In the final sixty seconds before two thirty, the pit became as quiet as an open grave. The water nozzles roared and the steam hissed through the packing glands. But between the workers, all human sound ceased.
Len stood by the anchor eyebolts, his right fingers wrapped around the emergency trip-cord, his boots braced against the dark rock floor. Through his Road Sense, he could feel the sky-high clocks of the world converging. On the high mountain passes outside Rookvale, the star-patterns of winter were wheeling toward the western ridge. Inside the province, twelve years of tightly packed, captive daylight were hammering against the four-inch cast-iron butterfly plates, seeking an exit through the rock.
He looked at Melli. The forewoman’s hands were shaking, not with fear, but with the violent locked-muscle tension of muscles held at the threshold of rupture. Her canvas undershirt was torn at the shoulder, soaked with a mixture of cold mountain spray and hot bodily sweat that ran down her ribs in gray rivulets. Beside her, Urel’s lined, coal-smudged face had turned the color of lead, his lips moving in a silent, soundless rhythm as he counted the second-ticks in his head.
“Thirty seconds,” Len called out, his voice steady, carrying the quiet power of a postal courier reporting delivery terms at a customs desk. “Watch the posture mark. When the plate cracks, the empty pocket will pull the air from your throat. Don’t gasp. Breathe through the nose and keep your heels in the wood.”
