Ysabet tied off the last knot on the fourth pine rafter, tested the lashings with her left boot, and reached into her canvas bag for the spare iron pry-bar they had brought out onto the span. The plan was simple enough: wedge the iron bar down through the mesh of the carpenters’ basket and clip Ashaun’s second copper ground-wire to its top end so the flightless nestlings could press their beaks against grounded iron without leaving their nest.
Before she could slide the bar down through the cables, a heavy cross-draft tore down the gorge from the low cloud bank. The whole suspension bridge lurched sideways with a screech of rusted links, swinging two feet out over the white mist below.
Under the middle rafters, the corroded wire hanger holding the left corner of the center nesting cradle snapped cleanly in two.
The wire basket dropped at a steep forty-degree slant. Most of the nestlings scrambled backward into the tangled mesh at the high end, squawking weakly as their claws caught the wire, but the smallest bird at the outer edge lost its footing on the slick, rusted floor. It tumbled over the rim, stubby pinfeathered wings flailing uselessly in the empty air between the main chains, blue sparks racing over its breast and quills like burning oil as it dropped toward the lower sway-cable and the five-hundred-foot chasm beneath.
