By the first week of October, six months after the restoration of the sky-high horizon over Rookvale, the morning frosts along the northern shoulder of the mountains had turned crisp, white, and brittle.
Len Vey stood on the raised pine platform of the Highfield postal exchange, facing east into a low, brilliant wash of autumn sunlight. The glare was clean, unclouded, and sharp enough to make his eyes water if he looked directly into the tree-line, but he didn’t squint. For five months, the simple physical sensation of uncurtained dawn had remained a shock to his skin—a broad, warm hand pressing against his wool-clad shoulders, carrying the scent of dry larch needles and curing hay from the lower river meadows.
On the cedar work-bench beside him lay his new courier rig.
It wasn’t the standard double-strap mountain pack issued by the Regional Transit Guild. That old rig—a forty-pound canvas sack fitted with two thick harness straps that dug directly into the collar bones and forced the runner into an unending, lung-crushing forward stoop—hung from a rusty peg in the back shed, discarded like a cracked saddle.
This new harness was an uneven web of oil-tanned steer hide, four tiny fractions of an inch thick, stitched by his sister Cira over two weeks of evening trials by the kitchen hearth.
