The orderlies secured the wide hemp safety webbing across Len Vey’s chest, buckling the iron friction clasps over his woolen blanket to prevent him from pitching forward as the litter negotiated the steep, seventeen-degree slope of the lower switchbacks.
Len lay quietly against the canvas roll, closing his eyes against the unaccustomed brightness of the morning sun.
With the master register signed and the screen slate dissolved, he conducted an internal census of his physical being. Not through a system menu, and not by reading floating text, but by moving his conscious awareness through the bone, tendon, and sinew of his own body, taking inventory of what twelve years of country darkness had left him.
First was Surefoot. He had claimed it four years ago, in his sixteenth autumn, on the slippery, rain-slick shale paths of the northern border between Highfield and the Redstone gorge. It wasn’t a magical anchor that glued his soles to sheer walls. It was an acute, micro-sense reflex in the body-sense receptors of his ankles and plantar muscle tissue. Even now, lying flat on his back, he felt the subtle, reflex twitching of the small stabilizing muscles in his feet, reacting to the slight tilt of the litter poles, preparing his arches to absorb an unexpected slip before his conscious mind could register that the ground had given way.
