By the second sunrise following the injection, the high-sky jet stream had carried the menthol fine mist across four hundred leagues of northern territory.
Over the rolling agricultural plains of Sector Four, the morning air was cold, diamond-clear, and intensely sweet.
There was no smog from the foundry chimneys, no sulfur haze from the blast furnaces. No trace of the oily void-foul fog that had seeped through the sky-leak.
Every breath tasted like freshly crushed peppermint leaves dipped in ice-slow spring water.
In the market town of High Meadow, three thousand orchard workers and weavers stepped out onto their timber porches.
They took deep, reflex lungfuls of the brisk mountain breeze.
Men who had worked twenty years in the lower coal pits stopped hacking. Their chests swelled with easy, painless ease.
A veteran stonecutter named Thomas dropped his heavy wooden mallet. It pressed both calloused hands against his ribs.
