Janna Kroll turned away from the brass stone base of the Dawn Registrar. He held her bandaged right hand clamped against her ribs. The wool of her work jacket was stiff with grease and dried bitter-salt water. But beneath the rough weave, her chest felt strange, uncluttered, and shockingly light.
For six years, ever since she was twenty-four and had watched her workshop master, Master Orren, advance past his seventh milestone in the back room of the third kiln house, Janna had lived by the calculated preservation of ignorance.
She remembered every detail of that damp autumn evening six years ago. Orren had solved the heat-loss equation for the long annealing lehr, adjusting the draft dampers with a gut, brilliant flick of his wrist that kept the molten salt-glass from crazing. A faint, violet shimmer had pulsed behind his collar, and by ten o’clock that night. His screen slate had was locked in an earned milestone. At sky-high midnight, before he could reach the border or secure an exemption permit from Magistrate Pell, the floorboards in the storage loft had buckled. The creature that stepped down the ladder had possessed Orren’s broad shoulders, his square gray beard, and his exact, delicate touch on the blowing pipe. But its eyes had been the flat, shiny gray of lead melted rock waste. Two weeks later, Orren’s body had been pulled from the bitter salt drainage canal, his throat crushed, his transit papers missing. The double had taken his place at the master…
