The liquid silver column mounted against the northern dark rock footing read one hundred and twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
At that heat, sweat ceases to be an evaporative coolant and becomes a scalding wash that cooks the outer layers of the outer skin. Melli Dorn’s canvas trousers were steaming where the nonstop spray from the overhead nozzles hit her knees, the coarse fabric stiffening with boiled lime scale. Across her shoulders and along the line of her spine, the skin had lifted into broad, water-filled blisters that cried clear fluid directly into the weave of her undershirt. Every time she breathed, the wet straps of the courier harness ground that fluid into the raw deep skin beneath. It sent white-hot needles of pain through her trapezoid muscles.
Her arms didn’t feel like bone and sinew anymore. They felt like sacks of wet river sand lashed to an iron frame.
She had spent twelve years working twelve-hour shifts before the roaring mouths of the Salt Ward’s reverberatory kilns, annealing sixty-pound sheets of soda-lime glass for the state’s agricultural greenhouses. She knew what heat did to human tissue. It thickened the blood, boiled the grease out of the skin. Then it turned the mind into a slow, stupid animal that wanted only to lie down on the cool flat stone slabs and sleep. In the kilns, they had measured fire heat levels by the color of the flame because Morn’s inspectors had requisitioned all the liquid silver thermometers for the Star tower guard…
