Bram Ash watched the gray light seep down the eastern flank of the Guard, the highest granite peak bounding the Rookvale basin. For twelve years, that peak had been invisible, buried beneath the dark, high-pressure soot-haze of the sky shield. People had remembered it only as a steep wall that prevented air breath flow and trapped heavy-duty coal smoke in the residential gutters.
Now, the rock was revealing its true texture. Jagged pink rock ledges, deep purple fissures where winter snow still clung in shadowed gullies, and stunted mountain firs clinging to cold crevices.
Beside Bram, his daughter Heth leaned heavily against his good left hip. Her face was pale, smudged with soot from the clinic stove. But her eyes were wide and glowing in the predawn glow. She was breathing through a coarse linen handkerchief, her chest wheezing with the chronic bronchitis that the coal smoke had carved into her lungs, but for the first time in her memory, she wasn’t looking at a painted morning on Halden Pell’s citrus-room wall.
“Is that what the outside looks like, Father?” she whispered, her voice trembling slightly in the cold.
“Aye,” Bram said, swallowing the knot in his throat. “That’s what it looks like. Just rock and cold air.”
