Len Vey didn’t look up into the rafters.
Looking into the dark forty feet above was the instinct of an amateur. That wasted half-second would tell him nothing his muscles could use. The creature holding the line had Burdenless Step. It couldn’t be located by the creak of an iron beam or the shifted weight of soot.
Len kept his eyes locked on the three-ply flax webbing shaking three feet above Urel’s thrashing body.
The line was screaming. It wasn’t under a static, steady tension. Through Tether Trace, the creature was pulsing the load in rhythmic, brutal oscillations. Twenty cycles, then thirty, then a sudden, savage snap that matched the exact hum of Melli Dorn’s deep-belly tremors. The double was not trying to win a tug-of-war against forty tons of iron. It was using ringing interference to break the forewoman’s neuromuscular control. Every jerk sent a shock wave through the harness straps that struck Melli’s shoulder blades at the precise instant her movement nerves fired to maintain her grip, intending to shake her bleeding fingers loose from the spokes like overripe plums from a shaken bough.
Len dropped to his knees on the iron grating.
The driving force of his sprint carried him four yards through the four inches of boiling runoff that flooded the pit floor. The scalding water soaked through the canvas of his trousers, blistering his shins and knees with an intense, burning agony that made his vision pulse with gray spots. But the sudden drop in…
