Len reached the end of the extraction baffle at a stumbling run, his right hand braced against the damp stone wall to keep from pitching forward onto his face. The sound trick with his father’s bell had bought him forty seconds of silence. But every stride had cost him a piece of his leftover strength. His right ankle felt like a bag of broken gravel inside his boot. His braced left arm was throbbing with a violent, rhythmic pressure that made his vision darken at the edges.
Before him stood the heavy oak door of Junction Four.
It was a massive barrier built of six-inch seasoned white oak. It was bound with slanted straps of cold-rolled iron and studded with three-quarter-inch boiler rivets. It marked the main extraction boundary between the central Star tower core and the high western terraces leading down to the Quarry Ward. If this door was open, Len could cross the intermediate bridge, reach Geth Marr’s outer edge pickets, and disappear into the fortified limestone terraces where eighty armed quarrymen were waiting with heavy crowbars and lime powder.
The door was not open.
Across the heavy iron brackets on the outer face, three solid bars of load-bearing channel iron had been dropped into place. Each bar was secured with a heavy bronze padlock bearing the embossed town seal of the High judge’s private executive office. Two crossed compasses over an unblinking eye.
