Melli Dorn walked with her blistered hands held loosely at waist height, palms turned slightly outward so the cool morning breeze could scour the raw, stinging heat from her forearms.
Her woolen sleeves were scorched to brittle black tinder in three places where high-pressure steam jets had hissed through the water-jacket packing during the fourth hour of the release. But she had refused Brant Sallow’s offer to wrap them in greasy lard bandages. She had spent fourteen years in the reverberatory kilns of the Salt Ward. She knew what scalded flesh needed. It didn’t need grease to trap the heat inside the skin. It needed clean, cold mountain air and dry linen until the blisters turned from weeping yellow fluid to firm, painless crusts.
For fourteen years, Melli’s visual world had been defined by a narrow, monochromatic prison of four colors: the dead, chalky white of bitter salt dust. The choking, greasy black of coal soot. The dull, bilious orange of glowing copper heating coils. And the sickly, jaundiced yellow of sulfur fumes rising from the annealing lehrs. In Rookvale, even the food had been gray. The pale gray of boiled turnip mash, the leaden gray of fungal bread, the cloudy gray of river water filtered through crushed limestone. People had forgotten that matter possessed hue. They spoke of cloth as “light” or “heavy,” not blue, green, or scarlet.
