At nine o’clock on the twenty-first morning of the third week, Len Vey stood on the northern approach road, fifty yards inside the Rookvale boundary, resting his weight against a peeled ash-wood walking stick.
The steel canopy of the border transit station, which had loomed over his arrival three weeks earlier like a slaughterhouse top door beam dividing cold afternoon sunlight from engineered dark, looked entirely different beneath an open, pale blue sky. Three days of steady spring rain had washed the corrugated iron roof, scouring away the thick, greasy deposits of coal soot and treated lamp oil that had blackened every rivet since the second year of the Severance. The inward and outward transit lanes were both thrown wide, their heavy baulks of adze-hewn timber propped open with dry cedar wedges. There were no court guards in boiled leather jack-coats pacing the gravel. No clerks sitting behind iron grilles offering fraudulent unrecorded claim vouchers for three silver marks. And no copper-flame lanterns casting their sickly, greenish-yellow glare across the threshold stones.
The roadway was simply dirt, crushed limestone, and wet mountain gravel, drying in the cool, steady draft that poured through the southern pass.
Down the long, white ribbon of the northern highway came a two-wheeled postal cart. It was drawn by an old, dappled gelding named Barnaby. The horse had a white star on his forehead, a scarred left knee from a winter slip on the Highfield bridge four years ago, and ears that flopped forward with each…
