Ivara Quill crossed the threshold of the backup service station three paces behind the stretcher, her hobnailed land-mapper’s boots striking the dark rock flags with the sharp, dry rhythm of an iron compass walking a boundary stone.
Her empty left sleeve was pinned tight to the breast of her salt-stained coat, the pinned wool flat against her ribs where the arm had been torn away in the turbine gearing seven years before. In her weathered right hand, she carried an eighteen-inch bronze sounding rod, its tip darkened with soot and machine grease from the governor bearings.
She didn’t glance at the arched ceiling or the cold zinc air-flow channel bolted to the corner. She walked straight to the pallet where Len Vey lay propped on the horse blankets, dropped to her right knee upon the damp flags, and laid the flat of her palm across the boy’s sodden wool shirt.
Her fingers didn’t hesitate. For twenty years, Ivara had calculated load spreading for stonework arches, timber headframes, and high-pressure channels. The human skeleton was simply another assembly of crushing members and cantilevered spars subject to the uncompromising mathematics of stress and yield.
When her thumb pressed two inches below the right chest muscle margin, Len’s torso stiffened like an ungreased brake shoe. A sharp, whistling gasp tore from his throat, his heels drumming involuntarily against the stretcher boards as his teeth ground together so hard a thread of bloody spit escaped his lip.
