Melli Dorn felt the change in the canvas harness before her eyes could pierce the steam.
The harness was a broad, three-ply cradle of woven flax webbing, padded with boiled wool felt, that crossed her chest bone and wrapped around her hip bones before terminating in a forged bronze D-ring. Through that ring ran the main anchor strap, secured to a heavy steel eyebolt bedded four inches into the granite foundation between her boots. For nearly an hour, that strap had been her only link to physical balance. A dead, unbending balance weight that absorbed the forty-thousand-foot-pound kick of the governor wheel. Then it kept her spine from snapping backward into the pit.
She had spent twelve years in the Salt Ward handling heavy iron tongs and maneuvering eighty-pound crucibles of molten soda-lime glass. She knew the behavior of tools under static load. An iron bar bends with a dull, silent pushback. A hemp line stretches and sags with heat. A floor bolt groans before its threads strip.
Suddenly, without a preliminary creak from the floor bolts, the strap ceased to be dead fiber.
It began to sing.
The shaking was not the coarse, rhythmic shudder of the dark rock chimney pipes roaring at twenty cycles per second. It was a high, thin, reedy whine. It was like the sound of a horsehair bow drawn across a rusted iron wire. The ringing traveled through the bronze D-ring, through the wool felt of the padding, and straight into Melli’s chest bone…
