Lying upon the pine stretcher against the cold dark rock wall of the backup station, Len Vey listened to the mountain through the marrow of his collarbone.
His right side was a locked cage of pain. The three-inch raw, unwhitened linen webbing Edda had wound around his thorax held his broken floating ribs with the unbending pressure of an iron hoop. It packed his lungs so that each breath tasted of copper, lint, and dry limestone dust. His left forearm was rigid in its ash-wood splints, resting flat against his stomach. His ruined right wrist lay upon the coarse horse blanket like a lump of cold animal fat, swollen to twice its girth, mottled black and purple from the crushing grip of Hookhold, its fingers unresponsive and curled into a rigid lead hook. Every joint in his nineteen-year-old body felt battered, scraped raw. Then he weighed down by nine nonstop days of darkness and physical labor.
Yet his mind was razor-sharp, stripped of all domestic fog by the fight-or-flight rush coursing through his veins.
His Road Sense—the third baseline improvement he had earned outside Rookvale while hauling freight along the washouts and snapped shale of the Tern Road—didn’t provide a visual map or reveal magical auras. It operated purely through clockwork acoustics. It turned the tiny shakes traveling through rock, timber, and iron into tactile pulses against his skin. Every joint in the Star tower, every riveted gusset plate in the air-flow stacks, spoke to him through the stone floor…
