The world had narrowed to the rough, oil-stained canvas of the rescue cradle pressed against Len Vey’s cheek and the choking reek of boiled linseed oil and wet soot that soaked Edda’s wool coat sleeves.
Every pulse of blood from his heart drove a red, blinding wedge of pain through his right thorax. The heavy iron-bound spreader bar of the dropping sling had scooped him off the edge of the damper platform. Then, two of his floating ribs on the right side had snapped along their joint padding beds with a sharp, sickening crunch. A dry, distinct snap that sounded, inside his own ears, like two green pine branches breaking under an iron boot heel.
Breathing was no longer an automatic reflex. It had become a lethal, tiny fraction of an inch-scale math. If he drew the icy mountain draft too deeply into his lungs, the cut bone ends ground together with a dry, crepitating friction that sent white needles of agony through his chest muscle, threatening at every stroke to puncture the delicate lung lining of his right lung. If he breathed too shallowly, the gray, choking fog of oxygen starvation rolled back over his vision, turning the amber flare of the emergency lamps into dim, shaking halos.
