On the twenty-second morning of the restoration, Bram Ash led a work detail of forty men down the damp, spiral stone stairs into the underground foundations beneath the abandoned Quarry feeder.
The air in the lower vault had not circulated since the sixth year of the sky shield. Just then, the Ministry of Internal Transit had sealed the iron blast doors to hide the sector from town check tours. It was a cold, stale, sickening air that smelled of carbolic soap, stale lime wash, moldering straw. The sour, chemical reek of sulfur-bleached wool. Along the curved concrete walls, lit up now by the harsh, yellow glare of portable kerosene pressure lamps, faint charcoal lines were still visible where someone had measured the height of children against the stonework. Lines that ended suddenly at forty-four inches beneath an office stencil that read QUOTA MET: SECTOR FIVE.
This was the state solitude nursery. The place where twenty-nine children who had showed early, anomalous body improvements had been packed. Then they kept under armed guard to serve as living milestone reserves for the country energy grid.
The feeder shaft at the rear of the bunkhouse was still visible. An open, sixteen-inch iron channel lined with polished lead sleeves, connecting the nursery floor directly to the lower Quarry anchor. Through that pipe, twelve years ago, the moving and heat-powered surplus of children who had learned to run without tiring or jump across drainage ditches had been harvested and channeled straight into the town sky…
