The dark rock floor behind the central discharge baffle shuddered with a deep, grinding hum that rattled loose fire grit against Len Vey’s boots. He was lying flat on the cold flat stone slabs. His back was pressed hard against the curved iron housing of the third cooling bypass, his father’s silver pocket watch resting flat against the coarse linen webbing bound around his thorax.
Beneath the chilled silver casing, through four tight turns of raw, unwhitened binding that held his broken sixth and seventh ribs in place, he felt the steady, tiny shaking of the balance wheel.
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
It was an unrushed, clockwork rhythm, ticking steadily against the dull, grinding agony in his chest. Every stroke of the balance wheel marked off a split second that no country judge could confiscate, no emergency decree could freeze. No midnight transfer could divert into an alternate vessel. The blued-steel second hand was sweeping through the fifty-seventh minute of the fifth hour.
Zero five fifty-seven and twelve seconds.
The nine-day road had reached its total clockwork terminus inside the granite skull of the mountain.
Nine days ago, at six o’clock on an ordinary autumn morning outside the border canopy, Len had stood in the freezing shallows of the northern river. He hauled timber baulks with his bare hands to repair the Highwater bridge. He had earned his sixth ordinal advancement through honest sweat and civic labor, only to carry that unsealed dispatch across the boundary toll into a province trapped beneath twelve…
