Len wheeled his handcart through the narrow pedestrian wicket door into the pitch-black service lane that ran behind the citadel’s southern artillery castle wall.
He pulled the heavy timber door shut behind him, hearing the iron deadbolt slip back into its stone keeper with a muffled, oily click that cut him from the Survey Office compound forever. There was no going back. If he turned around now, the sentries on the low roof wall would shoot him down before he could reach for his transit voucher.
Above him, thirty feet up on the massive granite banquette, two sentries paced in heavy, timed together rhythm, their iron-shod boots ringing like hammers against the wet stone. Every forty seconds, the huge emerald glow-stone searchlight mounted on the castle wall turret swung its packed beam across the alleyway, lighting up the black cobblestones with an intense, sickly glare that cast sharp, sharp-angled shadows twenty yards long.
The service lane behind the southern castle wall was an enclosed stone trench, barely eight feet wide, carved between the sheer dark rock stone retaining wall of the artillery battery and the windowless brick walls of the customs warehouse.
The air in the lane was freezing, heavy with the reek of damp coal tar, stale machine grease, and the sharp, bitter-salt sting of sulfur mud. From the upper low roof walls, water trickled continuously through lead cry pipes. It splashed onto the wet cobblestones in a steady, drumming rhythm that masked the sound of Len’s footsteps.
Len didn’t move right away. He remained crouched between the wheels of his barrow. His back was pressed against the damp limestone of the vault. He allowed his sight nerves to recover from the blinding glow-stone flash.
His Surefoot monitored the ground beneath his boots. The pavers here were ancient. It was heavy, irregular river boulders set in sulfur mortar, their upper crowns polished slick by decades of heavy iron carriage wheels. Between the stones, frost had formed in thin, needle-like rime crystals that crunched faintly under pressure. He shifted his weight. He tested the friction of his boot soles against the rime, making sure his balance vectors were locked before initiating his sprint.
Len stopped his barrow against the damp limestone wall of a coal storage vault, crouching low between the two wooden wheels.
Surefoot engaged through the balls of his boots. His weight settled into a low, perfectly centered crouch so that not a single loose cinder shifted beneath his soles. He reached into his coat, checking the coarse burlap sack draped over Crate Three, ensuring that every inch of copper binding strap and polished brass nail was buried beneath the gray boiler melted rock waste dust. If a single ray of emerald light caught a shiny metal surface, the sentries would spot the strange flaw instantly.
He timed the rotation of the turret in his head, counting the seconds against the rhythm of his own pulse: Forty seconds of sweep. Twenty seconds of blind shadow.
The searchlight beam swung across his head, bathing the opposite tenement wall in glaring emerald radiance, lighting up the streaming rainwater and the peeling layers of old town proclamations before tracking away toward the railway marshalling yards.
Now.
Len rose into his pulling harness, his calves driving into the wet flat stone slabs with short, powerful strides. The iron-tired wheels of the barrow rolled across the stones. His hands locked onto the ash handles with white-knuckled pressure to absorb every dynamic jolt before the axle pins could rattle against the hubs.
He covered sixty yards of open lane in fifteen silent seconds. That kept his boots on the soft margin of compost and wet cinders that ran along the foundation wall.
The emerald beam swung back toward the alley. Then, Len dropped his hips and guided the barrow beneath the low stone arch of an abandoned drainage aqueduct. The searchlight beam swept across the mouth of the tunnel half a second later, painting the wet cobblestones in brilliant green light, lighting up the exact spot where his wheels had rolled three breaths earlier.
Timing the searchlight was an exercise in pure courier arithmetic.
The great green turret sixty feet above was driven by a heavy, counterweighted clockwork gear catch that ticked with a dull, metal clank-clank heard through the stone. Len listened to the gear catch gears. Twelve ticks for the forward sweep, six ticks for the dwell at the eastern corner, twelve ticks for the return sweep, and eight ticks of blind shadow while the beam crossed the low roof wall roofline.
Eight ticks. Exactly twenty-two seconds.
In twenty-two seconds, a runner pulling an eighty-five-pound handcart over wet, frost-slicked cobblestones had to cover sixty yards, negotiate a snapped drainage curb, and clear the archway of the drainage aqueduct before the emerald beam returned.
If his boot slipped on the rime, or if an iron wheel caught in a sunken gutter, the searchlight would catch him in the open. The sentries on the banquette had repeating six-shot crossbows mounted on swivel pintles. They would pin him to the flat stone slabs with four iron quarrels before he could drop the handles.
He watched the green glare sweep across the wet brick opposite his nose. The light was dazzling, an unnatural, emerald incandescence that turned the falling drizzle into sheets of falling jade.
The beam reached the eastern corner, dwelled for six ticks, and then swung away toward the freight sidings.
Now.
Len exploded forward from his crouch. His boots drove into the cobblestones with short, rhythmic, piston-like strides, Surefoot making instant corrections for the ice in the mortar joints. The oak handles of the handcart shook wildly in his grip as the iron-tired wheels rolled across the stones. But his forearms and broad back muscles absorbed the shock. That kept the frame from rattling.
He counted the ticks in his chest: four... Eight... Twelve... Sixteen...
At eighteen ticks, he saw the low stone arch of the abandoned aqueduct looming in the dark mist ahead. A half-round opening four feet high, half-buried in drifting coal dust. He dropped his hips, guided the barrow through the opening. Then he threw himself flat onto the wet gravel inside the channel.
Half a second later, a brilliant, packed beam of emerald light struck the flat stone slabs outside the archway, painting the opening in blinding green fire before tracking away into the fog.
Inside the aqueduct, the air was freezing and dead, smelling of stale water, wet lime, and rotting timber wooden props.
Len paused in the dark tunnel, leaning his chest against the cart crossbar, using Long Breath to clear the fight-or-flight rush from his blood. Through the soles of his boots, Road Sense reported the load-bearing condition of the vaulted roof overhead. Four feet of dressed dark rock, perfectly stable, capable of carrying the weight of the artillery carriages on the castle walls above.
He pulled his silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, checking the dial by the faint, greenish glow that leaked through the tunnel mouth: twenty minutes past ten in the evening.
One hour and forty minutes remained until the global midnight threshold. One hundred minutes before his sixth milestone was stripped from his body.
He wiped the freezing drizzle from his eyelashes with the back of his leather glove.
He pushed the handcart through the far end of the aqueduct, emerging into the sprawling, unmapped maze of civilian alleys that dropped toward the lower heavy-duty basin. Behind him, the high granite walls and rotating searchlights of the citadel pulled back into the freezing sulfur fog. It faded into faint green halos that barely pierced the darkness.
He had escaped the Survey Office castle. He had eighty-five pounds of stolen fever bark on his cart. The Inside the drainage aqueduct, the darkness was total.
Len lay on his stomach in the damp gravel, his chest heaving, his Long Breath bringing his oxygen intake back under control. He smelled the ancient, damp limestone, the stone tang of seep water. The dry, powdery dust of rotted timber wooden props that had stood undisturbed for fifty winters.
He reached back with his right hand, feeling the burlap sack draped over Crate Three. The sack was damp with drizzle. But the thick layer of boiler melted rock waste dust remained undisturbed, fully hiding the cedar planks and the copper binding straps beneath. In his coat pocket, his father’s cracked brass bell was cold and silent against his ribs.
He waited for thirty seconds, listening through the stone.
Above the aqueduct, the sentries continued their heavy, measured pacing on the castle walls. Their boots struck the flags with steady, unrushed pace. They had seen nothing. To them, the lane was merely an empty stone trench glistening in the rain.
Len rose to his knees, took the oak handles of the barrow. Then he guided his load through the three hundred yards of underground channel until the tunnel opened into the civilian apartments of Gate Street.
Open streets of Rookvale lay before him.
The iron wheels of the handcart rolled smoothly across the wet gravel, the ash frame absorbing the shaking. Len paused at the mouth of the alleyway. He looked back one last time at the towering granite castle walls of the Gate citadel. The emerald searchlight swept across the low roof wall high above, cutting through the freezing mist like a turning blade. But down in the civilian trench of Gate Street, the shadows held firm. He adjusted his pulling harness, lowered his head into the drizzle, and pushed forward into the dark.