At sunrise on the sixth dawn, the scarred channels on the right side of Seyun’s chest slammed shut like an iron water gate dropped against a spring flood.
He was kneeling on his straw pallet in the small timber loft above the cart-shed. Just then, the sixth pulse of the echo rose out of Place I. For the first five days, the rising heat had tested his chest bone in slow, rhythmic waves that subsided between inhalations. Now, with twenty-four hours leftover before the seventh dawn’s culmination, the waves didn’t subside at all. A nonstop, high-pressure river of Coal-heat poured upward from his solar nerve web toward the twelve chest sky-slits that governed the shift into Early Flame.
On the left side of his chest—where his channels had been bruised on the road. But it never burst by the winter testing ring’s fire spirit. The collaterals dilated painfully to receive the current. It glowed under his skin like dull red charcoal wires.
On the right side of his chest. There, the three-inch band of white, hardened scar tissue crossed his fourth and fifth ribs from the winter injury, the channels didn’t dilate. Burned once four months ago by underground fire, the scarred spirit veins reacted to the rising heat of the sixth dawn with a violent, reflex defensive burst. Clamping down hard around his right lung and around the heart branch as if the fire spirit were attacking him all over again.
