The lower extraction baffle was an unpaved cut three feet wide, blasted out of gray dark rock forty feet beneath the floor of the governor gallery. The floor dropped in uneven, unmortared tiers, slick with condensed steam and stone slow leak that smelled of sulfur, damp lime, and stale river mud. Len Vey dragged his weight down the incline. He pressed his uninjured right shoulder against the cold rock to steady his balance. His left forearm, bound tightly between two slats of dried ash wood and wrapped in coarse linen, throbbed with a rhythmic, sickening heat that sent sharp needles of pain into his collarbone whenever his boots slipped on the loose gravel.
Behind him, eighty yards up the slope, an iron beam shook.
The sound was not loud, but through the soles of his heavy courier boots, his Road Sense registered the distinct, dead impact of boots meeting wet granite. The double had dropped from the central steel girder. It had landed without the sharp scrape of skidding studs or the stumble of an overbalanced torso. Its stolen Burdenless Step had absorbed the drop instantly. He turned eighty upright feet of gravity into smooth, level driving force. The creature was inside the cut.
