A beam of direct, unpressurized morning sunlight struck the whitewashed pine floorboards of the dispatch office, crept across the blue wool blanket, and rested warm and heavy across Len Vey’s face.
Len didn’t stir for several minutes.
He lay with his eyes closed, his cheek pressed into the soft linen of Martha’s down pillow. He felt the physical warmth of the sun soak into his skin. It wasn’t the sharp, stinging heat of an emergency release port, nor was it the chemical, dry warmth of a copper heating coil embedded in a ceiling floor beam. It was the vast, silent, easy warmth of a star ninety million leagues away. It crossed ninety million miles of empty pocket to warm a nineteen-year-old courier’s nose on a cold spring morning.
He listened to the valley waking up.
Through the open window sash, the sounds of Rookvale rose with a clear, sharp, steady, unrushed pace that he had never heard in the twelve-year night.
First came the distant, rhythmic clanking of an empty four-wheeled freight heavy cart rolling along the central tramline. The iron wheels singing against the cold rails with an easy, unrushed rumble: clack... Clack. Then came the crisp, musical ring of an anvil from the blacksmith’s shop behind the depot. There, a smith was hammering replacement iron shoes for a wagon driver’s heavy cart: TING-clang... TING-clang. Down in the square, three young boys were shouting in high, clear voices, laughing as they chased two white geese across the raked gravel…
