Len made his decision in three heartbeats.
He couldn’t turn the broken-sun wheel. The compound fracture in his left radius was bound in rigid ash splints, the arm throbbing with a dark, nauseating fever that pulsed into his armpit with every breath. To reach into those iron spokes with his sound right hand would be an act of suicidal vanity. The ten tons of tightly packed spring steel in the return coil would catch his wrist, shatter his wrist bones against the frame, and throw his crippled body into the drainage bilge. That left Melli Dorn to collapse five seconds later under an unbalanced load.
He couldn’t shoot the creature from the floor. He carried no firearms. The defected guards had only two boarding pikes. And an ash spear couldn’t reach sixty feet into the overhead darkness.
And he couldn’t stand in the shelter of the stonework tool nook and watch the forewoman die.
Melli’s breath was no longer a rhythm. It was a nonstop, rattling choke. The muscles along her neck spine had locked into rigid cords, her head pinned against the red-hot iron spindle, her fingers slipping half a tiny fraction of an inch with every pulse of the roaring chimney pipe. She had less than sixty seconds before her grip tore free.
