Len left the footbridge behind. He plunged straight into the yawning black maw of the Great Tram Cut.
The cutting was a huge, eighty-foot-deep limestone canyon blasted through the granite ridge seventy years ago during the peak of Rookvale’s heavy-duty spreading, engineered to carry heavy coal trams directly from the southern mines to the valley furnaces. It was three-quarters of a mile long, eighty paces wide at the lip. Then it narrowed to a claustrophobic throat of thirty paces at the bottom.
The walls rose sheer on either side, sheets of blasted black dark rock and fractured limestone slick with weeping moisture that condensed out of the cold basin air. Then it ran down the rock face in greasy, bitter-salt threads. Decades of sulfur smoke had stained the stone an unbending coal black, encrusting the jagged blasting seams with yellow crusts of iron pyrite and saltpeter.
There were no copper street lamps inside the cut.
The town administration had stripped the lighting cables three years earlier to patch the generator feeds on the northern ridge. That left the entire trench in total, choking darkness. The only light came from the green glow of the Gate citadel far behind him. It reflected faintly off the low-hanging cloud deck three hundred arm-lengths overhead. It cast a dim, sickly sheen across the wet rails below.
The slope was brutal. A nonstop, unbending fourteen-percent downgrade that dropped one hundred and twenty feet over four thousand paces.
The floor of the cutting was a dangerous obstacle course of rotted oak sleepers, shattered limestone ballast, and abandoned dual-gauge iron rails that gleamed in the mist like pairs of wet black eels. Decades of heavy coal haulage had crushed the ballast into fine, greasy melted rock waste that melted beneath a man’s boots, hiding iron drift bolts, snapped rail spikes, and rotten tie ends that could snap an ankle in an instant.
As soon as the handcart cleared the crest, the full, crushing weight of the load asserted itself.
Eighty-nine pounds of cedar crate, combined with forty pounds of iron barrow and eight pounds of bronze bearings, surged forward with savage moving driving force. The oak handles jerked wildly upward, trying to wrench themselves from Len’s grip and drag him headlong down the greasy tracks.
Len engaged his Surefoot with total, unhesitating commitment.
He didn’t fight the driving force with raw arm strength. Trying to hold an iron cart on a fourteen-percent grade with biceps alone would have torn his shoulder tendons within fifty paces. He transformed his entire body into a dynamic, friction-based braking engine.
He dropped his pelvis three inches. He lowered his balance point until his weight was anchored directly over the cart axle. His knees bent into deep, shock-absorbing springs. His thigh muscles locked into nonstop, iron-hard contractions. His torso leaned backward at a thirty-degree counter-angle. His chest harness pulled taut against his chest bone.
He didn’t walk between the rails. The space between the rails was a grease trap of rotted pine ties and slippery mud.
He stepped diagonally across the ties, placing the thick ox-hide soles of his boots directly on the crowned outer edges of the oak sleepers. His Surefoot adjusted the angle of his ankles before every footfall, his heels digging into the crushed limestone ballast to create dynamic braking friction. It scattered showers of gray melted rock waste with every stride.
Crunch-slide... Crunch-slide... Crunch-slide...
Long Breath swelled his chest cavity, drawing deep, measured drafts of the bitter, freezing air. The skill controlled his lung pressure, preventing the ragged, gasping panting that caused muscle burn to pool in working muscles. His thighs burned under the brutal quirky load. Then, his heart beat with steady, clockwork rhythm, his hands clamped to the ash handles like forged iron vices.
Five hundred paces into the descent, disaster struck.
His right boot came down on an oak sleeper coated with frozen locomotive grease. The sole slid forward six inches, the heel catching in a void where the ballast had washed away into an old drainage trench.
Len’s balance point pitched wildly forward.
The handcart surged down the slope, the left iron wheel dropping eight inches into a sunken washout, the oak frame tilting at a terrifying forty-five-degree angle. The eighty-nine-pound cedar crate screeched against the rope lashing, the hemp straining until the fibers popped like pistol shots in the dark.
Len didn’t scream. Shouting was a waste of oxygen that broke deep-belly rhythm.
His Surefoot responded with gut, reflexive violence. His left leg drove backward into the ballast, his toes clawing through the mud until the thick ox-hide heel wedged itself hard behind an iron rail drift bolt. The bolt held. The moving shock traveled up his calf into his hip, wrenching his sacroiliac joint cord with a sharp, white flare of pain. But his balance point locked in place.
With his left boot anchored to the bolt, Len threw his entire upper body weight backward over the right cart tine. He clamped both hands around the oak handle, engaging his back and deep back erectors in a single, desperate dead-lift.
The iron axle groaned. The sunken left wheel lifted out of the mud hole, spraying black water and gravel across the rails. Then it slammed back onto the oak ties with a heavy, shivering crash.
Len stood trembling on the fourteen-percent grade. His boots were locked, his breath whistling through his nostrils in long, steaming plumes.
He waited five seconds. That let the pain in his hip settle into a dull, manageable ache. He ran his hand over the hemp lashing on Crate Three. The courier’s double half-hitches had held. Even so, the copper strap had bitten half an inch into the oak side rail.
He wiped the freezing sweat from his eyebrows, took a fresh grip on the ash handles. Then he resumed his descent.
Twenty paces ahead, a snapped rail support post protruded four inches from the ballast, its jagged iron edge pointed uphill like a spear point.
Len saw the gleam of the metal through the mist barely two strides before impact.
His Road Sense flared through the ball of his left foot, warning him of the unbending steel anchor point. Without breaking his descent, he leaned his weight hard to the right, driving his shoulder into the harness. The handcart responded instantly, the left iron wheel lifting half an inch as the barrow pivoted on its right tire. It cleared the jagged rail spur by the width of a knife blade before dropping back onto the ballast with a muffled crunch.
The shock traveled up the oak handles into Len’s elbows. But his joints absorbed the shaking without slipping a single inch.
Through the swirling sulfur mist below, the cutting began to widen.
The sheer limestone walls fell away into terraced embankment slopes. He opened out onto the vast, flat floor of the central railway basin. Looming out of the dark two hundred paces ahead was the huge dark shape of Tram Shed Four. A huge heavy-duty cave of riveted wrought-iron roof beams, corrugated roofing, and brick smoke bays spanning three acres of switching tracks.
Around the base of the shed flickered dozens of faint, amber animal fat lanterns—the civilian lights of the refugee camp.
Len pulled his silver watch from his waistcoat by touch, snapping the bezel open with his thumb.
Eleven o’clock.
Exactly sixty minutes remained until the stroke of global midnight.
In his left wrist, beneath the rawhide cuff, the sixth milestone had reached its total margin. The progress band was burning with a blinding, blazing bright heat that felt as though liquid copper were coursing through his wrist blood vessel, sending painful pulses of fire into the marrow of his thumb.
One hour.
Len took a long, cold breath through his nose, leaned back against the crossbar. Then he rode his braking wheels down the final grade onto the melted rock waste apron of the switching yard.
The mouth of the Great Tram Cut was a huge, jagged wound blasted through the limestone ridge seventy years ago. A narrow railway canyon eighty feet deep, twenty feet wide at the base, with sheer rock walls that rose like black prison castle walls into the freezing drizzle.
Before the sky fell, electric trams powered by overhead copper wires had rumbled through this canyon every ten minutes, moving forty thousand workers between the residential terraces of the Gate Ward and the factories of the basin floor in half an hour. Now, the overhead copper wires were gone. Stripped by Chancellor Morn’s engineers twelve years ago to weave emergence barriers for the inner office citadel. The steel trolley poles leaned at crazy angles from the rock ledges, rusted and skeletal, trailing frayed hemp ropes that whipped in the mountain gale. The twin iron rails of the track bed remained. But they were rusted to a dark, flaky orange, the timber sleepers beneath them rotted into black sponge that squelched underfoot.
The incline was savage: a nonstop fourteen-percent downgrade over three-quarters of a mile.
To an unburdened runner, a fourteen-percent slope is a challenging descent. To a courier pushing a two-wheeled iron handcart laden with eighty-five pounds of cedar, fever bark, and boiler melted rock waste, it was an inescapable avalanche. Len’s iron wheels cleared the threshold of the cut. Then, the barrow surged forward with bone-shaking violence. The heavy oak tines jerked in his hands, threatening to rip his shoulders from their sockets, trying to drag him headlong down the wet, rotted sleepers into the darkness.
Surefoot activated across his entire body structure. His neuromuscular pathways fired with instant, gut care. His calf muscles tightened into solid iron cables. His balance point dropped eight inches backward, shifting his mass directly behind the cart axle. And his knees unlocked. He took in the downward dynamic driving force through his thigh muscles and hamstrings.
He didn’t fight the cart with his arms. He fought it with his heels. He stepped diagonally across the tracks. His boots struck the rotted timber sleepers at a thirty-degree angle, his heavy leather heels digging into the wet dark rock ballast to create controlled, rhythmic braking friction. The iron tires screamed against the rusted rails, showering sparks of orange fire into the wet cinders. But the handcart stayed true, the eighty-five-pound load centered perfectly over the axle.
Long Breath swelled his ribs in a nonstop, rhythmic cycle. He took in the freezing mountain air, filtering the coal dust from his bronchi, providing a steady supply of oxygen that kept his thigh muscles from seizing under the brutal, quirky load.
He looked down into the basin. Exactly sixty minutes remained until midnight.