Edda stood between the brass stone base of the Dawn Registrar and three hundred men and women who were suddenly trying to breathe all at once. Her left hand, with its two crushed fingers bound tightly in split cedar slats and oiled linen, throbbed with a rhythmic, sickening pulse in the cold mountain wind. But she didn’t let her grip on the iron-shod land-mapper’s rod waver by a fraction of an inch.
Before her, Janna Kroll was still staring down at the bandage on her right palm. The golden motes that had dissolved into the glassmaker’s skin were entirely gone. That left only the pale, dry morning air and the smell of sulfur-melted rock waste rising from the chimney pipes below. Janna was not shaking now. Her shoulders had dropped three inches. She settled into her frame with the quiet gravity of a person who had expected a headsman and received an ordinary receipt.
Behind Janna, the crowd shifted. It wasn’t a violent surge, but the heavy, uncoordinated forward press of people whose instincts were still tuned to panic. Men in greasy wool jackets reached toward their collarbones with soot-blackened fingers. They felt for the faint, warm prickle beneath their sternums where old, unclaimed progress bands had slept for three, five, or eight years. Two quarry drillers from the lower terrace bumped hard against each other. Their hobnailed boots skidded on the frost-slick flat stone slabs, their eyes fixed on the gleaming brass casing like starving dogs watching a butcher…
