hatch coaming. Then he turned his face back toward the south.
The southern wind caught his canvas coat. It whipped the heavy hems against the granite flat stone slabs with a sound like wet sails snapping in a squall.
From this high, isolated stone platform twelve hundred feet above the basin floor, the entire geographical anatomy of Rookvale lay spread out beneath his boots like an unrolled land-mapper’s chart inked in charcoal and grease.
It was vast, silent, and fully dark.
For four thousand three hundred and eighty days, the seven wards of the province had been an uninterrupted grid of artificial light. Ten thousand copper-flame lanterns had lit up the narrow-gauge tram lines. Eighty coal-fired reverberatory kilns had cast a dull, pulsating orange glare across the bitter salt flats of Salt Ward. The high-pressure steam boilers of River Ward had vented geysers of yellow vapor that caught the beam of the town searchlights. And the great central lens on this very ridge had pulsed with a sickening, violet static that turned midnight into an oily, unending dusk.
