In the eastern bitter salt basin of the Salt Ward, the great brick reverberatory kilns of the town glassworks were roaring with the clean, steady deep ring of birch-wood burning.
Melli Dorn stood on the raised iron narrow high walkway of the main annealing lehr, wearing a long apron of bleached flax and heavy cowhide gauntlets that reached to her elbows. The air on the platform was thick with the dry, stone heat of melting quartz dust. It smelled of calcined potash, river sand, and the crisp, pine-scented smoke of seasoned logs.
She pulled off her right gauntlet and tucked it beneath her arm.
Her forearms bore the mottled, silvery geography of old heavy-duty violence. Jagged, pale patches where scalding water-jacket steam had blistered her skin during the emergency bypass on Day Seven. The dark cross-hatchings of minor melted rock waste burns from the Day Nine fire release. Brant Sallow’s zinc-oxide salves had healed the raw deep skin into tough, stringy sheets that were dry to the touch and slightly insensitive to cold. But her fingers remained supple, calloused, and immensely strong.
She reached into a slatted pine shipping crate that sat on the wooden cooling bench.
The glass nestled in the dry rye straw was not the dense, greenish-grey heat-proof glass plate she had cast four months ago for the Quarry heat sink—slabs forty-five tiny fractions of an inch thick, compounded with boron flux to withstand twelve thousand heat units of diverted solar star-fire without exploding into shrapnel.
