From the raised watching gallery of the central Star tower core, Ivara Quill watched the lower chimney pipe through the crosshairs of her brass transit telescope.
She didn’t blink. She didn’t breathe. Her single weathered eye was pressed tight against the chilled metal eyepiece, the cold rim sticking to her eyebrow as she tracked the dark upright throat of Junction Four eighty feet below.
Help in Rookvale was not an abstract blessing falling from a merciful heaven. It wasn’t a magical surge of divine light that healed broken bones and banished fear with a song.
Help had a shape, a weight, and a pulling strength.
It was two thousand pounds of cold pig iron falling eighty feet through greased hemlock guides on the wind-swept rim of the Quarry Ward. It was sixty feet of one-inch braided steel cable spliced by veteran riggers whose hands were scarred by blasting powder. It was four plies of heavy flax canvas stitched with waxed linen cord by an old forewoman sitting by a coal stove. And it was a nineteen-year-old courier boy with a shattered forearm who had chosen to trust his neighbors rather than die alone in a hole.
Through the sight glass, Ivara saw the yellow pennant whip across the darkness like a falling spark.
